Quote:
Originally Posted by gregorio
Last night, in response to this part of a postI asked rivercity why he thought it was important to determine how long the sexual assault on Ford lasted. Here is rivercity's reply:I immediately reported the post as the comment "LOL.. wow, are you trying to be stupid? or is it just natural" is a personal attack that violates the very first sentence of the Politics Rules I reported the post 7 hours ago. Since that time, the mod has posted in Politics so it's not like he's been away from his computer and not seen my report, YET THE PERSONAL ATTACK REMAINS and the person who posted it received NO WARNING, INFRACTION or BAN. That attack on me has now been quoted by three other posters.
I shudder to think how a progressive poster would have been treated had they made such a comment towards a conservative, but conservatives are allowed to hurl insults with impunity. Allowing right-wing posters to attack progressives in this way threatens to stifle debate in the politics forum and THIS MUST BE STOPPED. I DEMAND the offending part of rivercity's post be removed and that he be INFRACTED or BANNED. We all know this won't happen though because right-wing posters are given carte blanche to post whatever they want, whereas progressive posters get punished for much less all the time.
This gets brought up and bounced about every so often. That's for good reason though (imo), there's a serious problem with bias and no place on this forum for anybody politically in the center or left-leaning (basically half of the population in america for example). The posters that don't conform with the far right here are mobbed and abused with a seemingly endless leash. Also the politics mods themselves even join in. On top of that, members of 2+2 who are otherwise in good standing are sanctioned with temp bans, bans, and exile
There are a few different directions this could be taken but the current situation just seems terrible. You could open an additional politics section that didn't tolerate mobs of empty abuse from either political pov, or the mods themselves. I think that's the best route personally. There has been a far right community developed and I don't think that needs to removed or changed necessarily. It probably just needs to be renamed because calling it a politics section is not only misleading, it also sets up 2+2 customers for attacks from an abusive mob
I think 2+2 has something of unique value to it's users and as a business. The general demographic and size of the community make it a place to get intelligent discussion and the community is not so big that you get a chance to form an understanding of the posters themselves. Discussion and debate is probably the most effective way we can determine things like morality, philosophy, and policy. We need to hear what we don't know and we need to have our ideas and beliefs challenged. This is how you learn and form a strong pov. Echo chambers create paper thin arguments and enormous blind spots. I find the people that want to silence other points of view have the weakest arguments and are usually ideologically possessed. On 2p2 the politics section is full of people on the far right that think of themselves as conservative and close-minded but in fact are extremely open-minded. This culture has been cultivated by moderation. It's not coincidence that the moderator mentioned above has removed all other POV, more than half of america would fail his purity test. It's less than half but we are so far beyond reasonable here, it's not even a point that needs to be argued
The failing of political moderation in the past has been the allowance of content free posts hurling pure abuse. It only takes a handful of those posters to hijack threads. That's exactly what happened