They did for Bill Clinton.
I don’t think it’s attached to their voting history. On other pages I see delight from conservatives when they see someone like Weinstein being taken down.
Was he? I don’t see that AK84 referenced a particular thread, and he was responding to madmonk28’s comment about “any thread” dealing with harassment of women.
Basically, after a number of desperate, but perhaps ill-advised posts regarding my stress and problems with my marriage, I decided to take the unfriendly advice offered and just decided to stop posting. An “anonymous” forum where I nevertheless thought that, after 13 years, people still sort of “knew” me and might be sympathetic turned out to not be a great place to seek help with things I was uncomfortable/didn’t have the tools to discuss in “real life”. The posters I “knew” weren’t very nice, and they were followed by a pile-on by a bunch of posters whose usernames I didn’t even recognize. So I took the hint and went away.
Nowadays I mostly write over on Quora.com, under my real name. That place is just as left-leaning as this place, but feels friendlier (perhaps because of the lack of anonymity). My story there about how I met my wife has been quite a hit (over 500k views and 45k+ upvotes).
I’m conservative and I’ve gotten to the point where I respond to CS and MPSIMS but really avoid GD or GQ when it involves politics. This is partly because I’m just so damn tired of it and partly because I just get sick and tired of having to defend myself against people that don’t know a damn thing about me but assume or accuse me of being ignorant, racist, stupid, uncaring, yes, I could go on. It’s a freaking message board and when it upsets me or stresses me, then, it’s not worth it. I’ve got plenty of stress in my life as it is. All of that said, I do post regularly in other forums. Sometimes I can’t control myself and I do throw my 2 cents in on a debate, usually hating the results so I need some more self control.
I can’t help it - it’s what I am! 
Well, if you define left wing as left of center…
But your point is well-taken. As I’ve noted before just like most of the board conservatives around here aren’t really of the hardcore variety( we have very few serious social conservatives ), so too very little of the board left is similarly hardcore in the other direction. Genuine Marxists get very short shift around here and left anarchists aren’t common.
This is a board dominated by social liberals/economic moderates. A somewhat larger than U.S. normal proportion of mild libertarians and a lot of mildly left Democrats/independents. Not a lot of Roy Moores or Che Guevaras.
I’m a longtime lurker (at least a year before my actual join date, which was many years ago now) and have posted sporadically over the years. What often prevents me from posting is either someone has beaten me with whatever I would have said so I don’t want to just repeat the same opinion or, since I’m generally tired when I’m reading here after a long work day, I don’t have the energy to compose a decent reply. Also, there’s just not as much activity as there used to be and not as much diversity in the posts that are made. It’s harder to find something I’m interested enough in to read, let alone comment on. I tend more towards IMHO these days whereas I used to ONLY read MSPSIMS and the PIT sometimes. I’m too old and tired for the PIT at this point, and never had any interest in Debating.
But probably the biggest frustration I have with this board is that even the most innocuous post can be completely derailed by unsolicited opinions (HUGELY), arguments and side conversations that are off-topic and disruptive to the flow of the discussion.
A simplified example: OP: We painted our house red and my wife and I can’t seem to agree on the color of the shutters. Any color suggestions?
THE TEEMING MILLIONS: Several posters will nicely offer their suggestions. But it won’t take long for someone to say that the problem is the red paint and they should have painted the house blue (as though someone is going to go repaint their house). And someone else will say they should have gone with vinyl siding and espouse the virtues of vinyl siding, with quotes and cites to back it up. (As though someone who just painted their house is now going to vinyl side over it.) And then another poster will argue with that poster about the environmental impact of vinyl siding and then they will volley back and forth on that topic in the middle of the post that was just asking about the color of shutters. Next, someone will say that the wife is being completely unreasonable and controlling and she’s probably cheating on him and he should just divorce her, kick her out and put whatever damn shutters he wants to on the house.
The OP didn’t ask for your opinion on the house or his wife or his marriage or anything else - he asked a simple question about the color of shutters, yet there will be a pile on about how he SHOULD HAVE done this or that or the other thing, which is completely irrelevant and uniformed since the OP didn’t give any details or background to even form such an opinion.
Drives me nuts to read and makes me want to not bother to post a new topic just to have that kind of thing happen. I don’t want to have to respond to off-base opinions about something I never asked.
