I wouldn’t go that far; I’m kind of a moderate, I think. I lean fairly socially liberal (pro gay marriage, pro-choice, generally for diversity, although not for forced or mandated diversity, but I’m pretty conservative when it comes to taxing and spending- it’s as much a philosophical difference in thought as it is being cantankerous about how my tax money is spent.
I continue to come and read here to challenge my beliefs- I get enough of the far right-wing stuff from friends and relatives; I come here to balance it out with the other side of the story, even if I often don’t agree.
But claiming that there’s no systemic bias to the board is crazy. The vast majority of Americans don’t take the same things as a given that this board does. If they did, there wouldn’t be any debate about gay marriage, abortion, universal health care, etc…
The problem with your analysis is that all conservative positions are attacked, regardless of the strengh of the argument, while the dumbass liberal posts are ignored.
Additionally, ad hominem attacks are standard against conservatives. When they
are used, they are rarely pointed out to be fallacious. If you take a conservative stance on many issues a standard reaponse is “Conservatives believe that because they hate the poor/women/minorities/etc”.
I’ve thought about leaving, and still might, because a whole bunch of people want this to be a liberal echo chamber.
As an aside, I would really like to see a graph of posts per day and posters per month going back about 10 years. It seems to me that the tone of the board has run off a lot of folks and the number of posts/threads has really fallen off.
Slee
P.S. For the record I think both parties suck in the U.S. I am fisically conservative and socially liberal.
Again, many of the posts on the SDMB aren’t from Americans. Take me, for example. I’m not American, I just lived in the US when I was a kid.
And I’m not stating anything more than the truth when I say that US politics are absolutely ludicrously right-wing when seen through the eyes of the rest of the Western world.
You may see this as a “liberal echo chamber” in which “dumbass liberal posts are ignored”.
I see it as a board which is slightly to the right when seen from a non-US perspective. And I find the accusations from US “conservatives” that it is inherently biased highly amusing. You people wanted the likes of Sarah Palin to be within a John McCain heart-attack of the nuclear button four years ago, FFS. The GOP was thinking of putting Rick Santorum and Rick Perry up as their candidate for POTUS in 2012.
<sigh>
I do not identify as either a Liberal or a Conservative, but if given a binary decision on the choice I would have to say Liberal. And the board does lean Liberal. But the moderators do a great job of being neutral. I wouldn’t want to have any of their jobs.
I am a scientist. Data is paramount in the way I make decisions. It genuinely appears that the current implementation of Conservatism in the USA is fatally damaged. The deliberate ignorance, the wallowing in radical Christianity by the people who are running the GOP is pretty off-putting to me. However, the majority of posters who are Conservatives here are remarkably sane and rational. We are here to debate things and learn things, are we not? You can’t learn something from someone who believes precisely as you do on a topic. We are made intellectually richer by the brave stalwarts who support the causes that have been warped by the current Conservative movement. I just wish some of them would run for office. I might well vote for one of them.
When I joined this board I was very interested in debates and the political give-and-take. I estimate that 90% of my posts were between 1999 and 2003. But now I don’t bother for the most part. Christians are insane or deluded; conservatives are evil or stupid, and you’ll get 20 drive-by posts echoing such. Most of the conservative posters I’ve respected over the years have been banned or have left, so now I stick mostly to cafe society or sports threads.
Classic case in point:
1)
irresistible urge to give a political jab when OP was not asking for direct input of users’ political opinions beyond their mere description.
But
is considered inherently germane, just because
is stated cutely, becaus, well, it’s just us in here, and we can talk cute and we’ll show how cute/not radical but sane we are (or, "I almost punched Sarah Palin)
Most clear of all: simply say their names (“Santorum,” “Perry”) with no other content, without bothering to have an opinion (or at least state any) besides “Yes” or “No,” because the humble opinion is so clear the hive mind knows it already.
Any remotely fair, open board is going to have what many Americans (but not me) would call a “liberal bias” because first, American conservatism is on the whole outright factually wrong and can’t survive honest scrutiny. And second, because most human political and cultural possibilities fall under “liberal” by American standards because of how narrowly right wing American politics have become. Pick any random hundred political positions and most of them by American standards are going to be “liberal”, since “liberal” in modern America mainly means “not far right Republican”. American politics looks like this:
[_"So-called Liberal" (and essentially nonexistent in America)][“Center”][“Right Wing”]
So any forum not constrained by that tight little band of acceptable American political positions on the right is going to be “liberal” by American standards, if by no one else’s.
I completely agree with this. While there is certainly a left lean to the board I attribute that to the sheer number of posters here. Both liberal and conservative posters on this board have much to say and with only a few exceptions, their arguments are always well reasoned and coherently presented. Unfortunately, many of the discussion topics here do not lend themselves to an easy resolution due to a lack of data but the debates are always informative.
I’m liberal, and I see the board, collectively, as hostile to all but the most milquetoast of conservatives, as an outgrowth of its avowed hostility to things it deems “ignorance.”