This belief that this place is an echo chamber is nonsense. Like last week there was a heated set of discussions between the people who thought democrats should offer something for the wall and those who said "**** his wall".

Politics is inherently adversarial, with the objective being to defeat one’s adversary by whatever means available. So personal attacks, ridicule, slander etc. are fair game in politics. Up to a point, obviously. Whether you choose to allow that is a separate question. Personally, I think people need some space to vent and engage in that area, and it’s probably better they do so with basically anonymous people than with family, acquaintances, co-workers, etc.

Political Philosophy is the opposite. There the goal is the dialectic, which necessitates civility and considering opposing points of view. That seems to be more near your stated purpose.

So how about separating the two activities? Maybe allow political philosophy in SMP?

I'm not sure what the threshold should be to call something an "echo chamber" but I think you're overselling this a bit. It was an argument about strategy between people who are otherwise all on the same side of the issue and all support the same political party, more or less.

wtf are these edits jman.

sure hope the Democrats don't cave as much as you are right now.

Creating a second forum would only make the issue at hand worse and increases the likelihood of Mason having a problem with the current forum in the future.

It's kinda hard to explain what exactly I mean, but if you created a second forum, a handful of the more conservative posters might use that and all of the new account drive-by trolls will go there as well. So the current forum will move toward the liberal echo-chamber side. Now since Mason is purely motivated to dunk on the liberal echo-chamber side by making threads that highlight how they all were wrong and how Trump is crushing(not to be confused with 'crashing') the US economy, his odds of making those threads in the current forum and subsequently getting critiqued when they don't stand the test of time only increase. Which will move the date the current forum gets closed due to one of his meltdowns to an earlier one, which is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve here(everyone living in peace and harmony).

Maybe ask David Sklansky how his experience has been with the current forum. He often posts all sorts of weird ideas, some of which can be kinda dumb just by virtue of not being able to land all of them due to probability. If people laugh and him and his quirky ideas, he won't go on banning sprees and he won't threaten to close the forum because that'd be weird on a level not even his weirdness can reach.

I'd say this strengthens, not weakens, my point. It shows we can have fierce disagreements and are anything but a hive mind.

I don't think this is very relevant to the actual complaints that people have about the forum, though.

If we do get shut down, maybe one of the mods will be allowed to post a sticky thread with ideas for a new home for us. Like a parting gift to the Libs. I've said it already tonight, but my life would be significantly worse without our political forum or a permanent replacement for it.

Right, it's an echo chamber because nobody here is making vigorous arguments that the wall is necessary to protect America from Latino rapists and criminals, and Middle Eastern terrorists, and if anyone tries they get shouted down.

The extent to which this forum is an echo chamber is correlated with the extent to which the GOP is an extremist party doing abhorrent things and its fervent supporters are detached from reality.

Ask questions like...

Is family separation okay?

Is voter ID a good thing?

Were there fine people on both sides in Charlottesville?

Does Trump lie a lot?

Is banning Muslims from entering the country cool?

But what about all the illegals getting free Medicaid without paying taxes?

Aren't you worried about this new caravan coming?

Yeah, we're going to be an echo chamber on those because the answers are pretty obvious to the vast majority of intelligent, critical thinkers.

On the other hand if you ask questions like...

What's the best solution on healthcare and why?

What are the best marginal tax rates and tax brackets?

What would your ideal gun policy be?

Should we balance the budget?

Should Democrats compromise on issue X and why?

You'll find that the regs have views that don't totally align, and during normal political times would be discussed and debated more.

Unfortunately we're living through some dark times with some awful things being done, and this is creating more alignment between center-right, center-left and left-wingers. Those remaining on the right don't necessarily notice the difference, and just think anything entirely left of today's GOP is a far left echo chamber.

The other important point here, which I don't think Mason addressed despite requests for examples, is that there is a big difference in telling someone defending racism that they're a horrible person and telling someone who disagrees on other issues the same thing.

Likewise there's a difference in telling someone honestly looking for discussion to pound sand, and telling someone who is repeatedly arguing in bad faith or being willfully ignorant of facts to do the same.

There are certainly instances of all four examples, but if we allow that telling off a racist or someone arguing in bad faith is not a problem, tweaking some modding/policies should take care of the rest.

Throw out a few temp bans and give obvious trolls less rope before they're tossed. I would also propose requiring people to respond to valid counterarguments/questions IF they respond to a post. Often what leads to name calling and vitriol is a poster engaging in debate only to repeatedly respond without addressing any of the points that they know are losers for them or that they can't refute, while pretending they don't even exist and throwing out some other garbage arguments.

