Straw-manning and broad-brushing together – well done! Solid, B+ nonsense attack on the evil libs!
I was addressing the OP and the Usual Suspects. Sorry if I went too fast for you.
Regards,
Shodan
Just wanted to say that, pretty clearly in this thread, most of the posters who have responded, many who are some form of ‘liberal’ or another, have not supported the OP. Most of those who supported the OP, sort of, did so in drive-by posts that were more aimed at other targets than the OP was actually getting at.
Maybe you should specify that rather than saying “Liberals on the SDMB”, idiot. See, I can read, unlike you apparently. Or, maybe I’ll just be done here, because you’re adding zero new value.
So what did you mean by “liberals on the SDMB”?
Or am I going too fast for you?
I find this thread amusing. It’s like a Festivus airing of grievances and so many are completely baseless or trivial.
didn’t refute anything I said. Didn’t even address it.
There’s nothing backhanded about it. I am not calling you a racist. I am saying you’re expressing a valid argument, one I happen to agree with (“China has a growing influence worldwide, and that’s not great for the world” is something I agree with 100%) in shitty language with a racist past.
Do you think I’d get shit if I started talking about how the “greedy” Israeli government was encroaching on the West Bank? Or how “poisonous” their settlement strategy is? Even though I never mentioned ethnicity and was honestly just talking about how I perceived the Israeli government actions? I should *totally *fucking hope I would. That’s the argot of antisemitism and it doesn’t belong in any reasoned discussion of Israeli policy…
Well, it’s the same with all the “invasion” and “slimy practice” and “infiltrate” and “subvert” and “dark ends” and “secret war”… if you can’t make your arguments without sounding exactly like an opium-pushing 1860s gunboat diplomat, you need to rethink what’s coming out your wordhole.
Hilarious! Are you seriously suggesting what it sounds like you’re suggesting?
Why bother with this charade? You’re just going to passive-aggressively whine about it in another unrelated thread, just like you did in this one. Apparently, you’re too cowardly to just up and Pit me …
Is there any way you two could take this argument to a new thread, and then take that thread to a different board, and then take that board offline? Thanks.
You do know that’s threadshitting, even if it’s in the Pit, don’t you?
I don’t think that its the current slate of conservative posters on the board that are driving the thoughtful conservatives out, I think its just that in the American Conservative right have gone so off base that it is no longer possible for a thoughtful conservative to defend any of their statements. Before you could argue whether we should have a more liberal immigration policy of a more restrictive one. Now its a choice between a more liberal immigration policy and mass human rights violation.
So those conservatives that are left who are going to try to defend the right are going to be of the more knee jerk and less fact based variety, and even then they tend to be the sort that comes out saying that they really don’t support Trump despite the fact that they defend him and all his policies.
Still, in spite of the fact that I disagree with them and everything they stand for I don’t want to see any of our resident conservatives like HD kicked out, and in fact wish that there were considerably more of them. There is a danger that this board just becomes a bunch of left learners posting Democratic talking points and patting themselves on the back. Without different views being expressed we become insular and lose perspective. Also while poster may complain about the trolling nature, and lack of intellectual rigor of these posters, I challenge them to look at other forum’s slate of conservative voices. Next to those our crop is the height of intellectual prowess and reserve. The fact that they can cite studies, form reasonable if flawed argument and maintain themselves in this sort of arena puts them head and shoulders above the “Its Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” level of argument that is the norm.
I wish there were a lot more actual thoughtful, non-trollish conservatives, like Bricker (yes he gets a lot of shit but I think he added a lot to the board), Bone, Sam Stone, Oakminster, puddleglum, Scylla, and more that I can’t think of off the top of my head. Even though I often very strongly (and harshly!) disagree with those posters, I find they generally argue in an honest fashion that’s not meant to troll or nitpick at silliness. But just off the top of my head (again), they seem to stick around, ISTM, at least more often than the true trolls, who are generally gone aside from a very, very few persistent ones. So it doesn’t seem to me like the good conservative posters are being driven away more than the trolls.
Perhaps you could post a plagiarized brownie recipe as an expression of your disapproval.
Yeah you can’t have that here …
Righties are scared to have votes on posts?
What is the reputational penalty beyond the number of dislikes? Am I missing something?
Another person who would downvote the op.
HD’s point is, for once, valid, even if what he often does in actuality is not merely present minority, and unpopular for the board, views.
As a matter of structure a system that relegates “unpopular” perspectives to being less likely to be seen is not desirable. I want to hear the perspectives of those who think very differently than I do. That’s a feature not a bug. My ignorance is not reduced by reading things I already know and agree with. The cost may be that some trolling gets past moderation but if there is an error to made I’d it be that one than creating a space safe from challenges to my current way of thought. Or one that prevents our opportunity to challenge their ways of thought.
FWIW HD’s are not the only one whose posts are more annoying and trollish than challenging but a bit of wheat is worth a fair amount of chaff.
Righties dislike votes that aren’t rigged.
I think it would be a bit ironic to give a vote system to the SDMB, because then you’re literally telling the teeming masses that they’re right about everything.
It’s good to have right-wingers, bigots and Trump supporters posting at SDMB so we can try to understand their thinking. Some of them have legitimate concerns that we should take into consideration. Anyway, bigots are humans also; and there’s a blurry line between bigotry and legitimate values like family and selfishness.
But HD doesn’t fit this model. If he’s auditioning for the Kremlin as a troller, someone should advise him he’s not smart enough. Sometimes he seems like an imbecile when he blatantly misrepresents statistics, but an imbecile wouldn’t even be able to come up with the misinterpretation. My model of him is that he’s a moron pretending to be an imbecile. (Because he finds this amusing?) In any event, he’s not here to learn or change. Like a dog with a brain tumor who likes the taste of his own shit, HD will never reject Trumpism.
Poll Questions:
- If HD’s posts all disappeared, would you miss them?
- If everyone else had HD set to Ignore, would you Ignore him also? Or feel some perverse need to view his posts?
I’ve put HD on Ignore and SDMB has become a happier place for me. At first I thought I might miss him and feel like clicking ‘View Post.’ After all, there’s a fascination in watching crazed dogs eat their own shit. But no, there are too many real people posting intelligent comments at SDMB for me to ever click ‘View Post’ for HD.
Imagine if everyone Ignored HD. Would anything of value be lost?
So, again, these are very noble motivations, but you are the 100th person on this thread to mistakenly equate reputational penalty with silencing or censorship, and to apparently be ignorant of how it actually works out in real-life situations.
Of course the vigilance and engagements of the mods makes a difference. Of course the rules of engagement of the board makes a difference. In (for example) subreddits lacking those constraints, they do turn into a cesspit of groupthink and nobody participates there unless what they want is groupthink. But in cases where there is thoughtful, engaged moderation, with rules that encourage and protect dissent, it really does help elevate high effort and quality ideas over low-effort shitposting. I suspect many SDMB folks have trouble imagining high-effort moderation because they’ve never seen it.
And I will state again: For any conservative or centrist who believes they’d be punished by Reddit-style bubblethink, this is a hypothesis that you could easily test by posting on /r/AskALiberal and seeing what happens.
This is good to know. I actually resist placing anyone on ignore out of a concern that I’ll miss how a conversation has been dragged off in an unexpected direction, but maybe I should rethink that.
It’s remarkable that the folks who cry “but muh dissent” about upvotes strangely have zero qualms about the existence of the ignore function and the fact that we aren’t allowed to talk about who’s on our ignore lists and why. I guess, once again, we see that trolly people prefer governance that avoids any kind of persistent quantifiable reputational value from the people who have to live with them.