There have been good threads on the matter in the past, there can be again. There does not seem to be a true epidemic of bad ones.
I have problems with people telling me their feelings should take a serious priority. This can be a problem as many nowadays would like their feelings to never be bothered and that is not really how the world works. Sometimes you can substitute feelings with the word respect, if you are completely willing to disregard previously accepted definitions of the concept but that seems to be OK with the people proposing that.
On the matters of rigorous intellectual debate some of said same... I would say knife to a gunfight but it is more like sharpened stick and a persistent fear of the dark when others are engaged in intergalactic space warfare. This is how we learn though. Some need to (re)learn to bring people up rather than smack them down -- someone might be flat wrong, or maybe even just flat wrong in your opinion, but run through their logic first, and if you are really good try not to do a mental denial of service (sometimes easier said than done if a good mantra is involved). A while back we had a vaccination thread, some of those genuinely thought a blanket statement of it does not work/is all bad was not utterly cretinous behaviour, but I ran with it anyway (unfortunately we did not get those offended by my calling things cretinous behaviour like we had one of the times before as those are funny). Often times the concept of intellectual property comes up and some trying their hand are so wrong I can even fathom how they got there, curiously though there are no real religious edicts on intellectual property (the concept first arose around 1700 and took a long time to get really codified, and with most major religions having already been set in their ways some thousand years before then...) and it does not seem to be a political issue with any really defined positions in any country* really (give or take the pirate party and the american tea party, and affiliates/branches/offshoots of each using similar principles).
*the country thing gets tricky. For instance no UK right wing conservative party politician would likely ever stand on a platform of getting rid of universal healthcare (known as the NHS in the UK) and while I am sure some would say they would rather people not get an abortion they would also never stand on an anti abortion one either. While not every right wing US politician has the opposite it is still common and possibly still the bread and butter of it all. Whether such things are a distraction issue or not could be debated but if we are discussing political issues that would have to be accounted for.
I'll see a thousand GBLT gets dipped in alphabet soup threads locked before I see someone struggling with concepts somehow infer that it is not a thing to be talked about. I have my fair share of issues with militant idiots almost turning things into a points scoring game where in most cases it is done, accepted by enough of society and unlikely to slide backwards, time for some nuance unless you are talking about a barbaric shithole (so rarely is it, that is a hard problem after all) and in that case still needs some tactical nuance.
There have been a few cases where certain users were variously banned or conditionally asked to refrain from posting in certain sections (mainly the EOF). I could see something like that working here, but at the same time I am not sure I would want to.
Islam then. For many reasons, including from a pure anthropological standpoint, it has been a great pleasure in life to watch first hand the reformation of Islam (largely within the Bengali community**) within the UK over the last 20 years or so (it was happening before but I am not that old). People taking aspects of it, getting rid of the cruft (which usually starts with dropping the more rigid aspects, which is nothing for most religions but actually a fairly radical thing within Islam***), remixing elements and then setting about life with it all. That it also seems to really upset fuckheads of a more fundamentalist, or perhaps wahhabist, persuasion is a bit scary at times but also amuses. Better yet the UK variety I am seeing is different still to those places where Islam historically had a major role but despite claims to the contrary is actually taking an increasingly more and more minor role within a country, to say nothing of some of the stuff I am more peripherally aware of from the US.
That said I have noticed a distinct correlation between the arrival in a thread of Islam as a concept, be it apologetics, those with a dislike of some of the more popular on the news fronts of it that can't quite articulate things or sometimes simply those starting from a base of some flavour of Islam (not necessarily apologetics) and working from there and the derailment of threads. There are many ways I could go from here**** but I will say some use the term islamophobia like some before them used the term racism and in doing so risk devaluing any notions of it, curiously the Islam and those concerned with feelings brigade are making for some very strange bedfellows right now and I kind of want to see what happens to the children. While not all adherents of Muhammadanism are of the religion of pieces of you flying everywhere, the notion of it being otherwise is patently ridiculous, it is a world leader by some margin. Not all is a phrase that is rather broken these days, possibly years before now by other things, and the only thing worse is saying they were not real, as if they were imaginary, and that also lacks the punch you might expect as apostasy is something some can even be seen to commend. There are plenty of ways to engage, and I have no doubt you find the notion of getting tooled up and going out like salafist rambo to be as disgusting and counter productive as anybody else with even a vague respect for life, so maybe find a better way. I have no concrete suggestions at this point though (the way suicides are reported and the way school shootings psychologists would say should be but US news has a bit of a sensationalist problem so does not maybe yielding something).
I floated through a thread the other day and saw phrases about assumptions on cultures. While I would not say there is a surplus of knowledge, and also despite what I later consider on the nature of the philosophy, the authoritarian bent and somewhat unyielding nature of things is known and is typically held to be rather opposed to notions that underpin laws and philosophy "in the west". Maybe it will be that aspects of the philosophy you hold are fundamentally different and ultimately irreconcilable with that of those typically held by those "in the west", and maybe it will be that as a result you are told to somehow impose or shun those for it which sucks if it is the case but hey.
**you rarely see it on the news the present wahhabism world tour also causes serious problems for Bangladesh, despite nominally being an Islamic country.
***going back to the gay thing earlier the favourite passages/books within the bible some like to say gay maybe not OK according to this also contain nonsense about shellfish and mixed fabrics. To that end the average people that might draw a philosophy from the bible are used to filtering things and trying to make something work, for a lot of takes on Islam that would cause a headache or some mental gymnastics. That said one need only look lightly into the various schools of Islamic jurisprudence as a whole to see the notions that heavy filtering is not a concept alien to Islam.
****While starting to be covered in the previous asterisked thing we would have to consider the nature of "pure" Islam as a rather comprehensive philosophy. We could consider that in many cases, historically and presently, it is a system that is used to being in charge, unquestioned and unquestionable, however now being another, often cases, minor philosophy among it all is then something it struggles with, and how that means some come off as abrasive or some wander in with a certainty that is not founded on the strongest base.
As the list of asterisks, brackets, run on sentences and such is reflecting the time (just gone 4am) that I am writing this means I will cut it off here.
