If you have a few choice examples of unreasonable ones, then stand and deliver, pal.
Eh, I don’t so much think I’m better than the rest of the human race, just different. I am still working on understanding how one person can find themselves not just consistently, but always, in agreement with the hive mind of one political group or another. To be quite honest, I don’t trust such people whether they allow themselves to be labeled conservative or liberal, because in my opinion, such consistency is unnatural. People who really think something through are bound on occasion to have a unique view. I don’t know if it is a crutch for people who don’t have the wherewithal to stand on their own, or a defense mechanism for people who need to belong to a group… but it has always bothered me and it always will.
To tie my little tangent back into the OP: no, I don’t generally feel the administrators (I don’t believe mods can ban) behave this way. They may lean, but they don’t tip over. On the other hand, not seeing december as the buffoon he was might just betray some inability to remain objective in and of itself.
Mods can ban. Mods usually don’t ban long-time posters, but they have been given the power, fairly recently IIRC, to ban in order to keep the trolls and spammers under control. If all of these had to wait until an Admin was available to actually ban them it would probably get uglier. A spammer who can start a new thread/post every minute versus a mod who is armed with nothing more than locking/moving/deleting threads/posts = spammer win. So mods can ban. At least this is my understanding of the situation.
Enjoy,
Steven
It IS your option not to trust people who choose to label themselves as such. Just for the record, a label is one way we people who use language have to quickly mark something so the recipient of the information can understand what we’re talking about. For example, if someone were to ask “What color is the grass on the lawn?” One would most likely reply “It is green” instead of “There are hues of green that have splotches of brown, sienna, yellow, and white if you inspect even further, it isn’t really green but a hearty aquamarine with deep yellow overtones yadda yadda yadda…” My parents align themselves with the Republican party. They consider themselves conservatives and when asked would label themselves as such. Both of them are strong supporters of gay equality and marriage and my mother is also pro-choice. Those items are not in the “standard” conservative republicans’ ideology.
John Wesley Harding said it best:
You can whine all you want and eschew groups and spit on them and claim you’re independent and different, but that really just puts you in the group that thinks the same way as you do. Sure, there might not be a formal name, but don’t go around strutting with your peacock feathers saying what a freethinker you are when you really aren’t.
(and I’m an atheist who has political leanings towards libertarian party but tends to vote for both the Democrats and Republicans).
I think you misunderstood what he said, as the statement you quoted was qualified by the sentence before it. It’s not that he doesn’t trust those who use labels to describe themselves, it’s that he (she?) doesn’t trust those who label themselves and ALWAYS toe the label’s party line on EVERY issue, be they liberal or conservative. I can’t say that I disagree.
Knowing that, and based on your description of your parents, he would have little trouble trusting them.
Sorry, my idiocy. Apologies and beers all around. 
stpauler,
DMC is correct. You misunderstood, or perhaps I wasn’t clear. In either case, what I said was, “I am still working on understanding how one person can find themselves not just consistently, but always, in agreement with the hive mind of one political group or another. To be quite honest, I don’t trust such people whether they allow themselves to be labeled conservative or liberal”
Bolding added; but essentially ‘such people’ are those that always share the have mind, not everyone calling themselves conservative or liberal. Make sense?
If you think what I’m saying is whining, you may want to back that up.
Giraffe,
OK, so if I understand you correctly, you agree then that if in fact this board does have a skew to the left it would influence the collective judgment of the board. But you are saying that since the board has no stated political purpose you think it is not likely that the board is in fact skewed, and you think it represents an even distribution of political viewpoints. This is a valid viewpoint and others have expressed it as well. I disagree with you and it seems to me that most others do as well including many liberals (some of whom try to use this very fact as proof of the superiority of liberals). But I don’t see any way to prove one way or the other, so we’ll have to leave it at that.
This is of course correct. The fact that they are biased against you does not mean that they can’t also be right. Still it would be wrong if their valueless opinion was itself a factor in your getting you declared a “total asshole”. Which is what we are discussing here. It’s not that since the collective judgment is biased it can’t be right. It’s just that since it is biased it is a shame that it is such a factor.
Daniel Withdrow,
Well if you qualify it to “take a definite step back and listen to what they say about [you]” I’m with you. I believe there’s a biblical verse somewhere or other about how you should listen carefully to what your enemies say about you - they may be motivated by the fact that they hate your guts, but they’re likely to seize on your actual weak points. There have been posters here who were attacked unfairly who would have still been a lot better off had they paid more attention to their attackers instead of just feeling like righteous martyrs - there was a lot of truth in many of these attacks.
Still the overall assessment counts a lot, and the overall assessment was a biased one. You might listen to the criticisms of the FR people, but if you disagreed with them I’m sure you would have an easier time dismissing their opinion than you would in dismissing the opinion of an unbiased group of people.
I am trying not to get bogged down in a discussion of any specific poster. But I will say that in every single case I’ve seen on this board, the attackers/defenders of a poster have been disproportionately split along ideological lines. You can look it up.
John Wesley Harding said it best:
We’re so convinced we’re different, it makes us all the same.
What sitcom was that the theme song for? I thought it was “Diff’rent Strokes”, but I can’t find it on imdb.com. Or John Wesley Harding’s filmography, either.
Actually, it’s singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding that sung that. It’s from the song Come Gather Round off of his wonderful CD Why We Fight. I don’t think it was on any show…
FYI, here are the lyrics to the Diff’rent Strokes theme song .
And once again, apologies out toWaverly. I’m a jackass.
Pretty much. I don’t think this board necessarily represents an even distribution of all political viewpoints, but I do think that there is very little collective bias here, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the board has no established political purpose.
I think that if you take a room full of randomly selected people 60% of whom happen to be registered Republicans and discuss the best way to improve public education, you’ll get a range of opinions which may on average be more conservative, but not biased as a whole against anyone expressing less conservative ideas. Why? Because there’s no group identity which encourages a certain mindset.
Now, if you put 60 members of the Republican National Convention in a room with 40 random people off the street, there will likely be a collective bias against ideas contradictory to the established positions of the Republican party. Not because the RNC members are more biased as individuals, but because they’ve already sat down together and pre-agreed on their positions, in order to present a united front against the opposition and thus accomplish common goals. That is a collective bias – they have incentive to support the consensus view of their group.
Has anyone else considered that december, a self-admited SDMBholic, may have simply been trying to do the only thing he could have to break his addiction?
stpauler,
No need for self flagellation, unless you are into that type of thing. It’s was a simple miscommunication.
Giraffe,
I see your distinction. I disagree with it. IOW, I think in your scenario of 60 Republicans off the street, the predominant opinion will shift somewhat to the right, the center of the country will be considered left, and the left will seem to some extent like some nutty fringe element, and holders of such opinions will be less respected as a result.
(With one important qualification: there’s a big difference between a single meeting, in which people’s opinions have primarily been formed by contact with the broader spectrum of the outside world, and say, a series of such meetings, at which the group-think of this particular audience will gradually take hold. The latter scenario is more comparable to the SDMB. This is a nit-pick and I include it as a parenthetical remark in the interests of… well primarily in the interests of nitpicking, but also for precision, should it come up later).