The civil liberties background of Harvey Silverglate, one of the founders of FIRE, is quite interesting. Apparently he used to be with the ACLU until they switched direction.
Type FIRE into wikipedia and you get a list of 13 choices. One of those 13 matches the context of this conversation: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil liberties organization in the US
Perhaps, but then YOU are not doing it the service it deserves by simply slapping it in there and not providing any context.
This is the problem with the whole "DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH" retort that lots of political arguments deteriorate into. If YOU have already done said research, and you have an informed opinion from said research, then you should share it directly in the conversation at hand.
Not only do you avoid looking like a jerk by trying to end a conversation with "look it up" or something similar; you are also able to potentially be the reason someone changes their mind on the subject because you evangelized something that you believe in instead of leaving them potentially thinking "People who like FIRE must be jerks."
> Not only do you avoid looking like a jerk by trying to end a conversation with "look it up" or something similar
What on Earth are you talking about? Your whole comment is in reference to rebuffing a request for more details with "look it up". _Nobody here is doing that_. The original comment mentioned FIRE without describing it; presumably you don't think every mention of an organization must come with an executive summary? The response then whined about how the previous comment left them with an ungoogleable dead-end. My comment simply said that, with context, it was far from ungoogleable (and thus the aggressive tone towards the parent comment wasn't warranted). The reason I personally didn't provide more information is that I myself am not that familiar with FIRE, certainly not to the extent that I'd be able to summarize why they're an adequate substitute for the ACLU.
> you evangelized something that you believe in instead of leaving them potentially thinking "People who like FIRE must be jerks
This and the rest of your comment is a perfect example of the decay of discourse behind things like the ACLU's troubles. Instead of trying to understand what they read, people like you are desperate to pattern-match to some imagined ill and then mistake your hysterical emotional response for moral reasoning.
You're just going to leave it there? What/who is FIRE? This isn't one of those unique words easily discovered during a web search.