Boy, that’s a question up there with, ‘Could God create a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it?’ I wish we could ask Sam.
I feel that Sam would love if Canada became part of Trumpistan.
Maybe. Sam was a Trumper to an extent but certainly not full-on MAGA or anything. I think he hated Biden more than he liked Trump honestly.
Pretty sure you can? I was going to say that @Sam_Stone was never banned, but I think he briefly was banned for socking, but it turned out his kid had registered to ask a random question from the same house.
Honestly I don’t care about that particular psycho-drama, nor do I anticipate that Sam would have anything particularly interesting to say about it. (Though I do maintain that Sam contributed some decent material to this message board. I’m not going to rehash his failings here.) That said, Sam is still around, sort of. Here are his stats: Posted Apr 3, 2024 Joined Jun 26, 1999 Read 3mon (20h in past 60 days).
That said, I’ll always welcome informed arguments that survive a quick fact check and casual scrutiny, just as I’ll welcome posters who value discussion that digs deeper than that and aims to depict an accurate mapping of the world.
Sam is as Canadian as I am. Actually, I’m probably more so since I don’t live far from the border.
It started well before that. It’s hard to remember now just how bad Dubya was because he has been overshadowed by the Orange One. His administration was the first to almost openly mock the idea of being “reality based” as a weakness. There was a gradual but notable exodus of conservatives from the SDMB at that time - I assume it just got too uncomfortable having to defend an administration that wasn’t reality based on a reality based messageboard.
The whole argument “If you don’t drive away conservatives the board will die” never sits well with me. It has a necessary, unspoken corollary: “So you better let this social hangout be a shittier place than it has to be, or else you’ll be stuck talking to people you like!”
If the board ends up being only six people, but I think they’re all great, that sounds like a better time than five thousand active posters, a hundred of whom are assholes.
That’s how I handle all my social situations. If there are assholes who won’t shut up, I dip. I’d much rather hang out with a small group of good folks than a large group of schmucks.
I’m in a Slack group with 15 like-minded movie fans and I spend way more time there than here.
I agree that we shouldn’t lower standards to pander to conservatives.
It is interesting though the way this place has changed. I used to think of it as somewhere to “sharpen the knife” (and it fulfilled that purpose) rather than a comfy social hangout. You can’t sharpen the knife if there’s no stone to sharpen it upon.
It is now mostly just an echo chamber and that’s all very nice - in the complimentary and pejorative senses.
It can still fulfill that purpose for me. Not so much for those further left. But the fact that so many other posters now prefer a comfy social hangout where their beliefs won’t be challenged (and maybe don’t want to admit that to themselves?) is kind of a downer.
It can still fulfill that purpose for those further left, too. Because left-right is not the only political axis. This is where I go to find out what comfortable center-left and center-right folks talk about when they think they are alone.
I know many people like that in real life, but it’s very much harder to lurk listening to their conversations without participating, and thus changing the nature of the discussion.
Which non left-right political axis are you referring to?
Well, there’s comfortable with the status quo vs. not. People in the “comfortable” zone tend to the center (or at least advocate slow change), while the “nots” have a lot of political diversity and tend to want to see major changes (while not being at all unified as to the type of change).
Kind of like horseshoe theory, but without being perjorative towards those away from the centre.
It’s probably the biggest change in politics I’ve seen in my lifetime; voters in developed nations increasingly rejecting the mainstream status quo parties, and none of the political elites can understand why.
It is an even deeper cut than that; the basic premise is that ‘conservatives’ bring a diverse set of views to the discussion that contributes to a tension of ideas which tests them from both the standpoint of how much benefit to they bring and how disruptive are they to the status quo. To the extent that you think there is value in that (I think making radical social and economic changes in short order tends to create unexpected and often harmful disruptions that do not serve even the most well-intentioned progressive ideals), it assumes a diversity of views across the spectrum with participants making honest arguments and giving fair consideration to contesting points of view; not necessarily agreeing but conceding the legitimacy of differences.
The reality is that the majority of self-described ‘conservatives’ who have fled or been banned from this board over the years have done so because they presented disingenuous arguments, performed one-sided debates where they refused to acknowledge that competing points of view had any legitimacy, and engaged in various acts of rhetorical chicanery from pettifogging, semantic manipulations of broadly understood terms, and sometimes resorted to lying, gaslighting, and toe-to-the-line trolling. Those tactics do not result in a legitimate consideration of ideas and proposals; they are just arguing for the sake of winning the argument, something that, for instance, @Bricker or @Sam_Stone engaged in on a regular basis, and they were often described as “good” conservatives.
