I think there are something like 70,000 members of this board. Only a small minority appear to be assholes. I think when we perceive this board as being mostly judgmental/arrogant/assholish, it’s a case of selective perception. Count the number of perfectly benign/positive posts vs. jerk posts and you will find the jerk posts are very small and generally can be traced back to a precious few people. Yet people are likely to remember the jerk posts and every subsequent jerk post is used as evidence for the faulty logic that the Dope, as a whole, is a jerk.
On the whole I have found the Dope to be more enlightened, intelligent, non-reactionary, civilized, and compassionate than any other forum on the internet.
I agree with your post, but there is no more than 3,000 to 5,000 active posters. The 70,000 is everyone that ever registered. It includes Spammers, Trolls and Socks and many, many one month guests and lapsed members from when the board was free.
Maybe I am missing it. I thought that the gay bashers were involved in a thread discussing whether it was OK for a woman to sleep in a bed with a gay man when she was romantically attached to another man.
I would suspect that the specific posters who are vociferous in defending the issue of gay rights in society in GD and the Pit would be unlikely to be the same sort of posters who participate in such a discussion. I do not see the SDMB as a monolithic institution. If the individuals who dominate one discussion never open and read threads that would enrage them, they are not going to make an issue of statements they have not read.
I just looked over that thread and I note that not one of the half-dozen or so posters who would have taken comments about promiscuity and hijacked the thread, completely derailing it, driving it into the gorge, and blowing the hillsides to completely bury it have posted in the thread. Back to essel’s earlier point: thread can get dominated by small groups–and not every member of each of the various factions, here, reads or posts to every thread (or Forum). Your thread has been lucky enough to have been not visited by the group that would have treated those comments as threats to civilization rather than silly personal opinions voiced by the ignorant few who can be ignored.
I find that “tolerance” as an ideal is getting perverted in much the same way that political correctness did. I constantly see online exchanges with people rolling their eyes that someone who has supported being tolerant of one group (e.g. gay rights) has a strong view on another group (e.g. Intelligent Design advocates) and thus is hypocritical.
To me, tolerance means recognizing that people come in all different stripes and trying not to automatically dismiss people who look/think/talk/fuck differently than you. It doesn’t mean forgoing the right to hold a strong opinion or political view, the right to dislike someone who is different than you, or the right to dislike the actions or opinions of entire groups of people. Tolerance is more about not jumping to conclusions than it is about passively loving everyone and everything equally.
Using that definition, I don’t think SDMB posters as a group are significantly more or less tolerant than the rest of society. There are people here who are admirable in their ability to focus only on the ideas and arguments a person makes, and there are people here who are total dipsticks. As Larry Borgia said, it’s silly to ascribe traits to a large, disparate group of people.
I agree. Sometimes I think some people around here are so invested in being “open-minded” that they keep their minds so open their brains fall out. There is nothing inherently “intolerant” about reaching a measured and reasonable conclusion that something is unacceptable, dangerous, or bad. The opposite of “intolerant” is not “amoral.”
I also agree that, as someone else said, certain people here confuse “liberal” with “tolerant” and fail to realize that there is nothing tolerant about refusing to admit the validity of any worldview but your own.
I read more than I post, which is reflective of my social personality in general, but I have found the SD to be a decent microcosm of real life in terms of the distribution of people.
Some really nice people. Some comics. Some wickedly smart/talented people.
And some intolerant jerks.
If there’s one specific trend I’ve observed, it’s that opinion threads often devolve into shouting matches over who is “right,” rather than discussions about what people think. I’d like it better the other way, personally.
What percentage of SDMB regulars have actually read that thread? I haven’t.
What percentage of people who read the thread noticed the comment?
What percentage of those people do you think felt it just wasn’t worth their while to feed a trollish statement?
You’re using what amounts to a remarkably small and insignificant case to castigate the tolerance of a large group of people. It’s the perfect example of the old cliche about making a mountain out of a molehill and seeing offense and anguish where, really, it’s being invented rather than discovered.
Frankly, we’re already seeing that there’s simply no way to answer the OP’s question because we can’t even agree on what constitutes tolerance. Naturally, the immediate default was to assume “tolerant” means “politically liberal.” This is sometimes true, for some issues, but sometimes not. As has been pointed out, those aren’t equivalent, and any given group of people or any given individual can be tolerant towards A, B and C while being intolerant of D, E and F. “Tolerance” is not a single, one dimensional trait that can be quantified in every person as one variable, and I’m not even sure you and I are even going to agree on the definition of the word itself.
A lot of the comments in this thread are actually quite insightful. msmith is quite right when he points out that the board skews towards some social opinions. Figaro makes a very good point as well that there’s more debating at times than there is exchange of ideas - I wouldn’t say it’s a bad problem or anything, but I think it’s true.
Heh, funny, I was considering commenting about how in this one thread, I mentioned how all my gay friends are self-admitted mansluts, and this one chick freaked out because her friend wasn’t like that. No room at all for any worldview other than what directly fit her experience and expectations.
This hits the nail on the head. There are some issues (some of which have been mentioned in this thread, some that haven’t) that Dopers are incredibly intolerant of.
Rubystreak, I don’t support your assertion that your recent thread on sleeping arrangements was an example of non-defended homophobia. This probably isn’t the place for that discussion, though.
