So, you are saying we need to define the word before we can discuss it?
And now you are discussing the definition of ‘equity’ so that we understand each other.
And now I need another definiton. What exactly do you mean by “real freedom”? Within the extremely broad confines of the law, I have a right to free speech. As they say, I do not have a right to consequence free speech . Is that your meaning?
Lol.
I think there are a couple of things going on here. One is that certain opinions have indeed been made taboo, and the allowable range is extremely skewed to the left. For example, I seem to recall @Ramira was banned for breaking the rules on talking about trans people, though I can’t remember what she said exactly. The other is the amount of effort and self control required to conform to the rules when your posts are constantly criticised and nit-picked by multiple people, and you must try to ignore those same people making vaguely insulting comments to or about you (something I failed to do last night). I wish you could all go post about politics on a conservative forum and experience it for yourselves, just to understand what it’s like. If, on the other hand, you have standardish left-wing opinions then you will not be subjected to this critical scrutiny, and your self-control will rarely be tested.
I hear this often, but I don’t think it actually makes sense. Someone who wants to cut Medicare, or benefits to the poor in order to lower taxes is going to do a lot of harm if they get their favoured policies passed. Why does politicians voting against cheaper prescription drugs not inspire the same disgust as them saying racist stuff? It’s harming people far more directly and obviously.
Someone who wants to hurt the poor is indeed, an unpleasant person that i prefer not to talk to. But someone who makes a cogent argument about solutions to social problems other than “tax and spend” may be a person i want to engage with.
There are conservatives who are trying to improve the world, you know.
And fwiw, i have experienced arguing a minority opinion on a board like this one. I favored gay marriage when it was illegal, suspect, and a minority opinion, for instance. I wasn’t all alone. There was a gay guy making similar arguments. But he got very worn out by having his existence basically attacked whenever he posted. So i posted quite a lot. And was attacked from all sides.
Absolutely. I am vehemently opposed to charter schools–at least as implemented in my state. They function as taxpayer-funded segregation academies, sap energy and funds from public schools, and disproportionately harm children whose parents have fewer resources to navigate the school system.
But proponents of charter schools aren’t necessarily bad people, nor are those who send their kids to charter schools. I can respect them and have civil disagreements with them. I know that many of them genuinely believe that charter schools are the best solution to the ills of public education; and although they’re wrong as hell, it’s a matter of being mistaken, rather than being malicious.
Contrast that to people who want to ban books that normalize being trans or being gay. Those fuckers are malicious.
Ha ha ha…
Liberals around here are only slightly more tolerant of left-wing ideas than they are of right-wing ones. Most of us leftists aren’t also raging racist trolls, so we are still around. But it’s certainly not because the board is left. Just look at that fascism+hopelessness thread.
Ramira’s not banned. She hasn’t posted since 2018, but her posting privileges are intact.
Also, based on a quick, very non-exhaustive search, she never got in any sort of trouble for her views on trans people. Or, (again, based on a very non-exhaustive search) ever expressed an opinion on trans rights one way or the other. The warnings and mod notes she got were pretty much entirely from threads on middle east politics.
I know I fall into the first group. I will ‘criticise and nit-pick’ any post by any poster if they make claims that need to be backed by cites or use terms that need defining. Not only do I not apologize for this behavior, I am proud of it.
As far as “vaguely insulting comments”, speaking only for myself I know where The Pit is. If I wanted to insult you, and receive hearty agreement, I could just go to the thread dedicated to you and one other poster. Additionally, while I have been stubborn and persistent, I have avoided insults here (this is not The Pit) nor have I posted about you in The Pit. I continue to speak to you in the hopes of getting answers and having some kind of productive debate, If I were to post about you in The Pit, you would understandably walk away from any discussion.
Plus, if you feel somebody is being even vaguely insulting you should flag that post and report it to the mods. Again, this is not The Pit.
@Demontree, do you have a single example of a poster who was banned for not agreeing with “the prevailing opinion” of this board?
