I think you're right. Being civil doesn't pay dividends unless most other people are civil too too, and if incivility is punished. Neither of those things are true, generally, right now, so being civil just makes you look weak.
Nah, not really. Real morality maybe. But there are environments where "doing the right thing" will simply fuck you. (I guess you could argue if you were _really_ really strong, you could do the right thing and survive. But that's almost tautological. The point is, the environment you're in may force you to make the choice of "do things you would rather not" or "fail".)
Or, more concisely, hate the game, not the player.
I will agree "strength" is probably not the right descriptor there. I almost didn't play it because I wasn't entirely sure.
I'm not perfect, far from it, but I try to fail graciously before I choose to stray from doing the right thing.
That said, I absolutely do recognize that that is a luxury that not everyone has given their situation. However, I do think that some use that to justify not having to do the right thing in cases where that isn't actually true, and that at least striving to always do right, but sometimes failing to do the right thing due to circumstances is a better approach in the long term versus minmaxing immediate returns because doing the right thing is inconvenient.
I think it depends a lot on the thing involved. If it's just, oh hey, there's a norm of being kind of an asshole, then, fine, maybe it's not ideal, but go with it if that's what you have to do to be effective. (And I think that's the situation we were talking about originally, w/r/t "civility" in language.)
On the other hand, if it's something like "hey we're gassing the jews" or "we're bombing schoolbusses full of children," then hopefully you're doing everything you can to fight against it (though, emperically, most of us will just go along).
C'est la vie.