ETA: On seeing new posts, maybe it is. I went back and looked at the posts Rubystreak is getting mad about, and they are people posting their own experiences with gay people, with the gay people calling themselves promiscuous. There’s a difference between a poster saying, “All my gay friends are self-admitted sluts” and a poster saying, “All gay people are sluts.” I think there was no gay-bashing-defending going on because the rest of us get that.
I read those posts rather differently, not as a slam on gay men specifically, but on the unscrupulousness of some men generally in their shifts, stratagems and spoils in luring women into their beds on platonic pretexts. I accept that it didn’t apply to the specific situation raised in the OP, but I’ve seen some downright Machiavellian tactics used by guys, often with the excuse of lack of sleeping arrangements or “you’re more like a sister than a friend”, in order to share a bedspace and try and cop some action*. In an odd kind of way those posts seemed rather unbiased to me, in that they do gay men the courtesy of assuming that they’re capable of just as much duplicity as straight men: the criticism seemed to me to be of men, not just homosexual men.
*I was a gentleman: I gave up my double bed to her and slept on the sofa. But for all my gentlemanliness, I can’t deny that there was a lurking hope that she’d invite me back in.
Maybe I didn’t read the thread correctly, but I don’t recall anyone saying that all gay men are whores. I remember someone posting that all his gay friends were whores.
I am a person with a gazillion gay friends, some of whom are completely promiscuous and some of whom are pure as the driven snow. And yet, somehow, I didn’t take offense to hearing a man say that based on his experience with his own gay friends and their lascivious habits, he wouldn’t be comfortable with his SO sleeping with a gay dude.
If you follow this line of reasoning through, he’s not saying, ‘‘I wouldn’t like it because all gay men are whores,’’ he’s saying, ‘‘I wouldn’t like it because a person’s homosexuality does not immediately preclude them having relations with the opposite sex, or doing slimeball things with my SO when I’m not looking.’’
I am hardly an intolerant person, but neither do I sit around looking for reasons to be offended. That doesn’t make me a stoic, apathetic observer. It makes me rational.
If you made the same statement but subsituted black people or Jews for gays, I bet the response to your comment would be different. Your reasoning for saying it has been the refuge of bigots forever, and it bugged me. I’m not “freaking out” because my one friend is not like that. I’m objecting to your characterization of gay people. But apparently plenty of people think either you were being ignorantly inflammatory and should be ignored, or that I’m taking offense where none should be taken, and it should be ignored. In either case, the upshot is, it’s not worth my time.
This is still not getting through your little head, it is not a characterization of gay people. It is a description of the gay people I know, based upon their own first-person descriptions of themselves. This doesn’t fit with what you want to believe, so you keep repeating this falsehood that it’s a whole-cloth fabrication of mine. Either learn to read or stop lying, please, in fact both would be great.
Keep your personal insults out of this thread/forum, thanks.
I think you should be able to understand why your comment rankled for me, and apparently for others too, including a gay person. It seemed a rather harsh characterization of gay people. You swear you are not universalizing or applying it to all gays, but it still came off as pretty inflammatory to me. The “pathologically promiscuous” stereotype has done a lot to harm gay rights, and I don’t enjoy seeing it promulgated. I don’t know your friends, so I can’t verify that absolutely all of them are total whores, lock up your women and children! If you say so. I think actually most gay people aren’t like that, and your contribution to that thread was less than helpful to both the thread and to the cause of fighting ignorance. Feel free to disagree, which I’m sure you will.
I think that the general atmosphere in the Dope is pretty negative on certain lifestyles, and in particular on parenthood/children. It appears to me much more acceptable to negatively stereotype parents then to stereotype pretty well any other group.
I’m active on a couple of other boards, and this is one pretty major trend I’ve noticed that distinguishes this place. Lots of threads on nasty parents, why I hate kids, etc. Lots of assumptions made about parental behaviour as generalizations.
Edit: the board apprears much more accepting of pet owners.
You escalated the insults by not only misrepresenting what I said as a slander, but then going on to analogize it to other ethnic groups. Practice what you preach.
Which is exhibit A to the question that this thread poses. You seem to harbor a certain positive stereotype, and when real examples are given, you resent their threat to what you believe. You cannot tolerate nor accept when reality intrudes upon what you’d like the world to look like because you think it would make someone “look bad”. And it’s even more pathological because there’s really nothing wrong with being a manslut, yet here you are acting like it is some sort of blood libel. And as to your continual appeals to what “others in the thread” thought, apparently you’re ignoring those whose experience seem to resonate with what I wrote. I’m not even trying to change your mind, just using you as an example of how accepting/tolerant the Dope isn’t, which you seem to be bent on illustrating quite thoroughly.
I would, if I didn’t care enough about the issue at hand. Screw anyone who thinks I have an obligation to weigh in when I don’t feel like it. The stakes here just aren’t that high.
I totally agree. There’s not enough time in the day to post in every thread I have an opinion about. Sometimes it’s an issue I don’t care about that much. Sometimes it’s an issue I care about a lot, but I know getting involved in the thread will end up requiring a time committment I can’t deal with at the moment. It depends on my mood, how busy I am, etc. Sometimes an issue in general might not be that significant to me, but a particular poster says something that I really want to respond to. You just can’t make assumptions about why a person doesn’t make an appearance in a thread.