Personally I tend to give people the opportunity to be better:

You tend to get the benefit of the doubt from me on the first engagement.

You tend to get me patiently explaining why your position is false or fundamentally inconsistent early on.

If the person is genuinely open to discussion and willing to engage in good faith, I will extend a lot of patience to the point of chiding them like a parent talking to a grumpy child telling them to improve their attitude if they happen to act like a bit of a shithead or a debate pervert. For example, if someone wants to play the fallacy card on me then I’ll tell them to pull their shit in and give them an itemised list of all the logical fallacies they themselves have committed, often disputing the ones they have invoked if they have done so due to a misapprehension of them and I’ll ask them if they really want to engage in a match of fallacy-hunting or if they are here for a genuine discussion.

If they’re sanctimonious or they wilfully misrepresent established facts, or if they try to pass off their lack of knowledge as expertise then I will come down on them like a pile of bricks. Generally with these types of people I will challenge their knowledge or ask a pointed question that only a person who is familiar with the details of the subject being discussed would have an answer for. Often I will take their original position and ask them to reconcile that with evidence to the contrary.

In doing this I’m not looking to wow people with my knowledge or to shut down the discussion, it’s just a litmus test to see if someone is full of shit or if they’re capable of enough humility to say “I don’t know” or maybe even to show some genuine curiosity towards learning.

I don’t suffer fools gladly but I try my best to give everyone the opportunity to be the best version of themselves. The internet is so incredibly toxic with regards to disagreement and debate, and it even rears its ugly head here between comrades, and I understand that people need to have the opportunity to step out of that mindset - sometimes I will even try to shake people out of that mindset if I see them as being worth the effort.

But if they’re an absolute unremorseful shithead and that is well established then I can be pretty damn ruthless.

Call the communists betrayers and collaborators in Weimar Republic era Germany and I’m not going to politely ask you to account for historical facts to the contrary, I’m just going to drag you until you learn to shut the fuck up and keep your ignorance to yourself because I will make the experience so aversive that I hope you will flinch the next time you decide to talk bullshit and to pretend like you’re knowledgeable about something that you aren’t. Talk shit, get hit y’know?

It also really depends on context too. I’m much more generous in this space because I want to help cultivate a compassionate, understanding culture here. I know I kick back and shitpost here but I’d hope that at least 1/3 of what I post either contributes to positive culture, knowledge or it’s part of the educate/agitate/organise targets. (If anyone is keeping score I think it would be interesting to see how often I call people in over things and say the terms “not to drag you” and expressing how I don’t want to cause a struggle session over something.) In other spaces I am less concerned with the culture and tone of discourse.

Carrot and stick is one way of looking at it but I also try to think about it as destroying in one hand and building with the other; there’s a lot of liberalism and bigotry and chauvinism as well as just bad conduct that needs to get broken down in people but at the same time unless I’m dedicating efforts to building people up, contributing to their knowledge, and encouraging them to become better in whichever way I can then I’m only ever going to be a corrosive influence. A bit like how tons of people are anti-capitalist but that only goes so far and we need to envision a better future while making whatever practical steps towards it that we can or otherwise we fall into the trap of just negating and problematising.