Civility would frankly prevent a lot of the leftists on this forum from their posts alleging anyone they dislike is a racist, to be fair.
You’ll have to visit your Pit thread to see my answer to that.
Civility would also prevent someone from saying that another poster was a rapist.
It’s hardly a problem unique to the right. @BigT wrote a whole post about how politely disagreeing with people victimises them, and they apparently need to be able to insult and abuse others to deal with it. And the constant refrain on the left is “I’d stop calling you a bigot and be reasonable, if you’d just agree with me.”
Seriously, no one here is criticising the Pit because it allows others to disagree with them. You can do that in any forum. People are criticising it because it enables abuse of other posters.
Really not seeing a downside here, guys.
Well, see, some folks are called racists based on what they post and some people are accused of being rapists because of where they’re from so that’s the ‘downside’.
FWIW I don’t mind the pit, my simple opinion was it lowers the actual quality of the discussion here primarily by keeping low quality posters on the board. A lot of these people who crutch on the pit simply aren’t capable of civil discussion, so without the pit they would be warned and eventually banned due to lack of control. People who cannot control themselves are generally not good posters.
If you attack someone’s mental health problems are you low quality poster?
Asking for a friend.
In the pit insults are allowed, if you have an issue with that you should advocate for the Pit’s removal.
So, discussing mental health problems is insulting?
Using someone’s post about their mental health issues to attack them in the Pit just might be.
Much as calling someone a racist is an insult.
I mean, I think it could work effectively that way, in my hypothetical. The way it could work would be, if you see individual posts that you believe are racist or misogynistic, you would report them, as I believe we are supposed to do now. If you see repeated behavior like this, particularly if it goes unmodded, then you could open a thread in ATMB and say: “I’m seeing a lot of racism/misogyny in these posts. I’ve reported them but they keep coming, I think this is a problem.” Etc. Others could chime in with agreement or disagreement. The person accused could come in and explain why the posts are not racist or whatnot. And the issue could be hashed out, just as it is right now for moderator complaints.
What would be out of bounds in this scenario, is something like: “Poster X is a racist motherfucker who deserves to be buried neck deep in a pile of shit. Long may they rot.”
It seems like a lot of people are committed to that kind of commentary, though, so I suspect my idea will go nowhere. 
People can’t (or at least shouldn’t) get away with rules violations because of mental/emotional/social problems.
And making someone with said issues “angry” is not trolling. That’s on the person who can’t control themselves.
Who said they should?
That’s the history of the moderation on the board.
It made me angry has been used as an excuse for poor behavior, and an excuse to call others trolls in the wrong forums.
Right, and that makes using someone’s mental health issues to attack them in the Pit OK somehow?
I have no doubt that the Pit often gets used not just because of racism or sexism or other morally bad behavioyr, but as an attempt to simply mock other posters or make some subjects off-limits.
As a personal example, there’s this:
I tried my best to add all the caveats to that - it was speculative, yes Trump lies, Maybe this isn’t true, but let’s have a discussion about the ramifications if it is. I thought it would be an actual interesting topic for debate.
Instead, it triggered so much vitriol that the thread had to be closed, then it went to the pit where it has so far generated 855 posts, mostly attacks on me, my character, etc. As a side note, even though that original thread got closed for the number of personal attacks, not a single person got an official mod warning.
The same thing happened when I asked questions about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Even though I qualified it carefully, (“It may be disinformation in whole or in part”), I still got pitted for it.
I do believe there are some users here who have made it their mission to drive off as many conservatives as they can, or at least make their time here difficult and unpleasant unless they stay in a very narrow lane of tolerated topics. Kind of like we are seeing everywhere else these days.
No, of course not. But at the same time, they shouldn’t be allowed to repeatedly violate board rules/norms because of “issues.”
I’m so glad we’ve been able to discuss this totally unrelated point you want to make.