Oh go on, tread darefully! 
I haven’t been around that long, but I do get the impression that the moderators are sometimes being rather over ‘politically correct’.
Personally I’m probably rather an old-school Manchester liberal: socially permissive but financially conservative. And also very much of the enlightenment: let’s base things on facts rather than religious dogma. Let us not support radical Islam, or any similar movement that wants to kill its opponents…
Same with music of course. There was a time in the mid-to-late 20th century when there were only a few radio channels and the record companies controlled what got on to them, so that was what you heard.
It would probably be impossible for an act like the Beatles to achieve global saturation in the same way today?
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. So much the worse for them if their actual argument wasn’t actually that well-formed–but where there might have been productive conversation anyway if it weren’t for the pile-on.
Maybe even that is an acceptable loss. But people with perfectly reasonable takes see what happens to anyone that steps outside the consensus. They get a pile-on, they get accused of all kinds of nonsense, and when they object they get accused of having a thin skin. So, very sensibly, they simply don’t participate in these conversations. It’s not worth it.
So what happens is that the acceptable range of thought in these conversations becomes even narrower. It becomes even harder for anyone outside the boundary to express anything resembling dissent. Of course, the remaining participants never hold each other to the same standard as the outsiders. But there’s more of them, and they’re as capable of Gish Galloping and other techniques as anyone, so they have an effective defense.
We do get trolls and other types of disruptive posters that have no intention of positive contributions. People have become sensitized to any statements that seem like a dogwhistle. But I think we could do a much better job at distinguishing these cases. And I think we should accept a much higher false negative rate, because the potential value of a legitimate dissenter is much higher than yet another assenter. The latter brings no new ideas to the table; the former offers a new perspective.
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.
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, 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.
I would quibble with little trouble. It often takes great effort. But yes, when everyone is behaving well, good communication can happen even on divisive topics.
My greater concern is with the people who simply opt out because it takes so much effort to be so careful with phrasing and tying up every logical loose end and so on, else you get mischaracterized. I’ve passed on some conversations for just this reason. And I’ve gotten PMs from people who basically said “Thanks for making that point in <controversial thread>, I wanted to do the same but I didn’t want to step into that mess.”
A bit of steelmanning on everyone’s part would go far. Not that I’m perfect, by any means.
The dancer’s stiff with pain
And they’ve made him kneel too long.
And the madness they have driven out.
They’ve left him cold and sane.
“supposed” humor. Nice, and quite illustrative. Why would anyone want to quash the expression of an idea? When I hear an idea I find distasteful I’m usually pretty curious about the mind it comes from, because it’s different from mine. I wonder about the life path and perspective that leads someone to believe and say the sorts of things that indicate a position very different from mine is being taken. Here, the answer is predictably “oooh! You are in violation of the offenderati code and must be shouted down and driven away.” The only interest a nonconforming idea gets around here is from people looking for a cheap political win.
Some ideas are shit.
They can be actively terrible things that harm good people who didn’t do anything to deserve harm. We have chased away countless good people from this community by embracing misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia among other terrible ideas that we just let be excreted all over the board.
These people should have been protected, not offered up as targets so we could learn about what life path people followed to decide that gay people are abominations.
When I do lookbacks at my own posts from as late as the mid-20teens, I find a lot that is quite cringe and not aged well. And a lot that is in the “welp, guess my ‘side’ lost… moving right along…” category. i.e. I may see nothing wrong with it per se but I know the community has moved on.
And yes there is a lot of stuff from many either ongoing or gone members that I still find clever or funny or valid regardless that for some other reason they may not find favor. We all contain multitudes.
As mentioned earlier, the board has changed as we have changed and the general culture has changed. It happens. But the community IMO tries to do as best it can, sometimes does well, sometimes badly, sometimes just muddles kind-of-manageably.
I’ve actually had to change my outlook on life to fit in to the field of design, where DEI is of primary concern. Like it or not, white power is slowly being displaced: not because of government/liberal mandates, but because businesses want bigger customer bases. The minorities are now enough of a buying power. Ignore them at your peril.
