I think whether "be kind" is at odds with, or a criteria of, an intellectual discourse is left as an exercise for (possibly literally, in this case) the reader.
One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience.
If failure to do so gets one's comment "censored" out of an intellectual discourse, perhaps that is a feature not a bug.
When I was younger, I used to believe "The pursuit of truth is so important that even truth coarsely spoken should not be quieted." As I've gotten older, I've come to observe that more often than not, people conflate coarse speaking with truth when the two are more likely to be divorced from each other than walking hand-in-hand. And the ability to smooth a harsh truth is a virtue... If for no other reason than most people read for entertainment, not truth-seeking, so the important facts are likelier to land in their minds and germinate if they aren't coated in a protein shell of personal attack language.
But again, prognosticating downvotes is a fraught enterprise (and also recommended against by the guidelines, so I shall say no more on the topic).
I understand that the reason people use the veneer of propriety to justify censorship is so they can do as you’ve done here: give a long self-righteous screed about how they’re upholding the good of the community when engaging in anti-intellectual censorship.
> One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience
This is just an imagining — people say this when they’re upset that facts challenge dearly held delusions, eg the media is unbiased and informs you about the world, and then engage in ex post facto attacks on the form of your message to silence you and remove that cognitive annoyance. The anger is not at the phrasing, but in having their world view challenged at all.
I think you brought up that imagining because you need to reassure yourself that you’re calmly rational as a reader — and not lashing out with censorship due to emotions. That you’re not actually anti-intellectual, you just happen to be copying their mannerism — for good!
We’ve heard these arguments for millennia: can you name a historic (prior to 1900) example where those censoring in the name of decorum led to positive outcomes?
