What do we do about insults and personal attacks that don't meet the "offensive" threshold?

Question

What should we do with comments that do not meet the standards of politeness expected from high-quality discourse, yet are not bad enough to be tagged as offensive?

One example:

My own opinion about his whole approach is that it's madness and so far fetched that whoever believes such a thing has no desire to know the truth and lacks all reason.

Another one:

And these [people I am criticzing] are not some out of the way haredim. If I told you their names, you would immediately recognize them. It's real, it's sinath hinam, and it's disgusting.

Here is a new one:

"[Quote from question]" Did you make this up? How do you know that? I would think...

To add one more wrinkle to this discussion: what if most of the comment is useful but a line or two is offensive - which is the case of the comments the quotes above were pulled through. How can we acknowledge the useful information while discouraging the offensive speech?

Answer 1

For guidelines on what counts as "rude or offensive," one of the categories of comments we're encouraged to flag, take a look at the Help page that explains the "Be nice." rule of interaction on Stack Exchange. If you see a comment that you think any part of is

• rude
• belittling
• name-calling
• bigoted
• vulgar
• harassing
• bullying

or the like, you should flag the comment, either with the standard reason "rude or offensive" or, if you think more detail is needed for a moderator to evaluate your flag, with "other ..." and your explanation.

Moderators have the ability and responsibility to delete flagged comments that they agree are worthy of deletion by these standards. If part of a comment is truly valuable and still needed (e.g. if it suggests an improvement to the post at hand that hasn't been made yet), and part is offensive, a moderator could edit the comment to remove the latter. If that's the course of action you'd recommend, I suggest you use the "other ..." flag reason and say so.

Don't forget that comments are distant second-class citizens compared to question and answer posts. They're generally not meant to be part of the permanent knowledge repository, so their authors and readers shouldn't be surprised if they disappear when they either aren't contributing to the actual content or when they are in any way harmful.

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For what it's worth:

• I agree with a comment left by msh210 that your first example is offensive, because it is rude and belittling to the author of the approach it's attacking.

• Depending on the context, your second example may be rightly called name-calling and/or bigoted.

• The third example, in my opinion, may border on rude, depending on the context, since "Did you make this up?" may be taken as pejorative and accusatory, and may unnecessarily cause its object to take offense and concentrate on personal defense rather than on the content. It would probably be more constructive, there, to say something like "Do you have a source for this, or is it your own idea? I would think ..."

Answer 2

I don't see why such comments can't be flagged as offensive if they're thought to be offensive. Otherwise, you can flag them as too chatty or as not constructive if they're thought to be such. As far as I recall, we haven't developed criteria for any of those flags, so flag at will.

In other words, my answer to your question — What should we do with comments that do not meet the standards of politeness…, yet are not bad enough to be tagged as offensive? — is that there's (as yet) no such thing as "not bad enough to be [flagged] as offensive".