There is definitely bias against the right here, among the userbase and the mods. I think it’s just the nature of the beast. If you are on the left and someone says something far-left, the distance from your opinion is smaller than if someone says something from the far right, which is so far from your beliefs that it may sound stupid or trollish.
But the people on the left certainly get away with far more in the way of insults than do people on the right. Maybe it’s just because they don’t get reported.
For example, this thread:
…got so out of control with insults that the mod shut it down. But no warnings were issued. And it was revived in the pit so the beatings could continue. I believe I had another theead actually moved to the pit by a mod because so many people were violating the rules with insults, rather than punish the people doing the insulting.
There’s another kind of jerkish behaviour that we on the right face constantly, and that’s the third-party pile-on, which goes like this:
Conservative poster ‘Bob’: Poster 1, I think A,B, and C.
Poster 1: Cite?
Poster 2: Don’t bother. Bob will just come up with a garbage cite.
Poster 3: Bob doesn’t know what he’s talking about anyway.
Poster 4: Hey Bob, remember when you were wrong in 2007? How about that?
Poster 5: Hell, Bob still hasn’t given me a cite that I asked him for last year.
Poster 6: Why even bother? I put Bob on ignore a long time ago.
Poster 7: Yeah, it’s not worth it.
Poster 8: I started a pit thread about Bob. Come on everyone!
I don’t know where the rules are on this type of off-topic and ad-hominem pile-on, but this is the kind of repeated behaviour that in my opnion has caused some of the long-time conservatives on this board to flame out.
And don’t ever move a thread to the pit. It’s wildly unfair to the thread creator, who now either has to abandon the topic and let people insult them without response, or suffer the insults to continue.