Ah, you mean people who like to call names in the Pit? 
Clearly, the most obvious reason to be pitted on this board is to have right-wing opinions. Theae are typically defined as either lies, of racist, or misogynist, or so incredibly stupid that the person uttering such opinions just needs to be pitted.
The reality is that there are maybe a dozen people on this board whose sport of choice is to find ‘wrong’ opinions and then attack the character or intelligence of the poster mercilessly in the pit. The same few people are heavily over-represented in pretty much any political pitting.
They are essentially the board hall monitors, trying to shut down anyone who doesn’t fall into line with the prevailing board zeitgeist. They are the equivalent of the howling newsroom staffs forcing conservative writers out to maintain ideological purity.
You admit that the judgement of whether someone is an asshole is a subjective one, yet you still feel the need to go and bash everyone you have so designated just to make yourself feel better? Aren’t you supposed to be a Christian?
It wouldn’t be getting rid of one side but not the other. Both sides would be equally banned from personal attacks, and ‘hashing it out’ in other forums without all the insults would still be an option.
That’s not a particularly compelling reason to keep “just a little” toxic waste nearby, as codinghorror put it.
That’s going a little far. At least posters here aren’t demeaning themselves by pretending being challenged by different opinions makes them feel ‘unsafe’. Some are honest enough to admit they just want to have fun and relieve their emotions by attacking the designated villains (aka conservatives).
And it’s just a coincidence that those opinions are the racist, sexist, transphobic, islamophobic, climate change denialist, pro-insurrection, etc ones…
I’ll let this stand as an example which proves my point.
Right-wingers only do the bad type of racism. The good type of racism (denying people spots in college for being Asian, refusing to do business with Jews, accusing every Cuban-American in Florida of being a slaveowner) is for leftists. And of course even though some kinds of racism are good and some are bad, and most of the statements that people campaigning against racism in 1966 would have made are now bad and conservative and racist, this is all incredibly self-evident and beyond the realm of debate, most especially in the “debate forum.”
That’s a circular argument.
No, you identify anyone with any of those viewpoints as a right winger.
And I’m going to be blunt: there are some people out there who have actually deserved it.
Getting back to the OP - which has to do with growing members, possibly by removing the pit and consequences thereof, do you feel @Sam_Stone that the particular subjects listed above do not have supporters and apologists here? Because I would absolutely consider backing most of those points as dishonest, and in many cases factually incorrect -whether voiced by a right or left winger.
Just for clarity UV, when you say it’s a dodge - do you mean a dodge in the sense of the OP, where I can say ‘This post is absolute incorrect, and here’s why cite1, cite2, cite 3’ rather than ‘You’re lying, and here’s why cite1, cite2, cite 3’ or in the sense that calling someone a racist for words or acts against an racially identified group as part of a larger debate is?
The accusation of “racism” even directed at the argument and not the person is just a lazy style of argument—but that laziness isn’t even good enough, we need to go after the person.
It is no different than the lazy style of argument of those on the right calling everything socialism. Pretend that instead of a strong left wing bias on this board it was flipped. Instead of having a robust debate on universal healthcare, let’s say, posters would just should down the opposition as being socialists and Pit them for being socialists and demand that “we” as a “community” out the socialists because look at what we fought the Cold War to win.
Plus, as Sam Stone said and you hint at, the accusations of racism by posters on this board have nothing to do with racism. You think that a holiday to celebrate the end of slavery should be on a different day? Racism. You disagree with CRT? Racism. You agree with a 6-3 Supreme Court opinion on voting rights? Racism. You think the Chauvin verdict was a bit too much? Well, it’s only because you hate blacks and could not possibly be for any other reason but racism.
In fact, there is no debate. The left is so unquestionably correct, that any opposition must be racism. It’s the go to insult to shout down opposition so as not to have any real debates.
I sort of said it in my last post. It doesn’t engage the issue. You “win” the debate by accusing the post of being a racist post, no different than “winning” a health care debate by saying “socialism.”
Every argument has a rhetorical device and analogy is good, so if you want to argue that, say, the AZ voting law is comparable to literacy tests under Jim Crow, then feel free to make that argument and hopefully make it a good one, but don’t just say that it is racism or have a poster pile on about how any disagreement from the consensus of the board must be racism.
Well, let say say someone doesn’t understand the new gender labels and such, and makes a mistake- they are then =transphobic.
Someone mentions that black olympic runners seem to be dominating that sport= racist.
Someone says they think that the PLO is Terrorist= islamophobic.
Someone says that the global warming might not be a catastrophe= climate change denialist- for using a outdated term and not a being a doom and gloom predictor.
And so forth. If you step out of a few posters rigidly defined lines, then they call you those names. You must toe the line, the line they want, or else.
And then they get Pitted and called names, and if new, they think we are all a bunch of assholes and they leave.
Exactly.
I can accept that in a debate forum any opinion touching on race might be called racist. The real issue seems to be that:
*A lot of people who disagree with me do not accept that in a debate forum, opinions are debatable
*Statements such as “it’s good for children to have two loving parents” or “people should be able to walk down the street without getting bashed over the head” also get called racist; the farcical old left-wing talking point that no one really cares about, e.g., school quality or family structure or crime, and these are all just dogwhistles for racism, has either been internalized by some people or they’re doing a great long con of pretending it has.
And again, people can believe, or claim to believe, what they want. But it’s not tenable in the long run to have all of these be true at the same time:
*A faction believes that they are possessed of the absolute and final truth.
*That faction believes that the only reason anyone could fail to acknowledge the absolute and final truth is because their opponents are racists.
*No holds are barred in how “racists” are dealt with.
*The board purports to have a “debate” forum in which various viewpoints are allowed to be discussed under a consistently enforced set of rules.
*The opinions of the correct faction can never be racist, even when they call for the targeted disadvantaging of certain people based on race. Racist is what their opponents are, haven’t you been listening?
*The people with their thumbs on the scale in enforcing the rules strongly believe in points 1 and 2, which frequently bleeds into 3 (why should we give people the respect of enforcing the rules the same towards all posters? Are you suggesting we respect racists?).
The attempt to continue having two debate fora while pursuing all of the above contradictory stances is ridiculous and is not working.
Or it proves that some people being called to account for expressing racist, sexist, transphobic, islamophobic, climate change denialist, pro-insurrection, etc opinions will immediately play the “you’re just persecuting me because I’m conservative” card to avoid accepting any accountability for their statements.
You know, i just ran into that earlier this evening. He didn’t come right out and say - every Cuban-American - but he came kinda close.
There are a lot of right wing arguments that I’ve never seen pitted. “We should have tolls to pay for highways”, “taxes should be lower”, “capitalism created covid vaccines incredibly quickly, and they went first to the nation that pays drug companies the best”.
I’m not sure why so much of the right is alliwing itself to be used by insurrectionists and racists, as those are not even close to right wing goals in any traditional sense of the right wing. But i don’t see it as a problem of the left that they call out the right for being used that way.
The difference is between “universal Healthcare is socialism” (which is factually untrue based on the definition of what the fuck socialism is and has no bearing on whether or not it is a good idea anyways) versus “your position is a racist one because it disproportionately harms black people” which is a factual statement you can prove with evidence.
Nobody is labeled transphobic for making a mistake. They are labeled transphobic when their mistake is pointed out and they respond by screeching about how terrible it is that the fascist left is imposing their morality on others (by requesting that people be treated with basic decency). This is a strawman.
Your opinion is a fact. Full stop. No debate to see here. Opposing views are racist and false. Thanks for proving my point.