GD is turning into PR

PR for “partisan rants”. I’ve noticed that over the last 6 months there is little debate in GD and many of the threads turn into something more appropriate for the Pit with the insults and denigration of threads into charges of racism, stupidity, etc.

For example, suppose I want to start (yet another) debate in immigration. I may bring up the points:
Being here in violation of Federal immigration laws is a crime and that part of the problem is that some law enforcement agencies are wrong in choosing to not enforce laws they disagree with it.
The term “resident” in the 14th Amendment was to overturn the precedent set up by the Dred Scott decision that a person had state citizenship and federal citizenship independent of each other. It had been bastardized by SCOTUS as “one who resides in the state” irregardless of citizenship in regards to social services and Congressional representation.
In the case of Wong Kim Ark, his parents were here legally, thus this case does not support “anchor babies” for illegal immigrants.

Now I would expect a debater on the other side to bring up:
Illegal immigration does not hurt legal citizens.
It is not SCOTUS’ fault that the 14th Amendment was poorly written in terms of “resident” and if Congress?States want to redefine it, they should pass an amendment kind of like the 11th Amendment in response to Chisholm v Georgia.
The immigration laws are extremely difficult to satisfy. No one who is poor (brown, black or white) can come here to work. Many who want to work here simply are not allowed to.

But is this what we really see? No. First of all, anyone who wants to curb/deport illegal immigrants is immediately labled a racist. Both sides deal with absolutes and very few do any investigation anymore. For example, in Arizona, a driver’s license is proof of lawful presence but everyone talks about “papers”. The other side don’t acknowledge that “reasonable suspicion” is nebulous and is open to abuse. They also imply that somehow crime will go away if all of the illegals are deported.

So can we get back to debates in GD and put the mudslinging in the Pit?

I’ve met one person that I know for a fact was an illegal immigrants. She was from Canada. But in my experience, whenever someone talks about ‘illegal immigrants’ they are talking about Hispanics. I occasionally lurk at another board that is… conservative. There are one or two resident liberals, and I’ve noticed that the conservative majority there are highly offended when it is implied that they are racist. And then they post things like this:

People like this have painted the more moderate conservatives into a corner by association. There are good arguments on both sides of the immigration issue. But until conservatives can disassociate themselves from the ‘racially insensitive’ members of their party, liberals will continue to suspect a racial motive behind conservatives’ views.

You think its worse in the last six months then the last six years? IMHO thats pretty much the status-quo. That said, here are my simple rules to getting something useful out of Great Debates:
FIrst, there’s some posters that basically always either post to insult the “other side”, or always just chime in with the same meta-argument whether its relevant or not (corporations own the government!, taxes are theft!, etc). Just don’t read those posts, or responses to those posters. You’d think this would make the thread unreadable, but it turns out it makes no difference. And its always the same people, so its pretty easy to figure out who you can ignore without losing any actual information.

Second: don’t read past the fourth page. Nothing of any relevance to anything has ever happend in the fifth-infinity page of any Great Debates Thread. All the interesting points you might not have though of or cites that add new and relevant information will be in the front of the thread. After the fifth page, it’ll be two or three posters arguing over the minutentia of some analogy used earlier in the thread. Nine times out of ten, this analogy will be Hitler.

Third: Say your piece, respond to any relevant or interesting points others may make on your post and then leave it be. Don’t let yourself get dragged into debating some analogy or irrelevant hypothetical, or trivial semantic point or trying to argue against people who are obvsiously being disingenous. Its fustrating to not respond to those people, but there really isn’t any point, and if you let your self get dragged in, you end up on page eleven of the thread, arguing whether its illegal Mexican immigrants or US border agents are really Hitler.
Ideally, we could just all agree to keep debates substantive, focused on a narrow topic and not derail with silly ad-hominems and the like, as you seem to suggest in your OP. I don’t really think this is possible though, so I’d just find a way to get something out of it despite the current status-quo.

That’s sort of the whole point of the forum. Back when it was first being proposed (as a means of keeping these threads out of General Questions) I suggested calling the forum “Under the Bridge” because that’s where you’d find all the trolls.

This is a good rule I’ve tried to make myself follow. If I find I’m going back to the same thread and making the same arguments, I try to just stop opening the thread. There’s no point in just repeating myself to the same people.