We could certainly use more diverse views on the board including actual conservatives of the George F. Will variety but unfortunately even those who having explicitly adopted MAGA are broadly adverse to acknowledging the degree to which nascent and now outright fascism has infiltrated conservative movements, and not just in the United States. For all of the decrying of how ‘liberal’ this board is, it is pretty middle-of-the-road (and in many ways right of center) compared to the politics of Western and Northern Europe, and I’d be hard pressed to identify more than a couple of posters who are even approaching ‘far-left’ views in the sense of non-democratic socialism. Of course, I also think that ‘progressive’ (in the sense of increasing opportunity and protecting civil liberties) should be the default inclination for a democracy (restrained by some pragmatic fiscal conservatism because progressives are often grossly unconcerned about the practicalities of how to pay for their proposals) and that accusing Kamala Harris of being a ‘Marxist’ is like complaining that a snake has too many legs, so what do I know.
Stranger
My biggest problem was that Sam lied all the time, and when confronted with proof would just ignore the accusation.
People keep repeating this, but it really isn’t true. America, and thus the board, is more libertarian than Europe, but the social justice movement that defines the modern left originated in America and spread to Europe. No, socialist posters aren’t common, but board attitudes on social issues are well to the left of the population of any country (with the exception of gun control, I’d guess).
I think if you went and debated on a conservative board (if any exist) they would likely see your contribution in a similar light. It’s very hard to judge fairly when you are invested in one side of an argument, and very much easier to see bad arguments on the other side than on your own. There is also the issue that two heads are better than one. I see plenty of crap arguments, straw men, silly exaggerations etc from people on the left here, but there are other people around making better arguments, and they can contribute things other posters may have missed, and find good examples or evidence, so you overall end up with a stronger argument than one person can manage alone.
I remember from the old days of this board that the conservative posters rarely convinced me with their arguments overall, but they often made good points that made me think about an issue differently, and helped me understand how other people could have very different beliefs about it.
You’d catch him in a bald-faced lie and instead of backing up and acknowledging his error he would just try to plow through with more lies, accusing other people of lying (and never seeming to get into any trouble for it), and whinging about how how badly he was being treated even as moderators handled him with kid gloves because he stopped just short of any bright line for a warning. He got away with so much borderline-trolling nonsense just by pretending that everyone was misinterpreting even though his intent was clear that he derailed thread after thread with bullshit. Even now you find apologists for him and how hard done by he was for ‘driving him off’ even though be became an intransigent disrupter and inveterate liar. Ugh.
Despite all of the culture wars nonsense the modern ‘social justice movement’ has little to do with actual politics in the United States except for being a bugaboo for Fox News about who used what bathroom and trans people in womens sports (they are curiously unconcerned about the other direction). There are no laws requiring the use of alternative pronouns or requiring private companies to support “DEI” even though conservative news outlets would try to convince you that it is part of a totalitarian progressive agenda, and the few things that have come out of ‘social justice’ movements such as gay marriage, civil rights for minorities, and protections for womens’ bodily autonomy, are actually quite pragmatic policies that you will find to be the norm all over Northern and Western Europe. So, I’d defy you to show me examples of threads where there majority of posters representing a broad swath of board members is evidentially left-of-center.
Stranger
The hill he choose to “die” was, out of all things when he began to toss clear trash and misinformation about the World Economic Forum.
Now, that is an organization that deserves criticism, but the problem was how virulent is the misleading hate coming from the right is nowadays. Even if a group does support a lot of what they support (the well to do being more in control), the WEF is despised just because it is an international conservative group that does some good around the world, like paying attention that AI does not remove human rights and press on clean energy. Hate that is similar with how many conservatives despised USAID.
It was clear that Sam just swallowed hook line and sinker of the sick right wing narrative back then about a video that he claimed that the head of the WEF was spouting things like “In the future you will have no privacy, and no property. And you will like it!” (not true), and after noticing how he got things wrong about a sarcastic video that had no head of the WEF declaring that, he had to reach for the explanation that we were the ones bullying him on that thread.
The sad reality is that the examples that then he gave of being a champion against bullies, (and using his family in those examples in a very contradictory way) only showed that he was even more sad by supporting bullshit sources of info, that also supported the hugest bully in chief that the US has now.
This is even more pathetic (what Sam did) once one realizes that in that thread, many defended accuracy and facts, while defending a slightly progressive but in the end, conservative world economic group…
The social justice movement was almost certainly a significant factor in Trump’s recent election win (not the most significant factor, however). US politics is schizophrenic: America has both more restrictive abortion laws than the majority of European countries, and at the same time has more liberal laws than any. The US has extreme pro-trans and extreme anti-trans laws. The US has both long sentences for common crimes, and elected prosecutors who refuse to prosecute criminals for those crimes. The US had laws requiring private companies to implement affirmative action policies if they wanted to do work for or receive money from the federal government, and now under Trump has laws requiring them not to do so.
The board, however, is solidly on the left in all these issues.