They often get mocked for this, which honestly seems fair (to a degree), since it's a form of trolling.

While some regs encourage the forum to just completely ignore them, the knowledge that we have a lot of lurkers who are perhaps trying to form opinions and decide where they stand makes me more inclined to respond.

We don't call people f*ggots and call for people to die on a regular basis.

Nobody's ever been called worse on here than Trump calls people every day on twitter.

The transition to full blown echo chamber sure seems to coincide with the rise of Trump. Maybe he's just not very defensible, so people gave up? Nahhh - couldn't be that.

More like they get shown how little sense the Wall makes on any level - except as a symbol to rally around. How the border patrol's own website used to say it made no sense.

So they stop trying after a while and retreat to places where those ideas aren't challenged and they're still allowed to believe stuff like ranchers are finding Muslim prayer rugs all over the place. Where's the fun in constantly having the propaganda you believe shown to be false?

Sure. I think eyebooger is arguing against the premise that the forum is an echo chamber at all, whereas you are arguing that the alternative to being an echo chamber would be worse. I think you have a much better argument, but there's no point in denying the obvious fact that the forum is mostly liberal/progressive. And I also don't think it's really possible to deny that the forum culture is pretty hostile -- not just to conservatives but in general.

The discussion got steered off-topic a bit by the comma fellow when he started launching ad hominem attacks at the quality and integrity of the forum.

Honestly, I don't see much of an issue with the forum in its current state. Sure, people engage trolls a bit too much but otherwise this is pretty high-level discussion compared to what the rest of the internet has to offer.

As for this forum being an echo chamber, I think that's an oversimplification. There are plenty of disagreements to be had among each other. It's that the discussions involve smaller, nuanced disagreements on issues people fundamentally agree with as a whole rather than some pro-life/pro-choice disagreement.

What cuse said. That whole post should be stickied forever and Ins0 and conservative posters can feel free to address every point to their heart's content.

I want to quote this because it's a really good post.

+1 to all of this. Really really good post.

I'd like to echo all of this. No pun intended. At this point, the risk to our forum seems to be that the owner may not care why we are an echo chamber.

Guess my response on this being an echo chamber is a slow pony that was really better said by cuse. Well done.

Thank you..

The latest post by cuse convincingly demonstrates that shutting down this forum would be a crime of unparalleled proportions!

Some posters' opinions and behaviour have been so repellant it would be quite wrong to afford them any respect, and when given it's taken as encouragement. We need to learn the lessons of what happened in P7 when people with hateful views were given too much licence.

I think the Politics mods do a generally good job but can't read every post and are dependent on clear guidelines and on people reporting breaches of the rules.

I was just going to lurk 2p2 and no longer post but seeing the only reason i still visit is the politics forum...why not.


One of the reasons ive liked (and at times disliked) your site is it does not surfer fools well. It has always been a kind of harsh with a bit of hate name calling mixed in. They did not name the zoo the zoo for nothing. Politics is not the only forum with the hate. Subforums like ATF, RGT, OOT, NVG, internet poker (zoo) all dabble in it time to time.

If you are shutting this forum down because of hate you should not stop there. There is plenty of it in other places on your site.


And besides if was the owner i would be more concerned about the black peoples small brains debate in BFI and stuff like that. It would would be interesting if you had a conservative Pol with people like TS and this "new" guy playing the martyr who went in trying to shut this place down in charge. My guess is there would be a lot of IQ, bestiality, lynching was no big, bathroom barring and pedo stuff like P7 had. Oh and the (((soros's))) paying protesters in an attempted to rule the world. Maybe the hate saves your site in a way....maybe not.


Either way as far as hate for trump and those who give him power. I think im entitled to it. Trump's presidency is built on hate and fear of the others. If its not Muslims its Latinos if its not them its Hillary if its not her its libs and dems in general. Its natural he and those that give him power would get that hate reflected back.

He has made it clear where i stand in his America. He has called my Congressional reps unamerican for not standing and clapping in his last state of the union. He has lambasted my view of his wall as unamerican and that im for murder and rape by the others against Americans. He has made it clear if i am not with him and dont want kids in cages i am his enemy.

With that said i dont hate trump or supporters of him like you. But im sure as hell entitled to it.


Seriously though if you want to see hate make a conservative Pol forum with some of the frequent ATF shut it downs in charge. It would make your current forum look tame.

Not that I would agree or care to articulate them, but those aren’t all obvious and there are intelligent rebuttals against the majority of them. So I’m okay with leaving most of them open for debate. Meaning people should be allowed to contest or reframe some of those questions without getting banned or personally attacked.