So, you may or may not have heard of tone argument. It's a derailing tactic where a person basically tells a minority or advocate that "If you hadn't used such abrasive language/sworn/been so angry, people might agree with you more."

I have reservations about tone argument because I want to believe that there are people who genuinely want to learn who are then sworn at and told off without being given the benefit of the doubt. I don't think swearing and anger should be the first response to a politely worded, if misguided, question. It's true that defensiveness and name-calling will not ingratiate someone to your side. Also, I worry that it feeds into the "You're just looking to get offended", "Hysterical woman", "Angry black man" type of thinking. I don't like to seem as though I'm proving the bigots right to those lurking/reading. I'd rather the bigot look like the unreasonable one.

HOWEVER, I've also seen tone argument used as a silencing tactic, which is not cool at all, and it usually happens after the person being accused of "being too angry" is driven to anger through obtuse arguing and trollish comments. It has happened to me before. I try very, very hard to explain calmly and rationally why something upsets me, and after repeating the same talking points five times and getting nowhere, I do start to resort to anger, frustration, and swears. And when someone then comes back with, "Whoa, why are you so mad? You need to calm down. I'm just asking a question", it's basically gas lighting.

Basically, I think it's not cool to take the idea of "tone argument" to mean "I can swear and generally act like an asshole and you can't call me out on it because TONE ARGUMENT", but people who deal with this stuff all day DO get frustrated and are so sick and tired of explaining themselves. And they have every right to express their frustration and anger.

I think tone argument makes the most sense when someone is criticizing someone's blog post as being "too angry" or "maybe if you hadn't used the word 'fuck' so much, it would be more persuasive". Because in that case, this person was in their own personal safe space and they can do whatever they want in there and it is not their job to educate the rest of the world. They just wanted to rant about how sexist Scott Lobdell is (for example). The twitter war between Lucy and Jim Butcher (of the Dresden Files) concerning his reaction to someone's blog post calling his books racist is a great example of tone argument in the wild.

Basically, I'm torn on the idea of tone argument because on the one hand, I think ignorant or misguided people should have somewhere to go in order to be educated and informed, otherwise how will their opinions change? Or the opinions of people on the fence who are just reading the conversation. But on the other hand, it's not the minority's job to educate everyone on all these issues either. And they have every right to get upset and swear and tell people to fuck off if they want to. I guess that I believe tone argument has a time and place. In SRS proper, it's all about the jerk and complaining about tone would not be taken seriously, but here on SRSD, we do try to respond rationally and calmly to posters so I think we would have the right to call out someone using loaded language.

What do you all think?

EDIT: Oooh, look, classic tone argument out in the wilds of reddit.