I think it's possible that two people can want high-quality discussion and disagree with what high quality discussion is. On the other hand, it seems that insulting generalisations about huge swathes of people with whom you disagree is very cheap and easy, but it's there as the conclusion to a post apparently wanting high-quality discussion. Any place that wanted to focus on high quality discussion should probably try to avoid that or else become the murky waters of insults or groupthink, but then we seem to be stuck in recursion.

(It seems that in a high quality forum, a person on the right should only be able to make generalisations about people on the right, and a person on the left should only be able to make generalisations about people on the left, unless the post has been moderated and approved as high quality. Not that such terms hold much content in any case, and they're far better avoided entirely. It is trivial to be a racist, misogynist, anti-glbt, protectionist, anti-business, anti-monarchist, anti-"their religion" communist.)

> I think it's possible that two people can want high-quality discussion and disagree with what high quality discussion is.

Without comment on any other substantive point, I think the simpler explanation is that people want high-quality discussion but don't necessarily know how to produce it. Even though they know quality discussion when they see it, there's no clear path to achieve that goal. (Hence all of the conflicting comments in this very discussion about the value of moderation policies!)

It's much like the idea of starting a restaurant with "my friends and I know what great food tastes like, so we should have no problem making it!"

> I think it's possible that two people can want high-quality discussion and disagree with what high quality discussion is

I'm setting the bar _very_ low here. There are a lot of people out there firmly ensconced in their bubbles, unable to conceive of anyone with different beliefs as anything but entirely alien (and/or evil). An enormously common approach to conversation, in my experience, is to take someone's claim, extract the buzzwords, map it to something you've already heard, and argue against that strawman. This is, by definition, completely nuance-killing. My definition of "wants high-quality conversation" doesn't consist of much more than the ability to avoid this. The only other requirement I'd add is a bit of emotional continence, which prevents immediately raising the temperature of every conversation, and thus lowering the chance of two people with different beliefs finding common ground.

> On the other hand, it seems that insulting generalisations about huge swathes of people with whom you disagree is very cheap and easy, but it's there as the conclusion to a post apparently wanting high-quality discussion

Presumably this is a reference to the last sentence of my comment? This is a common mistake. I'm describing people who behave a certain way; by definition, those people behave that way. I'm decidedly _not_ claiming that this is a quality of everyone on the left, or most of the left, or anything like that, and I'm personally firmly on the left. It's just an inevitable tendency of the side of the spectrum that gets cultural power: Conservatives in the '50s had roughly the same tendency. There's always a narrow-minded contingent that uses that power to define more and more beliefs as heretical and thus "dangerous", and decides that those beliefs should be hunted down and rooted out of every forum they can, starting with the most legitimate fora and moving on down to the least.

I'm not strawmanning their views either: this tendency is accompanied by openly-expressed beliefs that giving bad thoughts exposure or a platform anywhere is dangerous. Of course, the definition of "bad thoughts" is handed down by fiat from those institutions with said cultural power.

> Not that such terms hold much content in any case, and they're far better avoided entirely. It is trivial to be a racist, misogynist, anti-glbt, protectionist, anti-business, anti-monarchist, anti-"their religion" communist.)

I agree, and have found this to be the case in the fora I'm talking about, where these labels tend not to be as useful, since their predictive power is limited beyond broad sweeps of fundamental beliefs. But for the majority of people that I mention above, the labels are predictive because they're _causal_; people swallow their package of beliefs wholesale.