I agree that Trump is a special case for the SDMB. But that’s because it leans liberal. Far-right sites revved themselves up for this election by maintaining an extreme level of hate for the past eight years. Take freerepublic. Their hatred of Obama and Clinton bled over into every thread on every issue.
And it obviously worked. By vehement and vocal support of certain types of conservatives and just as vehement vituperation of any that didn’t fit their Procrustes bed, they got control of 32 state legislatures, Congress, and the Presidency.
If the left wants to win those back, they need active, total immersive, unending concentration on that goal. Everything must contribute to it, nothing can avoid it. If keeping that level of seething boiling determination at its highest pitch means adding political comment to every thread, well, that’s proven to work. It may be ugly, but politics ain’t beanbag.* The left has to learn to fight dirty. Trump has and does. He respects nothing else. So dirty it is.
*An old-timey adage that’s just as incomprehensible to Americans.
Like I’ve said though, nearly everyone on the boards either agrees with you or isn’t silly enough to put their hand up in dissent. All that harping on about its going to do is alienate or annoy the folks in the middle, which is likely to push them away from your views.
The folks who agree with you already have lots of places on the internet to agree with each other. So do the folks who think Trump is awesome.
I am asking you nicely: Please, dial it back. Stop carrying on about Trump here on the boards. You cannot achieve anything useful except annoy people, and that’s not going to further your aims, regardless of which side of the fence you’re on.
I know this sounds spectacularly counter-intuitive, but the best thing the anti-Trump brigade here can do at this point is to dial everything right back. Let his actions speak for themselves. You won’t convince anyone new of the correctness of your views, but you might push folks into the opposite camp.
Also: You don’t see folks from the UK or Canada or Australia carrying on vehemently about our Prime Ministers. True, they rarely do anything likely to provoke displeasure on the scale Trump appears to have, but even when they do silly things we don’t consider ourselves to be part of a resistance movement or consider it our sworn duty to get them booted out of office.
That is exactly what everybody has told the left ever. It’s been proven wrong, repeatedly. I understand why people have said it but no one can give it a second’s more credence. Obama spent eight years trying to achieve some variant of this; in the process he made zero converts yet alienated many in his own camp who were dying for some victories. The result was a loss of inconceivable scale.
The only future is to console, consolidate, rev up, and empower the left, using words that will lead to actions. There is no center anymore. There is no room for niceness. It’s live or die as a party and a philosophy.
I don’t say this to excuse the ugliness. Perhaps the Powers That Be will react at some point to corral the politics. Or not. I doubt Ed cares. If you care you need to understand that taking the advice you proffer has been worse than useless; it served to slit our throats. If people have risen up to reject your viewpoint in hyperbolic terms, then I say great. Let’s have more.
I’m sorry, but I really don’t think that explains why you feel the need to carry on about the US president on the boards, though. Like I’ve said several times, this place is very much an Anti-Trump safe space.
Who are you trying to convince? There’s no-one on the fence you can bring around; you’re either preaching to the choir or deliberately winding up people whose views you know can’t/won’t be changed anyway.
From my POV as a non-American, an end to the constant “President Trump Has Displeased Us!” threads/themes - or better yet, moving them to a dedicated “Politics” forum - would be a fantastic thing.
I was going to let this thread drop, but this can’t go unchallenged.
“Preaching to the choir” has come to mean words or actions that are futile, redundant, or actively counterproductive. Yet the fundamentalist Christian churches in America have spent years screaming about the horror that is the LGBTQ community and yesterday the President of the United States removed federal protections on transgendered people.
Preaching to the choir is basic to creating bonding within a community, and the more so as that community feels threatened. It has been a staple of religious services since antiquity. Do adults go to church because they need to learn the precepts of their religion? Obviously not. They go to have their beliefs affirmed and their confidence in them strengthened by publicly avowing them in the midst of a cadre of like-minded individuals. Churches never stop talking about sin, ever. They may also enumerate good works, but sin is always there, lurking, ready to emerge if the strictest vigilance is not paid. The Enemy is a palpable presence, and must be fought, daily, weekly, yearly, in thought and deed.
This is the best technique ever devised for group action. The Left needs to ramp preaching to the choir up by ten thousand per cent just to get to the bottom levels of where it needs to be to become effective to take on the screamers of the right. More preaching. Larger choirs. Every venue, every minute.
You’ve completely and utterly failed to address my fundamental point though: Why here, when it’s already been established everyone either agrees with you or won’t change their minds?
This is an internet messageboard. Many members here are from other countries. It’s not a local thing. There are no “screamers of the right” here.
THIS IS THE WRONG VENUE FOR RAMPING UP THE LEFTIST RHETORIC.
So, I ask again: Are you deliberately trying to annoy people, or do you simply want to be part of the cool crowd where everyone agrees with you and you can high-five each other for having the correct opinions?
And as a general point: Thank you for proving exactly why we need a politics forum.
Why do you think a subject is only valid if someone’s mind might be changed about it in the first place? There are dozens of Trump threads here for the same reason every newspaper, tv show and website has dozens of stories about Trump every week. He is making current events. There is no rule that a thread has to be able to accomplish something.
