Have you ever visited another board?
Quite a few, actually. Many of them are topic specific, although not all.
I really don’t see any more intelligence on this board than any other, or any other gathering place IRL.
Frankly, I think the greatest weakness on this board is this attitude. It breeds an elitism that isn’t earned or warranted. Listen, most people think they’re way above average, right? (any/all Mensa threads make the point here) But it’s impossible that everyone is above average.
And if I’m above average and I’m hanging out with a group who largely agree with me on issues large and small, they must be brilliant too. My intelligence is reaffirmed every time someone agrees with me. It’s incestuous.
And not enough progressives do that, either.
You are?
I thank you for your critique of my posting style and character flaws. Rest assured, I will give it all the attention it is due. Thank you for sharing.
This is interesting, because I’ve been posting to (and previously lurking in the shadows of) this board for many years, and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a “‘friendly’ warning” of the type you describe. Would you mind linking to one or two of the innumerable examples?
That is just a typical conservatives reaction. I give it as much credence as TV network news is left leaning. If you cry loud enough and long enough ,you can convince yourself and other conservatives that it is true. But they are far from it. News is corporate and military propaganda . You don’t piss off your sponsors or owners.
If this board ,is liberal are you saying people that most people that can read and write are liberal. There is nothing preventing conservatives from stating their opinions on this board. So it is fair to say this board is just a cross section of American society.
Which they then reject out of hand. 
Can you give some examples? I would like these as well.
Regards,
Shodan
9/11 threads are a good example, actually. Never seen it in political threads though.
I can’t link, but I know what he’s talking about. Almost universally it’s said only to the conspiracy crackpots, not rightwingers per se as raindog would like to imply.
I think you’ll find I’m quite liberal by most definitions.
You must surely see how this sort of logic could be misapplied to any outlet. There is nothing preventing liberals from stating their opinions on RedState, so it is fair to say RedState.com is a cross section. There is nothing preventing liberals from participating in FoxNews internet polls, so they are a cross section. There is nothing preventing liberals from attending Tea Party events, so they are a cross section.
Although forums, polls, and protests are not inherently biased media, they do exhibit participation bias. Sometimes this bias is significant, sometimes it is slight. At the SDMB, my sense of the bias is that it is liberal, probably due to the association of the forum with a column that runs in an alternative Chicago newspaper.
Ah. Well, that much I have witnessed.
That is my impression also.
What is Red State? Would the name tell you they are after a specific audience? Would it suggest they will harbor conservatives more comfortably? What does Straight Dope tell you. They are interested in the truth. Unless the truth has a liberal bias, you would have to admit that the board in your example would deliberately be skewed. Why would this one be? Because conservatives say it is? The same people who tell me Fox presents the fair news, are not by base for determining that this board is skewed left.
Snickering hippy-type weirdoes who love a bad pun all the more for being vaguely drug-related. Probably know the names of all of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, as well as the the cat.
I said nothing about you. I said that was a typical conservative reaction. You don’t have to be conservative to be wrong, it just seems that way sometimes.
puff puff See? Why do the snickering hippy-type weirdoes get all the fun?? I think this is blatant…
puff puff
…what was I saying?
Never mind, carry on…
-XT
Mostly the comment sections of the better blogs, like the ones at the Atlantic, the Economist, Marginal Revolution, etc. The commenters at Marginal Revolution are especially good - on both the right and left. It kind of has the feel this board had in 2000, but it’s not nearly as large, and it’s pretty much focused on economics with occasional forays into other subjects.
There are also some occasionally good discussions on the more reasonable left-wing blogs, such as Yglesias’s site, Brad Delong’s site, etc.
I enjoy the discussions at Reason.com, although obviously it’s more slanted in favor on my own personal opinions. However, there are a lot of liberals that post there, and they probably find themselves in exactly the same kind of defensive posture the conservatives and libertarians here are forced to adopt.
In short, I’m finding better quality discussions when you go to blogs and comment sections of the people who specialize in those areas - economics, defense, whatever. I find this to be true on both the left and the right. Frankly, with a few exceptions (Kimstu, JShore, maybe 2 or 3 others), the overall quality of debate coming out of the left has also declined on this board. Maybe that’s what happens when it starts to become an echo chamber where the extremists and conspiratorialists hold sway. It’s not just the good posters on the right who leave - it’s all the good posters. The grownups just get tired of it.
I guess I’m not quite a grownup.
Well, this has all been such an eye-opener! I guess like so many on the left, I had unthinkingly absorbed the stereotype of the hard-headed, tough-minded, realistic and unsentimental conservative. But I see that underneath all that, you are really quite sensitive, even vulnerable!
I had no idea of the delicacy of your sensibilities, didn’t know you had feelings to hurt! Thought it would be like nipple-twisting a snake, just couldn’t be done…
I’ve wrestled with my conscience, and it lost again. Nonetheless, I am resolved to be more temperate in the future. Lay off the bitter snark, lean more to constructive humor, some harmless joshing.
OK, so maybe militaristic, conservative foreign policy has created a mountain of innocent corpses, and conservative free-market voodoo has covered my country knee-deep in blazing shit…is that any reason to be rude to people, simply because they argued for and defended those self-same policies?
Well, of course it is, but can’t we be nice about it?
More tea, anyone? Mind the doilies, now…
Speaking for myself, I’m not hurt, or distressed in any way. I’m bored. I find this place to be increasingly repetitive and uninteresting, and the quality of the debate to be increasingly poor. It’s hard to maintain a serious debate here any more because people like you dive-bomb such threads, injecting content-free snark and little chippy posts like the one above, and you derail the conversation and turn it partisan.
It’s getting old. And not particularly interesting. Again, this is just my personal preference. I actually enjoy substantive debates where people treat each other civilly and attempt to defend their political positions in depth and in good faith, without assuming that their opponents are idiots, members of a conspiracy, or evil. That’s increasingly rare here, so I’m increasingly uninterested. But there are still good threads, and I’ll participate in them when I think it’s interesting. A common characteristic of those threads is that they lack the participation of a certain handful of posters.