Civility

[Angrboda]

Maybe an internet cookie? I've really been avoiding the doughnuts if I can.

Wise choice. 

🍩🍩🍩🍩🍩

Do these show up on other people's screens? They make me feel fat just looking.

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Here is another reason why I think it's good to be polite in these discussions.

Incivility shows pride, in a bad way. To justify incivility, I have to judge not only that I am right and you are wrong, but that you are so wrong you deserve to be made to feel bad. As if it is my right to change your mind not through reasons but through sheer verbal force. It gushes out the emotion of my rightness without demonstrating it.

Pride, force, and display without demonstration are usually bad. Humility is good.

I think you're overlooking the obvious social function that disapproval and emotionally loaded language has. We evolved as a social species and many of these behaviors are likely geared toward encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors in the interest of the group. I think you're overthinking it, like a Freudian trying to explain an organic brain defect in terms of penis envy or whatever. You seem to be applying motives and intents in an attempt to explain it because you are overlooking the obvious. We recognize something bad, we react. It's largely instinctual. It provokes emotions. We act on those emotions. People who are arrogant and egotistical do it. But so do people who aren't arrogant and egotistical. I think you're trying to explain something in terms of surface motives that both is not composed of surface motives, likely lying deeper, and is better explained as a more general trait of human nature that isn't dependent upon or correlated with these surface features. And I think you need to realize that you've probably got the looking glass the wrong way around. Incivility, which is something of a misnomer, is the original natural state. It is a base feature of human nature. It is civility that actually needs the explanation as it is the behavior that is layered on top of our baser selves and interferes with them. Not that explaining the motives for civility is difficult, but it seems wrong headed to approach 'incivility' as some kind of aberration in need of explanation and civility as not.