The first thing to notice is that this place isn’t really any more or less civil than other places on the internet that discuss religion, politics and such.
There’s a certain negative tone here, but it’s not driven by an unusual amount of hostility, it’s driven by familiarity and ignorance.
We don’t have an upvote/downvote system here or anything like that; which probably is a good thing given the small community size. But one consequence of that is that people can prattle on about stupid nonsense without any feedback as to whether or not their prattling is appreciated. We have multiple threads going on, for example, in which one person is basically just writing to themselves over and over and over again, with no sign that anybody else is reading a word of it. Without that instant feedback, people aren’t steered away from saying stupid shit, and at the same time, readers don’t have any way to express their reaction other than to post and say “Shit, that’s stupid.”
Another thing is that this place is pretty tiny. We all basically know what to expect from each other. If Anarchist A says something to Paleocon B, they both know it’s going to result in one of them calling the other a pussy or a faggot or whatever. They already know each other, they know they don’t like each other, and they chose to step into that interaction anyway. It’s not as though unsuspecting newcomers are being attacked by trolls ruining otherwise wonderful conversations.
A third thing I notice is that the couple people here who write long-winded, detailed, thought-provoking posts aren’t reporting other people to me and don’t seem to have a problem with getting harassed. But everybody who creates one-liner threads or writes one-liner responses to other people’s threads seems to have this super important line in mind, and they seem to think anybody who responds to them has crossed it.
Fourth, and relatedly, when you have strict civility rules on any online community but especially small online communities, those rules just become methods of people who can’t ‘win’ a debate in the usual ways to feel like a victor. Mowk pretty clearly has a vendetta against me for making him look stupid over the years, which is something he doesn’t manage to hide even in his first post here. And I’ve seen that behavior lots of times, with lots of people over the years; if a “ILP rules need to be changed!” thread crops up, you can bet your ass somebody just lost a debate.
I’m not particularly interesting in telling grown-ass adults that know each other that they aren’t allowed to say ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’. I’m certainly not interested in creating a bunch of complex bylaws and regulations that people can use against each other when they get butt-hurt. My advice to Mowk remains the same as it was when he raised the topic in Chamber of Debate: write interesting content, and you’ll get interesting responses.