I think that if someone’s views include overt racism, defending the use of hate speech (including calling women the vilest of names) and supporting violent attempts to overturn our elections, then they deserve to be called out. Why are we bending over backwards to accommodate the worst people when it results in creating a hostile place for everyone else?
I suspect your judgement is likewise influenced just a teeny-tiny bit by your own political beliefs. I mean, I certainly didn’t make up the Christian persecution complex which is heavily aligned with the American right at present. I could also link to a dozen articles discussing how the American right claims political persecution but I’m afraid none of them would be from right-wing sources, largely because right-wing media make a very, very good living by feeding that complex.
Or I could point to ATMB and all the posters who are still claiming persecution because of their particular political stances. There are so many examples of what is admittedly quite a small but noisy group of posters accusing others of attacking them simply for disagreeing, but when one actually goes and looks at the instances they reference one discovers that the reality is substantially different and that the complainers were often actually being castigated for making poor or dishonest arguments.
Can you imagine that, DemonTree? That there are some board members so brazen and morally bereft that they would just openly lie over and over and over again about something so easily verified, and double down when called out on their lies? I’m sure you would agree that such people can do a lot of damage to a messageboard.
Eh. I’ll concede that. It’s definitely snark. But it’s snark with a point, albeit one that had already been previously made.
True, it’s a terrible burden having to make coherent, fact-based arguments.
Are you saying that conservative posters don’t do and haven’t done the same thing over the years? Because boy howdy, have you got a lot of board history to catch up on.
Yes, it’s terrible to be part of a demonized minority being piled on by a large and powerful majority who have the de facto backing of the enforcement body, and having to constantly work twice as hard or risk having one’s every mistake held up as an example of the failings of one’s entire cohort. But enough about black and trans people…
Oh, fuck off. You have no fucking clue what being a minority is actually like.
Saying that someone getting banned after ten years of trolling is proof that the system works is insipid. For literally half the life of this board, a troll was obviously trolling. The life of a conservative troll here is ten years of trolling, being told by the mods that just because you disagree with someone, doesn’t make them a troll; and then an announcement that the troll has been banned for trolling. We clearly have affirmative action for conservatives and give them way more leeway than other posters.
Okay. My experience has been different. But we all take away whatever we take away from our time here, and we all have our blind spots.
Some of them weren’t banned as fast as they deserved given their specific behaviors. Shodan, for example, grotesquely misrepresented what other people said in order to cast their views in the worst possible light. He would make outrageously provocative statements in GD threads and then refuse to respond to any questions about them. He was probably the greatest producer of partisan “snarky throwaways” this board has ever known. And he did this virtually daily for years. Eventually he escalated to the point of drawing moderator ire (although I will admit to being baffled by the particular straw that broke that camel’s back) but he low-level trolled this board for a long, long, long time and got away with it. As for his “psychological issues”, I couldn’t speculate. december was another in the same mode, who got away with some spectacular trolling for a long time before the mods eventually had enough.
Conversely, HurricaneDitka was one of a number of hard-right posters who, during the Trump era, simply took their filters off and went full-on obnoxious. And when the banhammer came down, a lot of them socked their way back to troll us more. The more polarized the country got, the worse this situation got. But it wasn’t “persecution” by “liberals” that caused it. It wasn’t even their right-wing views as such. They were just assholes who felt empowered to be assholes.
That’s an understatement. He was kind of an all-around jerk, though. He did maintain that everything was always the fault of liberals, but after his unforgettable contribution to the Penn State scandal thread the writing was on the wall for him anyway.
We have also have left-wingers that have gotten a long leash (cough Diogenes cough) but in more recent years they and their fellow travellers have also been sent to the cornfield. The only difference is that there wasn’t a group of people claiming they’d been banned for political reasons (that I recall, at least).
No doubt. I wasn’t denying the American right have a persecution complex, rather I believe @octupus’s posts have the same sort of basis in fact, even if exaggerated.
Again, this is 100% in the eye of the beholder.
Like I said, those who agree with the majority can act the same or worse and get no pushback for it. If they ever are pitted they get a bunch of people defending them. When I looked through Pit threads, I thought some people deserved it, but others had not done anything particularly offensive, just annoyed the Pitter in some way.
As opposed to sometimes posting ‘snark with a point’ and letting other posters do the research and take the time to write something long and detailed, or just letting them carry the conversation for a while. No one can be on their A-game all the time, and it’s very time consuming for any one person to try to answer the arguments of many. Many heads are better than one, and there used to be some very good heads on this board.