Trying to put all the threads about him into one forum is a stupid idea. The boards aren’t organized by subject that way. They are organized by the style of discussion; rants, factual questions, opinions, etc.
Everything is just fine with the way Trump threads are currently organized on the boards. It isn’t their responsibility to ensure you’re interested in a subject before allowing those who are interested in it to talk about it, nor to quarantine any subject you’d prefer to see less of by rearranging the boards to better suit your personal preference. If you aren’t interested in what is on people’s minds don’t read their posts.
I’ll take this opportunity to repost the link to a greasemonkey/tampermonkey script that will hide threads on the forum list pages. If you don’t want to see a Trump thread, click Hide and it’s gone.
Precisely. Especially because I’ll point out that almost none of the pro-Trump folks have been going around the boards carrying on about how awesome they think he is. So in that context, from the perspective of a non-US person, guess which side looks more reasonable?
Look, if you want to stage your Right-On Two Minutes’ Hate for Trump with likeminded people, go right ahead. I’m sure there’s several subreddits which would welcome you. My point stands: The SDMB is not the place for it.
As another non-US person here on the boards: put my name down on the side of “everything is fine as it is.” Maybe rename “elections” to “politics.” But otherwise, no complaints.
I can’t bold what’s already bolded, but I can tell you that IMO there is no wrong venue for ramping up the leftist rhetoric (although I of course accede to the Mods’ directives). Just as the right took every opportunity, including some they had to manufacture out of whole cloth, to berate President Obama, so too should the left now take every legitimate opportunity to “ramp up” the anti-Trump rhetoric. And if some opportunities aren’t quite as legitimate as others, well, let’s deal with those if and when they happen.
We know that constant drum-beating works because Donald Fucking Trump is now our President.
ETA: I’m already on record as wanting to see “Elections” changed to “Politics”, but I figured it can’t hurt to reiterate.
Every place is the place for it. EVERY place. In line at the supermarket, at the Burger King drive-thru window, in blogs and songs and movies and TV shows and Broadway musicals and weddings and Super Bowl parties. Every place. IMO the left should show slightly less restraint than the right did for the past 8 years.
To what end? As it relates to this board, what purpose would that serve? Do you think it would persuade those not already convinced to your cause? Is that the most effective way to bring people to your point of view? I may be wrong, but I doubt that would be effective if the goal is to persuade someone to change their views.
As to the renaming, here is the description of the Elections Forum:
Notice the bolded part? This doesn’t mean that threads with underlying political implications would not be appropriate in other fora. Plenty could go in IMHO, MPSIMS, GQ, etc. Given that, a renaming by itself wouldn’t have a significant impact without additional rules about thread placement.
Here is from the rules which was copied verbatim from Ed’s original announcement of the forum creation about thread placement:
It might change minds. It might remind some not to change their mind. It might serve to remind others who feel the same way that they are not alone, are not thinking what they are thinking in isolation. It might serve as a log of all reasons, as they accumulate, for why people don’t like Mr. Trump, so that none are forgotten over time.
I don’t know if it is the most effective way to bring people to my point of view, but is that a necessity? Are we only allowed to post “most effective” arguments now? Who will decide whether or not something is “most effective”?
:dubious:
I don’t find your concerns or arguments persuasive; were they the “most effective” ones you could come up with? (See the problem with that argument now?)
Nomenclature is important, however. IMO no additional rules are necessary, just a change in nomenclature. Why is there so much resistance to this change? What purpose does it serve?
Surely it’s not a necessity. Only the readers of what you write will be able to decide whether it is effective or not.
I don’t think there is strong resistance to a simple name change - the contention seems to be around subsequent impact to thread geography. If it’s simply a name change and there are no additional rules then this granularity of semantics seems to be of little value. The resistance that I perceive is related mostly to rule changes that may follow a name change.
This line of thinking is patently, absurdly and 1000% absolutely false. The conversation belongs literally in none of those places because it involves throwing your unwarranted opinion on people who have no desire to hear it. It’s disgraceful to other people, it’s rude and it’s selfishly making yourself and your opinions more important than someone else’s.
Also, you throwing your opinion around like that will literally change absolutely nothing other than making you feel important and better than me. Which, I guess, is the point of talking about politics in general, so I can’t fault you too much for that.
It’s also the line of thinking that got me started on this whole endeavor in the first place. I’m sorry that you, Bo, whom I honestly have no qualms with, have to bear the brunt of this right now, but it’s ridiculous to think that just because you have an opinion that I have to suffer for it.
There is a time and a place for everything, and that includes politics and Trump talk. That time is whenever because that place is the Open-24-hours-a-day Elections forum. However, there aren’t always elections going on, and politics goes way beyond simple elections which is why…
…I don’t understand this. It seems so simple to me, and not a giant upheaval of the “impact of thread geography”. If the thread you’re starting has to do with politics, put it in the Politics forum. If it doesn’t, then put it somewhere else. End of the story. There could be a little bit of a gray area when it comes to IMHO threads, since some of the polls do ask legitimate questions. Those threads can be dealt with in time. But under no circumstances should something that is politics related go into MPSIMS. If it’s truly that mundane and pointless, then it can just be thrown in with the rest of the political crap and be called a day.
