Yeah, that is a very healthy form of discussion...

I did not read 95% of this thread (and perhaps a bunch of people will swarm in to mention that etc etc), but the pattern of behavior you mention here is standard for any new poster that does not fall into line.

Creating a fake bubble within a bubble where the person has to debate a few specific people as others agree to watch is silly, and hardly natural. That just creates variants of threads like this that go nowhere.

With all of that said, why is this a big deal anyway. This forum is like any other forum with a very tight range of belief structures that are approved, and as such it is very hostile to new posters that do not follow them, and the swarm here has a ton of muscle memory experience to hurl quick points and memes and troll labels at any interloper offering an opinion that does not agree with how things work.

This forum will not get a lot of new contributing regular posters, and why would it? It is not welcoming to that, so why not just be what it is. Sure, you guys had to behave a bit nicer under threat of the owner slashing it, and you are kind of doing that, with some snark and passive aggressive stuff about that need being tossed in the mix, so continue that for a while and carry on pretty much as you have in the past.

The one suggestion, which can be considered or ignored, I would make is reduce the amount of posts dedicated to twitter comments made by relative randos. Those tend to clog down any points being made. The non stop silly pictures of Trump posted by the guy who had the fetish collection of those stopped, and that change made threads a lot more readable as well, so things can be improved while working with the innate limitations of the dynamics of those within this forum.

Who was arguing against this? I mean, its pretty obv hes working for russias interest in some capacity but i dont think anyone believes hes like an actual agent.

This should be ban or exile for absolutely blatant trolling.

I think I was mostly arguing against folks who think he's being "actively blackmailed by Putin" and then that the Steele dossier isn't good evidence of that. So it could be that people who don't actually think the former but believe in the Steele dossier were jumping in. Mostly I remember arguing with wookie about it but I'm sure there were others.

lol at giving this guy his own thread instead of banishing him to ATF or NVG

Another infrequent poli poster makes broad disparaging claims about the P forum without backing them up. His positions get challenged. Monteroy adds another datapoint to his position that the regs are unwelcoming unless you fall in line.

He did say so:

I think you might be conflating NOG and commas, are, funny's posting ITT as your description seems more accurate of the latter. NOG said he doesn't really care how Politics is run, but rather as an occasional lurker was giving his impression of the forum in answer to Mason's OP. I think a number of lurkers have surfaced recently in response to Mason threatening the forum, mostly positive ones, so I don't think it is fair to put NOG in the trolling the forum camp just because his impression is more negative than others.

The point I was trying to make was a narrower one, that if you disagree with his claim that this is a place for people on the left to argue about issues, then the best response is be friendly towards new right-wing posters as that is more likely to persuade them to stay than immediately challenging them to a debate and criticizing them if they are not willing to do so. That is a lot of pressure to put on someone.

That's exactly correct, thanks for pointing it out. And I did so civilly and thoughtfully without attacking anyone. But the hackles went up immediately and snowballed into something else. Particularly with that commas guy jumping in with much more aggressive criticism than mine, and then people quoting snippits of him in responses to me. All of which led to a containment thread that originally had a title that didn't even represent my posts, but put up a big challenge for me to argue something I had nothing to say about and that wasn't even brought up by me. This has been a total cluster.

I try this forum about once every year or two and this experience has turned me away for another couple of years.

FWIW, the way your OP felt to me is that you essentially attacked everyone (regs in poli) without attacking anyone in particular.

NOG did stake a claim though. He decided to run when he caught pushback. It’s ok to be wrong on the internet NOG.

Why? This appears to be a very clever move. It was the internet version of a head on a spike, and it serves as an excellent deterrent for anyone who would consider posting as he has done. Looks like the target will retreat for a long time as well, and good chance others will not repeat the mistakes he made with regard to posting in this forum. Hard to imagine that a banishment would accomplish the same thing.

Fair enough on the claim, and I did provide a source. The pushback was that state legislator counts by individual party are not a proxy for the voters who put them there. BS, it's almost exactly proportional. Wasted votes (more than needed to win) works both ways, not favoring one party. Then someone wanted to argue "but gerrymandering....". Which led to dumping everything in this thread.

I can appreciate that, but attack may be too harsh a word for my intention. But yes, the purpose of the thread was to look at what has been wrong with the Politics forum, and so I opined on that very issue. I wasn't the one who decided that something was wrong in the first place, it was a foregone conclusion that even the regs agreed on. The defensiveness that resulted from my post made the case for me that it ain't fixed.