Yeah, pretty much what Salem said. Also there’s always some snipey little twit who comes in and demands a cite for what’s obviously an opinion, and that one fucking drive by one liner poster who gets up in EVERY fucking thread with irrelevant “funny” comments, and the obvious goddamned trolls you can’t actually CALL a troll, and the fucking rape apologists and kiddy diddler apologists that you can’t even tell off without getting a warning but they can post their shit because they skate juuuuuuust inside the lines. Then come the line by line parsers and the nitpicky dicks willing to make their last stand on the hill of a misplaced comma and and and and. And I get tired and go post somewhere that you can tell someone to fuck the fuck off when they derail the thread and tell obvious trolls they’re obvious and need to GTFO or get better game and there are emoji that allow you flip people off and kick 'em inna nuts and illustrate their stupidy little slapfights without expending a lot of energy saying so–they get it, and they usually fuck off or amend their behavior.
And the Luddites are out of control, for reals. I’m an old person and I cringe every time I see one of those goddamned “those kids today” posts. WHO CARES that they did it differently in the past? Get a goddamned grip.
Yeah, the “I don’t have a TV or follow any popular culture at all and cellphones are the worst” brigade are pretty tiring here. I don’t have Facebook but I’m still pretty well aware of what’s happening in internet culture and in the news.
And cellphones have been about for about three decades now. They’re not for Stereotypical Evil Yuppie Businessman #2 from an 80s movie. EVERYONE has one. I would not be overly surprised if, when someone finally makes contact with the Sentinelese, there’s a still-functioning Nokia 3310 in one of their villages.
Yeah, I mean, that’s the beginning and ending of conservative interest in sexual assault, as you’re showing: does the case expose the hypocrisy of the eeeevil lib’rul meeeeedia? No? Then she’s probably a dishonest ladder-climber who changed her mind about sex.
I pay a lot of attention to this stuff. Liberals show up to undermine accusers all the time. It has nothing to do with politics. Misogyny, ignorance about sexual assault, etc. are not political orientations. I see political rape apologism on both sides. Most people will rally to support survivors only when it’s convenient to them.
The thing that surprises me most, though, are liberals who excoriate systemic racism but seem to think women are just making shit up.
I think one reason sexual assault threads tend to go off the rails is that people are participating for wildly different reasons. Some are survivors of sexual assault, some are advocates, some are reasonable, considerate moderates, some are radical feminists, some are misogynists, some are lawyers, some are worried/interested in some specific thing pertaining to that specific case. It’s so easy to talk at cross-purposes when not everyone is in agreement on what the thread should be about.
One thing I can say, anecdotally: There are not nearly as many rape apologists on this board as there used to be. There are not nearly as many misogynists as there used to be. This is an issue where I’ve seen a lot of improvement over time. The only part I haven’t seen is that women on the whole still aren’t speaking up on their own behalf, which is an unfortunate result of the still existing rape apologists. Personally I’m nearing my own breaking point. I’m tired of always having to be the calm, reasonable, rational, empathetic one while people shit all over my experiences and ideas.
I’m not given to attack Republican candidates just for being Republican. Trump would still be a piece of shit if he was a Democrat. He is an objectively terrible person. I see that as totally separate from the knee-jerk tendency to hate anyone not on your side - the liberals’ reaction to W. Bush was pretty extreme, from my vantage point on a liberal college campus at the time. Trump is his own, special thing. I think it’s similar to the ‘‘boy who cried wolf’’ in how seriously Republicans have taken this claim on the left, but in Trump’s case it is actually a valid claim.
Doesn’t mean the people who voted for him are objectively terrible people. I have some friends that did. I have some very specific issues regarding Trump on which I will not ethically compromise, but having voted for Trump is not de-facto a reason for me to hate you.
Which is a position some of my liberal friends couldn’t stand. I’m not going to generalize about all liberals, because generalizing about all anything is dumb, but when you’ve got some liberals screaming at you that you’re a bad person if you *don’t * have uncomfortable conversations with people you disagree with (as in, ‘‘white people are morally obligated to argue with their racist relatives’’) and some liberals screaming that you’re a bad person if you don’t exclude anyone from your social circle who disagrees with you (‘‘white people are morally obligated to disown their racist relatives’’), eventually you realize there is no possible way to win, and just divorce yourself from that environment altogether. The situation I was in was very toxic, and it was a very specific to liberalism kind of toxic. I am definitely a liberal, but I am not whatever that kind of liberalism is.
Most people on this board are not the ‘‘academic Millenial’’ kind of liberal to which I refer. I see conservative posters confuse anyone who identifies as liberal with that kind of liberal. So the reasonable liberals on this board get defensive and say that kind of liberal is an invention of the rightwing media, but actually those people do exist and they are alienating hundreds of potential allies by the blog post. I used to be one of them. That is to say, I tried to be, but it didn’t suit me, it just made me feel conflicted all the time. So eventually I bailed. I also want to add, from experience - these people are generally not obnoxious in person, just social media.