SDMB has been a guide for me, and I get global viewpoints I hadn’t experienced before.
Twenty years ago I would often find out about the latest trends here. That hasn’t happened in a very long time.
As an example, I recently started three threads that asked for direct information:
Why would I use a letter of demand for an easement?
How many people have cancer?
What is the “national anthem” used in Meatballs?
The first one morphed into: How do I get access to the strip of land I want to use?
The second one morphed into: How would we define cancer?
The third one was: Here is the answer. Oh and here is the answer to your response to the answer to your question.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that threads can grow organically and maybe the question is not phrased as well as it could be and needs to be honed via the thread. I’m not calling out the posters in these thread but here’s my takeaway re: the subject of this thread.
On the first one, someone please just answer the question. And I had to repeat myself multiple times answering the same questions. It seems that there was focus on thing that have nothing to do with how a letter of demand works re: getting a prescriptive easement.
With the second one, I get that we need to define terms and “cancer” means a lot of different things so maybe not as off-question as the first one but it struck me that the question was being overcomplicated for what I needed.
The third one was like the SD of old.
Interesting
Maybe my memory is fading, but the first two threads are much more similar to the old SDMB than the current board. Hijacking and argumentative answers used to be de rigueur around here. The past board could be very unwelcoming.
+1 …
I also recall (correctly?) that the SD of yore went off the deep end quite often … and many threads ran for dozens or 100s of posts …
and to be honest, all those tangents, a propos and related anectodes are more than half the fun of the SDMB - and quite often the places I learned most
I completely disagree. You had sketchy legal advice about this easement you would like to have, and a couple of SDMB lawyers came in to suggest that the prescriptive easement you wanted to write a letter about isn’t going to work in your favor.
This is the value of posting here vs. searching on Google. Real people who seek to genuinely understand your situation so they can help you. Yes, you got a couple of cranky people opining that you’re trying to cheat your neighbor, but that’s OK because it tells you what your neighbor is potentially going to think after getting that letter.
And more profound than you may be recognizing.
Shit ideas (on the order of “gay people are abominations”, “women are stupid”, etc.), like actual shit, can indeed be well worth discussing and investigating. There’s a lot to be learned about what they contain and what that tells us about the lives of the shit-producers and so on.
But shit ideas, like actual shit, can also harm people and contaminate the environments in which they’re being handled. It would be highly irresponsible to just toss around pieces of shit in ordinary circumstances in the same way that you might hand somebody a spoon or a piece of paper.
Similarly, it’s highly irresponsible to just toss around shit ideas in ordinary contexts of civilized discussion, and then sneer at people who think that’s inappropriate because they’re “quashing expression” of “nonconforming ideas”.
Nope. If you want to handle shit because you’re curious about where it comes from, you follow proper protocols to avoid irresponsibly harming, contaminating and disgusting other people who not unreasonably expected to be dealing with a shit-free environment. And the same principle applies when you feel like discussing shit ideas.
Well said. Reminds me of an old Cecil column about shit (the questioner signed their name “Billy Rubin”….get it?).
@Billy_Rubin was the OP of the famous “Prehensile Rectum” Pit thread.
THAT part of the thread was valuable. I’m talking about:
Why don’t you use your existing easement? Because I have reasons, let’s stick to the question.
You have another easement so you can’t get an easement of necessity. I’m looking to get a prescriptive easement which is a completely different creature.
You are a horrible person for using adverse possession. That’s your opinion but I still get to explore if I have that right.
Is the strip in the middle of his property or the edge? It’s on the edge. OK, but is it in the middle or the edge of his property? The Edge! I don’t get it, draw me a map.
Etc.
And I don’t think I anyone ever directly answered my original question. I think from the first few posts I have to demand the easement from the owner and not go straight to court. But then when the owner says no … And that’s the extent of answering my question re: Letter of Demand except for “DON’T!”