# Your thoughts on the evolution of SDMB in time **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 22, 2023, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-sdmb-in-time/991935 "2023-10-22T23:23:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 84
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2023, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-sdmb-in-time/991935/84 "2023-10-31T03:17:28Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > It’s not that the majority of the people on this board are blindly attacking people who disagree with the majority. It’s that the majority of the people on this board will argue on the side of reality. So when people come here and assert things like vaccination causes autism, eating meat causes cancer, black people have a crime gene, the holocaust didn’t happen, the moon landing was faked, the CIA killed Kennedy, or Trump is a great man, they’re going to have reality thrown in their face. And the people saying those things can’t handle that. Yup. I remember Great Debates threads with pages and pages of discussion about whether the moon landings were faked, or the 9/11 attacks were a false flag, or climate change was fake, or race-linked differences in IQ test scores were genetic, and so on. They weren’t particularly enlightening or informative, and the fact that the “contrarians” who kept them going were smugly convinced that they were bravely “daring” to “deviate from the crowd” didn’t make their arguments any less stupid. > [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > The problem is that it gets thrown in the face of more than just those people. Vaccine safety denialists come in and argue that we shouldn’t have vaccine mandates. They get their pseudoscience thrown back in their faces–fine. But then someone else comes in and argues that we shouldn’t have vaccine mandates for completely different reasons. They then get accused of being a crypto-denialist, and in any case they get a pile-on for everything _except_ what they were actually trying to argue. Sometimes that can happen, but ISTM that in most cases thoughtful and articulate posters have little trouble making it clear what they’re actually trying to argue, and most of the posters who respond to them have little trouble separating out the different kinds of arguments. Look, for example, at the [recent IMHO thread on interpreting the display of American flags](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-display-of-american-flags-have-some-hidden-meaning-these-days/990270/195), where there was plenty of reasonably expressed disagreement and AFAICT no reflexive “pile-ons”, “merciless attacks” or similar disproportionate responses that tend to get whined about. Likewise, there’s been quite a lot of constructive engagement with differing viewpoints in the various Gaza-war threads, even if the one thread that was actually advocating for ethnic cleansing got (rightfully, IMHO) shut down. It’s true that many posters with well-established track records of saying stupid shit tend to get jumped on for potentially controversial remarks before it’s been clearly established that what they’re currently saying actually is stupid shit, though. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-sdmb-in-time/991935)._