Kent's blog post

> We'd all be worse off if everyone took that attitude.
> Sometimes the fight is worth having.

And this is exactly the problem: you are at present unable to see how to have the fight without being abusive. No one is arguing against having the fight, only about how the fight is conducted.

I'm just some random person on the Internet who has been in a lot of technical fights (in Debian, not in kernel development, so the context is admittedly different). You don't know me and you have no reason to take my advice. But my natural tendency is the same: I want to have a blunt discussion at the same level that the other person is discussing things, and if a point is particularly important to me or if something the other person says seems particularly outrageous, I want to drive home my point with force. I invent all sorts of justifications and reasons in my mind for why this time I need to put all of my emotion in the response, because some things DESERVE that emotion, damn it.

It doesn't help. It just doesn't. As much as I try to convince myself that this time for sure it will serve a purpose, it doesn't, not really.

The emotion is a crutch. The abuse is a crutch. It is your subconscious telling you that your argument is not working. The natural human reaction is to just apply more force, but applying more force causes damage and risks breaking all the components of the system, including you.

Roughly speaking, there are four reasons why my arguments aren't working in a discussion and I become tempted to apply more force. My argument may be bad: insufficiently precise, insufficiently detailed, insufficiently supported. The topic may be a matter of subjective judgment or future prediction and the other person fully understands my argument and simply disagrees. The other person may be simply wrong and completely unwilling to see it. Or I may be simply wrong and completely unwilling to see it.

In every case, adding the abuse and emotion doesn't help and usually makes it worse. When you apply more force in the argument, not only do you inspire MORE resistance, not less, in the other person, you also harden your own position. You make it less likely that you will be capable of realizing when you're wrong because now you're emotionally invested and you would also have to admit your emotion was unjustified. If the argument is bad, no amount of additional force applied to it will make the argument better. And if the debate is over subjective judgment, you will not convince other people to substitute your judgment for theirs by being abusive, nor should you be able to.

Pounding on the keys harder doesn't make the bug go away. You have to actually find the bug and fix it, and pounding on the keys harder doesn't help and usually hurts. It's incredibly difficult to let the emotion go and instead try to calmly understand which of those cases applies and how to move forward, but that's what works. Sometimes I've gotten away with throwing a big enough tantrum that someone else stepped in and did the work for me, but that's not the person I want to be, and based on your writing I don't think that's the person you want to be either.

I will grant that there are some exceptions for social problems where what's required is, essentially, a revolution or a threatened revolution and you need emotion to get people out into the streets and threaten violence, but I don't think that's the situation in kernel development and based on your blog post I don't think you think it is either.