Bruh. In your attempt to broadly attack the forum, you posted a directly falsifiable claim which I am re-quoting here. When engaged on this, you deliberately deflected to pretend you were talking about something else ("I said population but I meant representatives") and managed to dismiss a political reality (gerrymandering) in a single swoop. You have shown no good faith effort to engage on the simplest of claims that was central to your forum-bashing OP--why should we continue to engage you?

You are crafting a view of reality that simply isn't reflected in data (your claim that the country is 50/50). We haven't even gotten to the argument itself, that the forum should somehow mirror the broader population (which is obviously untrue) because you can't even engage on simple facts without causing a scene.

I thought requesting for equality of outcome was a meme/strawman attributed to liberals by people like Jordan Peterson, never seen one in the wild like this and with the roles reversed and everything. Gonna get fun when he finds out that 9% of the US population are women over 65.

I'd like to see examples of these successful forums or subreddits that are better than this one with a 50/50ish split between conservatives and liberals and how they are modded differently.

For those who are confused (I've gotten several PMs asking), my posts were moved here from this thread:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/4...forum-1733877/

The OP in that thread was this:

I lurk here more than I post, but I've been guilty of unnecessary liberal snark, broad attacks on the entire GOP, and probably some other sins, and I for one will do better going forward. For instance I regret my behavior toward the poster who was an abortion protester (in a discussion about Kaepernick). He was being civil the entire time FWIR and then we all judged him because of a religious belief of his.

There should be civil debate between left and right. America is too divided and we should be able to talk to each other. Libs and conservatives are genetically the same but have different backgrounds, so at the core we're all the same. There are plenty of fine people on both sides. I know and have met Trumpers who aren't monsters. I've even met Hillary supporters who didn't have blood coming out of their eyes.

-----

Like whosnext, I can vouch for NOG's post quality in other subs.

@NOG - I hope you start posting in Politics and that you can handle being a small minority on the side of an issue (at least until the left:right ratio of this forum balances and this forum becomes great again). You will get no disrespect from me.

Nope, I argued that in the case of state legislature membership taken as a whole countrywide, they are essentially the same proportion. They are. But as you pointed out, that's only an aside from the main point, which is that the Politics forum is 95% leftish posters who prefer to debate with each other and just get nasty when an outsider ventures in. This isn't an original claim of mine, it was the topic of the original thread that I responded to, started by Mason as a result of years of observing and hearing about it.

Thanks for this post. I have always respected your posting in other forums as well.

This is not true.

The perception of the rest of 2+2 outside of the Politics regulars, is that it's true.

Yeah, its pretty much true, but I don't quite understand why this even bothers regulars here. Forums like this will naturally attract a narrow demographic who enjoy chatting with others within their demographic. Why is that actually bad in and by itself?

The only real problem I see for this forum is that it lives on the property of someone who can flick it off like a light switch, and jman correctly recognized that and incorporated that with the rules of posting here, so that the odds of that happening is greatly reduced.

LOL no.

You ventured opinions on the forum. I asked you for some simple examples of what you called "blatantly apparent bias". I wasn't being "defensive", in any possible manner (and again, there is no need for you to speculate on my inner mental states, that is rude... if nothing else).

So far you have just blown me off.

You claim (falsely) that it is a "foregone conclusion that even the regs" agree that "something is wrong". You claim that this "wrongness" is "blatantly apparent". But still... you are either unable or unwilling to cite even one single example, just one, of this bias of which you speak of.

FYI: Neo-Goreans are not liberulz. So lumping me in with your (so far unsubstantiated) "majority" would not be correct.

So which is it...

(a) Are you unable to provide any cites? In that case, I think you have completely invalidated your claim that this alleged bias is "blatantly apparent"... because how can it be when even you, the peep making this claim, is unable to find even one example themselves.

(b) Are you unwilling to provide any cites? In that case it looks like you, as the more liberal between you & me, are the one who is scuttling the conversation. In which case I guess your premise is kinda true... as in you, who is relatively speaking the "lefty" in this so-far still-born vigorous debate, is doing exactly what you claim your fellow "lefties" are always doing to you.

Reminder: Our rule #3 says option (b) is against the rules. You make a positive assertion regarding reality. If challenged, like I'm challenging you here & now, you need to come up with some cites.

Don't expect that to change. Claim victory.

If you aren't part of the majority I spoke of, then fine. I never pointed you out.

.