my energy is zapped, however.

Wookies said Wookie might be allowing that some republican supporters are dumb or ignorant about what the Republicans offer

Make Wellnamed mod and see how he goes if we aren't going to have another politics forum. It is that simple.

i'm very tired. but i still have the energy to hate you. both of you.

congrats.

Lucky you have bobo to take over.

Oh, leave me the **** out of this.

Ya'll should be giving Wookie a god damn medal for single-handedly maintaining a forum that generates so many page views and is valued so highly by its users in this current political climate, and on a web site where the ownership is actively hostile to the prevailing consensus.

Yeah he ought to get a medal - a medal for lasting as long as he has despite being the most biased moderator I have ever seen moderate forums online.

I don't think this was the case at all. He certainly didn't mod wil's posts the same way he modded mine and goofys. He may have thought he was being fair because of past perceived injustices but he wasn't really close to objective fairness.

LOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLL

Still a lot better than wookie - you'll at least agree on that.

I believe liberals are tired of the conservative trick of claiming they are being oppressed and can't have conversations because they keep getting shouted down while at the same time they are calling liberals snowflakes and cucks because they protest white supremacists. Liberals have learned from conservatives that attacking is the best defense. And it's much easier to attack a position of "all muslims are bad and shouldn't be allowed to come into this country" than something like "we need to slow immigration down because of overcrowding and poverty in our inner cities" so they make it pretty easy.

Why? You haven't shown that there is a problem that needs to be fixed and it's doubtful it would stop the complaining.

The idea that chez is better at anything than wookie is an example of how conservative bias works.

It's also the funniest post in the thread, congratulations!

And there you go the delusional these forums are based on. Chez's downfall was that he wasn't hard left enough for you despite there already being a forum that protected those kinds of views. You can't have everything and that's the problem about what I alluded to earlier about the left not being able to tolerate free speech (or, in the case of these forums, vigorous debate).

Endless whining and crying about unfairness etc. But what is it that you actually want? Like in Masons perfect world what does the politics forum look like? People credulously believing that $1.5T tax cuts for billionaires is a good thing or that trump/kavanaugh etc aren't rapists or that the majority of trumps base aren't racist morons? Do we have to deny reality to make you guys happy?

The democratic establishment bent over backwards to compromise with republicans for decades and in response they went with "**** your feelings", "Trump that *****", and elected a syphilitic, racist, sexual predator with the senility addled mind of an angry toddler. So some of us figured that being obnoxious and not compromising seems to work pretty well in terms of getting power and doing the things you want. Why should we reach out to you? Not call you out for what you are? What possible principle is that based on?

You weren't a moderator at any stage were you?

tackles for loss in high school or GTFO

Just spell out one concrete thing that wookie et al could do that would stop you whining. If that thing is credulously agree with your moronic opinions then just come out and say it.

The word bias gets used a lot, but it's somewhat vague and I think you have to think carefully about what you think should qualify as a demonstration of bias. To expand a bit on one of my previous comments, I think there are roughly two separate complaints about the politics forum: (1) that Wookie makes actively biased moderation decisions against conservative posters; and (2) that the forum is an echo chamber which is excessively hostile to minority viewpoints, particularly more conservative ones. These two complaints are often connected, but I want to treat them separately.

So, re: (1) -- it's clearly difficult for anyone on either side of the question to make a convincing argument, given the need to either track down a bunch of history or have a perfect memory, but I don't personally believe that Wookie's decisions to ban/exile conservative posters or lock threads show any particularly egregious unfairness. That's not to say that I always agree with him, but I haven't seen anything that I would consider clearly biased. And I think it's significant that when we look at specific moderation decisions they tend to look pretty reasonable, like locking faxanadu's thread, which has a completely substance-less OP.

On the other hand, re: (2), I think the premise of this complaint is clearly true, that this is driven more by the posters than the moderation, but that it contributes substantially to the perception of bias, especially given comments Wookie makes as a poster, like the one you linked.

But I think those perceptions of bias are also driven by differences of opinion about what the forum ought to be, and for whom. If you begin with the assumption that it ought to be a neutral space with moderation aimed at fostering debate or discussion among people of widely differing viewpoints, then you will take the actual state of affairs as evidence of bias not just because of what is moderated, but mostly because of what is not moderated. This is not, however, the view of the overwhelming majority of forum regs, for whom I think the zikzak post (watch us run you out of town, to paraphrase) reflects something closer to the majority view of the forum.

For the majority of regs, the forum is a place to discuss current political events with mostly like-minded people, to vent frustrations, laugh at political memes, share links, etc, and perhaps the occasional argument or at least a little light sport dunking on conservatives. But the single most common reaction to someone arguing against commonly held views in the Trump thread, for example, is to complain about people quoting that someone, and to complain that the mods don't ban them sooner. This is more or less the complaint that Louis Cypher made earlier, but it's worth noting that this reaction is not just aimed at conservative posters, it's not purely about ideology.

Note that I don't think either idea of the forum expressed above is invalid, and my reticence both present and past to do anything to the main forum is because I think the forum works well as a community of mostly like-minded liberals for the overwhelming majority of its regs. But clearly that view of what the forum should be is incompatible with the desires of the folks that complain about (2), and if they interpret the purpose or rules of the forum according to their view they will of course perceive the moderation as biased, when I would say the truth is more that the moderation has mostly just changed over time to accommodate the views of the regs.

On that note, I'd point out that there's a rules sticky that hasn't been updated in nearly 10 years, and it gives a wildly misleading impression of what the moderation of the forum is actually like, mostly because the posted rules reflect something closer to the "neutral forum for debate" view.

This post is predictably too long, but to sum up the above: my view is that if you are happy (or at least tolerant :P) with the forum as a community with its own social norms and culture -- which happens to be on the left as a result of who the regular posters are -- then I don't believe that there's any reason to find wookie's modding problematic, and your original advice ("don't go there, I don't") is the best advice. Although you might consider updates to the forum rules to reflect that reality. If you want a politics forum that's more a neutral forum for debate then the problem is not so much that wookie is biased against conservatives IMO and makes unjustifiable moderating decisions, it's that you don't actually have a large number of posters who share that vision of what the forum should be.

I most like the part where you say my advice is the best advice.

On this particularly, this has been brought about by years of unfair and biased moderating that the forums have become a left echo chamber and protected as such. If you are happy with this, then sure do nothing but it isn't a good look from the outside looking in at what are meant to be poker forums and having a mod that is closer to the centre should be far more palatable to those that like the status quo of the chamber than inserting a mod from the centre or centre right.

I'm coming to this with a proposition that is a compromising position and again shows how far those that are defending the chamber are out of their depth if they can't counter with their own reasonable alternative.

One single concrete suggestion. Just one.

Mat remember when you let chezlaw run a "right-wing-friendly" forum and then a poster threatening to publicize the content of that forum to the general public was seen as a threat to book sales and the corporate image of 2p2?

if your compromise is make well named a moderator, you're forgetting the part where he doesn't want to be a politics moderator. not last time i checked anyway.