I couldn’t put a time-frame on it, but I do think it’s changed over time. Some long-time posters have calcified in their views, and after the X-hundredth time of trying to make a basic point have somewhat devolved into partisan bitterness. This relates to both sides of the political spectrum and a whole host of nuances. Now, those same posters seem a bit more cantankerous, a bit more knee-jerky, a bit quicker to generalize their and the other side’s point.

Since they are more prevalent posters, they tend to shift the atmosphere. A very slight shift, but a shift nonetheless.

Another factor is the massive increase in partisan marketing driven by Murdoch Enterprises. Yes, partisanship always existed, and yes, claims of the Rushes and Grants predate the boards, but the growth of Fox et al over the past several years has done a lot to taint discourse. Not that conservative views and philosophies are inherently problematic, but the distillation to the soundbite and gross oversimplifications on such a massive scale has warped the landscape – warped perceptions on both sides.

There’s some of that going on, yes. And there’s the fact that the board has become more left-leaning over time (I think that process really got going after the Iraq war started) and there’s now a Democrat in the White House, and a lot of Dopers support him strongly overall.

Like I’ve said in other threads, this is an issue I’m interested in from a moderating standpoint. Hardcore partisanship bores me. I realize people are entitled to butt heads if they want to but I’d rather read a nuanced discussion of a complicated issue than watch people joust. When I see off-topic broadsides about one party or another I try to moderate that and keep the discussions on topic, but at a certain level, if people want to post that kind of thing, that’s what the forum is going to be. But I’d like to nudge it in a different direction to whatever degree is possible.

Y’know how mods can merge threads? Sometimes I wish they could split them.

Of course that wouldn’t really work out, but it can be a good thing when mods tell someone, “if you want to change the subject, please make a new thread about it”.

We can. We don’t do it much because the results can be confusing, but we do have the ability to do it.

With all due respect to present moderation policy, which I think in the main is the right mixture of firmness when needed and lack of heavy-handedness the majority of the time, to allow issues to be resolved without jackboots marching in to enforce The Rules™, I think that when a thread is circling Jose Martí International Airport awaiting landing instructions, the time has come to decide it’s been hijacked and deserves to have the hijack split off. Perhaps staff could discuss standards for doing so among themselves and set a policy on when and how to do it?

That’s kind of where I saw it start to. The board started to reflect the outside world during the 2008 elections where anti-Obama = racism. Now according to many on the SDMB:
anti-Obama = racism
anti-illegal immigration = racism
anti-UHC = wanting people to die
conservative = stupid

And I’m sure the left side have their list of generalizations that the right side makes.

Sure:

pro-Obama = Communist/Nazi (they’re the same thing)
pro-illegal immigration = pro-crime
pro-UHC = wanting people to die (I guess this is the universal part of it)
liberal = weak

That may be generally true. However, in our very first debate over the MOP of God, it was quite late in the thread when a contemporary philosopher (Tisthammer) noticed the traffic from this site to his, and joined the discussion. (We had been using his tableau, which was somewhat simpler than Plantinga’s and much simpler than Godel’s — yes, the one of undecidable propositions fame.)

After some questioning and discussion from SentientMeat, others, and me, Tisthammer decided to remove one of his postulates and derive it deductively. His website now reflects the changes that he made as a result of his discussions with us. And so. real substantial progress and edification were had all around beginning quite long after the thread had opened.

It was like Kant coming in late to a discussion about the nature of existence, and admitting that existence is a predicate after all. (Which it is — see Miller’s essay "In Defence of the Predicate “Exists’”, Mind, Vol 84: 338–354, 1975 and his later book, The Fullness of Being, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.)

Actually, I think I got that backwards. He removed an inference, and stated it as a postulate.

Well, you can always read the last post or two to see if the thread is still on topic.

Welcome back, Lib - I am praying for you and your wife.

Regards,
Shodan

Welcome back, Liberal, go to see you here again.

Hi, Lib, you tough old bird! Blessings on your head!

Thank you, Shodan. Your prayers are greatly appreciated. And I’m not really back, Little Nemo. Just sipping joe this morning and noticed the post. I’m just driving by. My apologies to the members and staff if I have derailed the thread.

(On preview, thanks Zoe. You made me smile.)