Maybe it would be a better use of everyone’s time to just post an honest disclaimer about what the purpose of this website and its various subdivisions are.
The SDMB is a social club for early Internet adopter boomers who got together in the 90s and found that they enjoyed hanging out and making small talk with each other. After various failed attempts to be something else in the 2000s, it has decided in 2022 that it has no interest in being anything else or in avoiding going under once its userbase finishes dying off. It is explicitly hostile to the idea of making any sort of accommodations for new members whose demographic or ideological orientations might differ from the remaining core of highly active users.
There is nothing wrong with this. Certainly you have the right to run a message board for 50-something Star Trek fans to have conversations about the minutiae of their lives and assure each other that anyone who deviates from the Bernie-to-Hillary window of political opinions is irredeemably evil, dishonest, and stupid. But - it has to be acknowledged that this is what we are talking about in terms of “the SDMB and its rules” if you want to make any sense of anything that goes on here.
There are two forums supposedly dedicated to debates. Don’t ask why there are two, or why the one explicitly NOT labeled “politics & elections” contains nothing but threads about current U.S. political issues. If you don’t already know, then that means you’re one of the Trolls and the fact that you’re asking proves you’re a bad person who deserves whatever you get. These two forums are not actually for debate; they are for asserting how virtuous one is for believing in the acceptable window of opinions (nothing to the left of Bernie or the right of Hillary, ever). A few people will insist that this isn’t the case, though they will not explain how everyone who deviates from that window eventually is banned other than the straight-faced assertion that being outside that window magically correlates with being “a jerk” or unable to follow “the rules” with 100% accuracy across every situation and personality. Others will analyze this as being primarily an attempt to enforce those political opinions on a larger userbase as part of a political project, which again, is missing the point. The point is that for at least the last 15 years, the SDMB has been viewed by the people who actually control it as a social space for their friends, and their perception of people who come into their social space to try to “debate politics” is the same as people who are running a backyard barbecue for their friends and see a stranger wander in yelling about Trump. It has very little to do with what the stranger’s opinions are or whether anyone agrees with them, it’s about the rudeness of disturbing a social space among longtime friends with political arguments at all. There is, de facto, no tolerance for people looking to “debate politics” there, something which in the context is viewed as unfathomably rude and done by those are who are aggressively socially inept.
There is a forum called the “BBQ Pit” where people who have been here for 23 years and have the right politics are allowed not only to abuse others with impunity, but, more insidiously, to maintain running commentary threads in which every single post by someone outside of the clique is responded to with “looks like Captain Dumbass is shitting out of his mouth again” regardless of whether anything specifically objectionable is contained in that post. The same privileges are, of course, not accorded to people who are not in the group or who don’t wish to participate in free-for-all mudslinging (but their posts might be moved to that forum for target practice if the mods feel like it). The fact that this forum exists is treated as an inherently necessary and logical fact of the universe; any attempt at connecting behavior there with the accelerating death of the SDMB is simply met with “it’s The Pit so it doesn’t matter” as if people who have not been posting here since the era of rotary telephones have any idea what that means or any reason to care about the distinction.
And, of course, there is an “About This Message Board” forum where people LARP as participants in a message board where there are objective “rules” that the mods “enforce” and the power users care about being applied in a rational and objective way. The first clue that this is not the case is the following test: Could a person without access to “the rules” come anywhere close to determining what they are by observing how the moderation team actually acts? The answer, of course, is no. There are people who love the idea of being constitution-writers and legislators who will endlessly debate what “the rules” should be in this forum even though they bear no resemblance to the actual motivations of staff action (keeping the social space tranquil by forbidding discussion of certain topics and the entrance of new people). Most threads that are closed are done so for vague, undocumented reasons such as “going off the rails” or “we’re done here” - sometimes this translates to “a member of the clique with unlimited trolling privileges didn’t like uncomfortable points being made and decided to shit up the thread with reams of nonsense, so we’re going to punish everyone but him by closing the thread and sanctioning future discussions of the topic.” Often it just means “the people and content in this thread are against the real, unwritten rules.” There is also a crazy fealty to the idea that this forum, which has been on the perpetual brink of death from both technical incompetence and user attrition for years, has somehow evolved to figure out the right way to run things and that we must defer to past decisions; hence yet another example of the total insanity presented to new users, which is that explicit racism is not against the rules, but completely centrist political positions that the clique has decided they do not wish to engage with are automatically racist and will never be allowed to be discussed.
Some people still don’t get that there is no winning the game of “since this forum says it’s for discussing X using rules Y, it doesn’t make any sense that Z was sanctioned for doing so” because that is not in fact what the SDMB is for. If you’re not part of the small-talk group and you don’t want to nod and agree with the late-middle-aged “in this house we believe…” crowd, then you’re not wanted here, there will no “rule” or “argument” that ever stops the staff from fulfilling what they understand their job to be (getting you to leave), and you’re wasting your time preaching to an audience of a few hundred people who are the least likely group in the world to admit that they need to change their opinion about anything. Go do literally anything else and it will be more productive for whatever your goal is.