I can only think of one poster banned for transphobia/deliberate misgendering. This was after the official rules were updated. So “scientific racism” and transphobia were violations of official rules and not just against “the prevailing opinion”
What I see happen sometimes is that ConservativeDude posts an opposing view, a handful of people make it their life’s mission to refute/attack that view, CD responds to their posts, CD gets accused of sealioning, is pitted, and/or is thread banned. I often don’t think that people are really trying to understand conservative viewpoints with their replies and attacks. Rather, I feel like they are taking out their frustration on that conservative viewpoint on the person. Eventually, the conservative person blows his top and gets banned, or gets tired of getting attacked all the time. I suppose that’s okay if people want to drive away opposing views, but it’s not helpful to gain an understanding of the other side. It creates an echo chamber environment where it’s easy to come up with unworkable solutions to social issues.
For instance, without having any gun supporters on the site, it’s easy to come up with school shooting solutions like “Ban all guns”. But that’s only a workable solution if there’s no understanding or consideration of how gun supporters will react to that kind of solution. Back when we had gun supporters on the site, I found it valuable to hear their viewpoint. It made it clear how difficult it would be to ban guns or create restrictions which gun supporters found onerous. So now when thinking of solutions to gun violence, I take that into consideration. For something like school shootings, I feel a more realistic solution is to secure the schools rather than ban guns. I certainly would love to ban guns, but attitudes of gun supporters means banning guns is a fantasy solution at this time. Even though it’s an imperfect solution, making schools more secure is a workable, feasible solution that can be accomplished in a reasonable time frame. That’s something I learned from having gun supporters active on the site. I feel the same way with many conservative viewpoints. Even if I don’t agree with them, I find it valuable to hear from them to gain a greater understanding of how they feel about that viewpoint. It makes it possible to come up with realistic solutions.
It’s the same with woke. Whether or not you agree with the anti-woke crowd, there are a lot of them and they have a lot of political might. Any pro-woke policy will need to make it through the gauntlet of the anti-woke voters. If people like the OP are driven away with constant attacks, then there is a void of understanding of what the opposition is thinking and feeling. You don’t have to agree with them, but when you respond to them, think about if you’re trying to gain a better understanding or whether you’re trying to antagonize them and drive them away.
So many off-topic replies i want to make… I’ll just say that we definitely still have some gun advocate on this site.
And to return to the topic, i do think that people posting unpopular views can be overwhelmed with responses. And if the views are unpopular enough, the poster can be accused of trolling, because, “the only reason he could say that is to upset the rest of us.”
That being said, when posters are actually banned, it generally is because they broke an official rule. They got fed up and insulted other posters outside the pit. They refused to drop hijacks after the mods asked them to. They used slurs after being asked to stop. They were disparaging of women after being asked to stop.
The iffiest of those categories is “hijacks”, because a hijack can be in the eyes of the reader, and the mods don’t always agree with a prolific poster as to exactly what the topic of a thread is. That can be improved with careful communication (from the mods, mostly) but we’ll make mistakes.
How often would you say this happens, in your opinion?
Second, can you cite any examples of it happening?
Pretty sure I stole it from somebody, but I don’t remember from whom.
Yeah. I think there is often such a pattern; but that as you say the example given often doesn’t quite match the original claim, or is an extreme example of it.
One of the uses of honest discussion is to figure out where each person thinks the exceptions are; and for each person to themselves actually think about whether they’ve got their exceptions and their rules in what they seriously consider to be in the right place, or whether they ought to adjust some of their thinking.
And I often see a similar pattern in conservatives and libertarians – it isn’t limited to liberals, or to anybody’s definition of “leftists” (a term the definition of which seems to vary wildly, often depending on the user’s own positions. To some extent, of course, the defnitions of “liberals” and “conservatives” do also.)
[etcetera]
Thanks for finally providing answers. I’ll consider them and come back to this. (My immediate reaction is that at least a couple of them aren’t actually answers to what I asked, but I don’t want to go with my immediate reaction without thinking about it first.)
I thought that’s what we were here for.
(Well, that and cat pictures and recipes and sometimes sympathy.)
Huh? There are definitely people on the site who have guns, and who support using them properly; as well as people who don’t have guns but who support responsible use of them; both of which positions obviously require supporting access to guns so long as the “proper” and “responsible” conditions are met. Much of the argument is over what those conditions should be – which we probably shouldn’t get into in this thread.
If what DemonTree says is true, for example that race realism is not permitted in arguments, them conservative posters can’t effectively discuss ‘woke’ without getting banned.