Of course, the reverse - denial that ‘‘bad conservativism’’ is a serious problem - is true for conservatives on this board as well. One trend I’ve seen on all sides of the political spectrum is an unwillingess for people to own their shit.
As for ‘‘mods condoning it’’ you really seem to struggle with the fact that insulting people who don’t post here is not against the rules. Our job isn’t to invent rules for things we don’t like, it’s to enforce the rules that exist. The only circumstance in which political jabs are not permitted are Breaking News threads (as far as I know, as a noob) and of course when they are a part of breaking some other rule, such as threadshitting. The only reason they are forbidden in Breaking News threads is that they always derail the thread.
Spice Weasel you are a sweetheart, you are kind, generous, patient, objective and just a love.
I always want to post but don’t because as I said I worry I’ll look dumb or be shot downin flames. I really shouldn’t give a toss as you guys don’t know me nor give a shit about my views!
Many thanks comrade.
I’m front line but I’ll only ever block and obstruct the far right. I’m a pacifist and have taken a (thrown) brick to the head but would never retaliate. I understand the protesters who do fight back and would never condemn black bloc comrades for their retaliation
I bet there are probably some people out there who don’t care what other people think, but I’m not one of them and I think most people secretly aren’t. I once asked a friend (who thinks very differently than I do) if I cared too much what other people thought of me, and he said no, I cared about what the right people thought of me and that was a good way to be.
So I guess it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Exactly. On the internet, people bravely tell their racist drunk uncle to go fuck himself at the dinner table when he gets on the piss at Christmas and starts carrying on about all the Ethnic Panic Du Jour group stealing the jobs and impurifying the nation’s bodily essences with their foreigness, but in real life, people quietly bury their heads in their hands and quietly moan “Oh for fuck’s sake, who let Uncle Reg into the liquor cabinet?” or change tactfully change the subject before aforementioned Drunk Uncle gets onto his solutions to that problem, which might euphemistically be called “extreme” or “abhorrent”.
Most people - even you, dear reader - have at least one characteristic other people see as an awful, awful character flaw. Maybe you drink alcohol and caffeine and your family are teetotal Mormons. Maybe you like guns and hunting, but one of your friends is a hardcore vegan. Maybe you’re a Buddhist pacifist but your brother thinks the solution to most of the world’s problems can be solved with heavy ordnance and/or small arms fire.
The point is, if you cut out everyone with an opinion you didn’t like, no-one would ever talk to anyone. IRL we put up with people’s character flaws because they’re only one part of what defines them.
I may be wrong, when real controversies arise forum users either post monologues or engage in angry arguments rather than debating. No wonder some people prefer to withdraw. It seems to me that the most active users are usually idealists and people who love to hear themselves talk, but I’m not sure.
I’m an Australian solicitor now! Too old to go for a call to the bar, unless it’s the kind that serves gin. It was a long, hard trip to get here though and I’m pleased. Thanks for asking. 
I don’t post much or even read often any more because I think the SD has developed something of an attitude problem (I fairly recently started a thread about it), instead of somewhere to find fun and interesting comments and discussion it seems more about people being needlessly cynical and sarcastic know-it-alls who only participate because of a need to ‘win’ a thread.
I was asked for examples in the other thread and I think this is one:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=847046
The OP asked what seems to me a fairly innocuous and interesting question, and s/he gets some unpleasant and snarky replies as a response. Personally I find real life stressful enough without coming to face more needless hostility on a message board, which is why I’m reluctant to participate and especially to start a thread.
And thats not even covering the firmly left-wing viewpoint of the board, not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it really has become an echo-chamber where anyone dissenting from the party line is dogpiled on and discussion shut down.
As an aside I read the SD and I also read right-leaning message boards, the utter disconnect between viewpoints is shocking and only seems to be getting worse, it does make me worry for the future.
Basically tl/dr what should be a fun and interesting activity is now needlessly stressful and unpleasant, so that’s why I don’t post much any more.
Yes, I read what I wrote. Are you arguing that feminism is an important tenet of conservatism? I think that would be a hard case to make. This board is far too misogynist and pro gun to be a liberal board, maybe when compared to the forum at Fox News.
Misogynism can be found across the political spectrum. Gun control has always been more of a Democratic Party cause than a liberal cause. Not that the Republicans have a sterling record of supporting gun rights, by any means. They have profited mightily, though, from the numbers of voters driven into their arms by the Democratic Party’s refusal to learn they don’t win anything in national elections (or a good many state elections) by being The Gun Control Party.