No, I’m saying they get judged for it, and Pitted, and constantly snarked at until they snap and get banned, or pass the limit of what they are willing to put up with and leave the board.
In a small way, that’s exactly what it’s like.
I wasn’t aware that FOX news had a forum. I know there’s comment sections on some stories, but didn’t know they had a forum.
They sometimes refer to their comments sections as forums on their web site, see here for their commenting policy:
So while you or I might not consider them forums, if you refer to their comment sections as forums you’re at least using their own terminology.
I can and do have interesting and pleasant conversations with conservative, even Trumpist, and religious (not automatically the same group, though sometimes) friends and family all the time.
But we do so, for the most part, by staying off the subjects of politics and religions.
I am really really careful, with people I meet with physically, about who I get into those conversations with. There are a very few people, IME, who I can discuss such subjects with without their freaking out and very likely getting furious with me (and some who used to be in that group moved themselves out of it over the last five or ten years). I treasure such people, when I find them; but even twenty or forty years ago, I would never have expected a group of hundreds or thousands of people to all come into that category.
I do want to have those conversations. So I come here. But I still don’t want to have them with people who react to disagreement by telling me that I’m a hive mind. That’s not conversation, that’s just a snarl; and it not only isn’t going to convince anybody of anything, it doesn’t inform anybody of anything (other than possibly which side the poster thinks they’re on).
And I don’t get anything useful out of trying to have them with people who are routinely ignoring relevant points in order to keep repeating the same stuff over, and over, and over again. If someone’s considered those points and is still of the same opinion, they ought to be able to answer them. If they’re thinking about those points, or need to do research on them, and are not about to change positions on a dime, they can say that.
Again: expecting people who can’t deal with disagreements about politics and religion to stay out of such discussions online isn’t realistic. Of course the environment’s going to be harsher here than in in-person discussions with friends and family – because that’s a much more limited venue.
But that’s a large part of what I come here for: because it’s a place where I can get jumped on when I’m wrong. (Ideally, of course, by people actually explaining why they think so.)
In or out of politics, I’ve changed my mind about a lot of posts because I thought in the middle of typing them, wait a minute, can I back that up? Sometimes I don’t post, because I don’t want to take the time to research; sometimes, whether or not I put them in the thread, I go look for cites before posting – and occasionally find out that I’m wrong before anybody here has to tell me about it.
This is the most hilarious and pathetic thing I’ve ever seen 
Sigh… that wasn’t the point. Fox News watchers are overwhelmingly conservative, so their forums would be full of like-thinkers, which is the definition of a “hive mind.”
That’s too bad. I’m able to have those conversations with people without staying off those subjects (not here at SDMB, in the physical world).
And they’ve been good. Once in a blue moon, one or the other of us actually gets the other to concede a point and see things differently. And even when that’s not the case, we come away from those conversations with a better understanding of how the other got to where they are.
In the interest of being Fair and Balanced ™ this is actually the SECOND most pathetic thing, right after MTG saying that mask mandates are like the holocaust
People replying with well reasoned arguments was not what I meant by being jumped on. That’s kind of the point of a debate forum. Rather it’s the snarky comments, borderline insults that don’t get modded, and actual insults in the Pit that I was referring to. The hostility and judgement. I don’t know if you’ve experienced it or not, but I kind of doubt it.
I have also discovered that I remembered something wrong, or was otherwise mistaken, while looking for cites. But many times if I don’t do the research, no one else will, and when there are multiple posts waiting for replies it’s tempting to address the easy ones first. It’s bad, because it doesn’t lead to a constructive debate, but it’s still tempting. Having an ally makes such a difference, like @monstro in the JKR thread. Even just the moral support, but she also made much better arguments than me.
I haven’t said my piece about the OP, which is: of course the board doesn’t need anyone, but if I could choose a group to get the banhammer, it’d be the folks who post dishonestly, and the folks who dehumanize others (and here I’m not talking about insults, I’m talking about denying basic rights). Give me an honest good-faith libertarian any day over a leftist who lies about others or who thinks we should put conservatives in reeducation camps. Only one of those is worth having a conversation with.
That’s a hell of a self-own.
Earnest question for the folks who have all the objectively right answers in their grasp:
Have you never in your life been wrong about something that mattered?
I generally try not to use the word anymore, but I’ll make an exception for you - you really, really are a giant cunt. The fucking nerve of you.
I was severely mistaken about Caesario.