stupid doesn't end a conversation. It starts it. Ok, someone thinking is different (stupid). But how exactly do they think? Why? What drives? Where does the break or wrong start?
In addition to "I don't know" is "I messed up". Everyone does stupid things occasionally. Stupid people double down on their stupidity once they realize what happened instead of owning up to it.
There's some nuance there though. Doubling down is (almost) always a stupid move but it isn't always stupid people that do it. It's rooted in insecurity which is independent of intelligence.
Someone who claims to hold a basic concept of something as straight forward as "free speech absolutist" and doesn't see the logical incoherence of proceeding to ban reporters and others who publish and aggregate publicly available information (@elonjet).
Further, I think “somebody that spends an extraordinary amount of money to become admin on a forum (one of the worst jobs on earth)” qualifies as “a stupid person” well before “being incredibly, laughably, hilariously inept at being a forum admin” even gets factored into the “How stupid can a person be?” equation.
Is it necessary to believe anyone is "stupid" as a personality?
I just disagree with people's opinions on certain things. And if I frequently disagree with someone enough, then I just quietly stop paying any attention to what they say.
How is judging people’s way of thinking as being a binary between “necessary” and “unnecessary” not just calling people “stupid” or “not stupid” the same thing just using different words?
Perhaps not your intent, but you have hit on the entire social media mindset, distilled.
TV debate long ago decided that every complex human concern can be profitably reduced to a crass binary which can be argued about in front of a camera for the audience's thumbs up or down.
Social media democratised this decerebrate approach. A thumbs up or down from your tribe. Mastodon, Post.news et al only replicate the Twitter model.
It doesn't matter which platform PG, or anyone else, is on. They're all worthless distraction. Fiddling while Rome burns etc.
You can tell who's actually discussing a person's intelligence and who's status-signaling how smurt they are because only one group gets terribly offended when you disagree.