For example, they fundamentally disagree that races are equally capable, so a goal of equity is totally unattainable and in fact undesirable. They can tip tap around this (and in fact you can read them doing so), but they can’t out right say it.
And that is a misleading take obtained by the ones controlling the narration, (Hint: it is not the left leaning media) A better image/cartoon to explain it better is this one used also in Equity training:
https://cdi.uvm.edu/islandora/object/uvmcdi-uvmcdi105242
So sure, we end up arriving to the same place, but only as a result of being fair at the beginning.
I disagree with a lot of what @DemonTree has posted in this thread, but on this point I think she brings up a good point in post 64, which IMHO is missed by a lot of the “woke” crowd. No, it isn’t a problem if innate deficiencies in the minority group. Yes, racism still plays a role. But there are also cultural issues that play into lack of achievement / success.
Take sports as an obvious example. A lot of sports tend to have athletes of particular racial groups or nationalities that excel in the sport in question. It isn’t, for example, that Japanese people are inherently better at baseball, Indians and Pakistanis inherently better at cricket, American Blacks and white people from Eastern Europe (but not white Americans descended from Eastern European immigrants or Black people native to West Africa where most of the ancestors of American Blacks came from) inherently superior at basketball, and so on. It’s just that in those places, those are the sports which are taught to young children, so of course people from those places and cultures will be over represented. IMHO this same thing happens in areas other than sports, and can also explain some (but not all) of the disparities in achievements by people of different races.
I disagree that this is an essential element of conservatism.
Or, for that matter, that “race realism” is a good name for it.
And I disagree with that cartoon, in the context of my field. The way to clear the field for some students with special needs will make it more difficult for some students without special needs. As a trivial example, some students with autism are much more comfortable if they’re allowed to stim whenever they need to, and learn better with this provision. Some students without autism find certain stimming behaviors very distracting, and learn better when they’re not around those behaviors. It’s not the case that “clearing the path” for autism students helps everyone out; rather, it’s necessary to figure out what everyone needs, and then to find a brilliant or messy solution that gets everyone as close to what they need as the resources allow.
What I learned is that it is not that all students will do the same, the equity part actually came when autistic children finally had the chance to “stim”. Remember, back in the day there was no such a concept, so Autistic children where SOL in the past educational environments. So, the actual clear the ramp part took place in recent times. Of course, that image does not literally mean that giving a fair chance to people with disabilities means that all normal students should do the same; only that, in the past, people with disabilities/wheelchairs had no ramp whatsoever.
BTW: It should go without saying, but it seems that this is needed to be said: a metaphor/parable is not supposed to be taken literally.
Defining things may seem simple to you, but in general it is not - you may know an X when you see one, but that is very different from being able to give a concise definition of X - and it is all the harder if you are doing so adversarially rather than cooperatively. The need to prevent any possible misinterpretation is what leads to stilted legal speak, and that is famously not conducive to understanding…
Your SO can, I hope and trust, assume that when you ask her to define something, you honestly want to understand, and will work with her to get that understanding. If instead she could reasonably expect you to criticise and nit-pick any definition she gave, and for your 5 friends to join in with the criticism and add some snide remarks, she may be understandably reluctant to make the effort.
I know I should, but I’m a human being with normal human emotions, and it’s hard not to respond when you feel someone is attacking you.
Sure, and I’m not saying there’s a problem with moderation. The issue is the rules themselves are tilted towards left-wing sensibilities, and (way more significant), it’s just horribly uncomfortable being a tiny minority in this type of discussion. Even if overt attacks and insults are moderated, it’s still the death of 1000 cuts that eventually causes such posters to lash out and get banned, or to find it too unpleasant to bother.
Yes, exactly this. There used to be a few conservatives on this board, and it made threads 100 times more interesting and informative to see that viewpoint represented and understand where they were coming from. Now I see echo chamber threads with people simply repeating misapprehensions to each other, but having tried to explain my viewpoint, it is simply not worth it.
This is fascinating. I would assume the people who don’t want books about being gay or trans in schools incorrectly believe that such books can turn kids gay and trans, ie they are also mistaken. Do you not believe that? Can you summarise which views you see as malicious and which merely mistaken, and what distinguishes the two?
It seems to be a particular characteristic of social justice views that opposing them is commonly seen as malicious, rather than a normal political disagreement about how best to improve the world. Do you agree this is true?