Was just accused of a 'teenage' attitude for saying this which kind of compounds a few thoughts I've had about it today w/r/t 'civility'. https://twitter.com/joekennedy81/status/1251922505507504128

I'm actually not reflexively anti-'civility'. I think it's one of those issues the left has broad-brushed and lost semantic control of. There is good faith in voluntarily acting up to a measure of civility; it's a form of promise.

But 'civility' as called in over and over by the blue-ticks is utter bad faith, therefore - by my metrics - uncivil. It essentially means 'let me say what I want, when I want, how I want. I have earned this. You have not.'

Making sweepingly horrendous statements about whole groups of people with an abstract right of reply but no concrete one is uncivil. Opening contentious issues in public to rile people up and then coldshouldering them when try to question you is uncivil.

Journalists whose entire career is founded on nepotism and colossal irresponsibility making false equivalences between their 'plight' and any real suffering is the kind of empathy void which characterises the failure of 'civility'.

Anyway, a concrete example of incivility - by which I mean something like vandalistic antisociality - would be Stig Abell permitting the running of that Hopkins piece in the name of 'debate' then refusing to discuss it for five years and counting.

I'd rather not be reduced to theatrically saying I hope he winds up in penury, but my doing that seems to have no concrete victim other than him, and I doubt he's very bothered.

I guess what I mean is that incivility may itself be a demand for (a broader conception of) civility.