Medium is great because guys like you haven’t managed to ruin it yet. Your, “people should have to listen to my hard-edged sophistry or there should be no comments” is infantile. Again, go away.

Or perhaps, just keep writing your own posts and enjoy the company of people who think like you do. Why is that such a bad option? Maybe you should think about that.

I actually think it’s “guys like you” who are the problem, and who HAVE managed to ruin Medium, and the issue is right there in what you wrote: “just keep writing your own posts and enjoy the company of people who think like you do.” That’s a very sad vision, which, unfortunately, is becoming too common a reality for too many of us who can’t abide disagreement and communicate only with like-minded others. I’m not one of those people, however. I make it a point to engage with viewpoints that aren’t even close to my own, to read things from a diversity of political perspectives (which, perhaps, is why my own political perspective is a grab-bag of left, right and center positions). I regularly read articles ranging from those published in The American Conservative and National Review to those that appear in Jacobin and The Nation, as well as everything in between, and on Medium as well, I regularly read articles from both traditional “conservatives” and traditional “liberals” and the “alt-left”/“regressive left” as well. I tend to respond more to the ones on the alt-left simply because I find myself disagreeing far more with those kinds of divisive perspectives on the world.

Medium, by all rights, should be and could be a thriving intellectual community in which people from all different vantage points could meet and discuss their views and arrive at something greater than the sum of the parts. Instead, it’s dominated by superficial identity politics, and all too often, when an intelligent critique is offered, a knee-jerk anti-intellectual like you bursts out of the woodwork and spews forth a stream of profanities, levels insults or just shouts, as you did, “go away!” This results in discussions that devolve very quickly into shouting matches that don’t go anywhere and don’t get past a very superficial level. This is a sad and stupid spectacle.

Obviously, I’m not in favor of discussions that are anything-goes “cesspools,” as you’ve described them. This is precisely why I try to hold myself to a certain standard, and though I’m not above leveling an insult or two of my own in responding to garbage like yours, I still make an effort, as I’m doing here, to engage you on an intellectual level rather than a level where we’re just screaming at each other. In other words, I’m doing my best to tease out the bit of substantive content that’s hiding in your mindless vituperation and to respond to that in a substantive manner, so that anyone who happens to be reading our exchange can ponder it and make up their mind and even contribute rather than just watching a crossfire of bullets fly by and either running for cover or else joining in the brawl. My ideal might be a bit idealistic — it is an “ideal,” after all — but this is what I aspire towards and what I think Medium should be aspiring towards. If YOU, on the other hand, want to take your own advice and “just keep writing your own posts and enjoy the company of people who think like you do,” feel absolutely free to do so. It appears that the rest of us won’t lose very much in the process.