Rafael wrote:
Actually, when you were banned and absent, the tone was a lot different.
Not really. I read the glade. It was just as prone to the hate-fulled demagoguery. I will agree that there was more common ground, mostly because the board is populated almost entirely by conservatives of one stripe or another. But the disagreements still got vicious and nasty.
Quote:
This isn't **** dodgeball. I disagree with lots of people besides you. I disagree with people you probably think are on my "side". Because sides don't exist.
No, it doesn't really become a dodge ball game until a liberal get too mouthy. That's not intended to be inflammatory, just a statement of observed history. We had a conservative literally threaten to start murdering elected officials, and the worst thing that happened was a polite moderator request to just stop talking about it. Think about that for a second. Elmo probably violated federal law with his repeated calls for anti-government violence, and his call for open, violent revolution.
There are things that get said in passing around here that are generally accepted with a "meh", that in most circles would be utterly apalling. Mus' recent jokes about lynching and the color of the President's skin are two recent examples. Sure, we laugh about them, but Mus isn't actually a comedian on stage doing a routine. He's a guy on the internet saying these things.
When people imply things about liberalism like fascism and soviet communism, the community says to itself "well isn't that true?", and moves on. But some of us are liberals, we know that we are not facist, that we have about as much in common with soviet communism as most Christians have with the Westboro Baptist Church, and when people imply otherwise
it really pisses you off. And one of the main reasons people get their undies in such a bundle about what I have to say is that I incorporate the exact same techniques and turn them on conservative ideas, ideologies, and platforms as a means of illustration. However, because the heavy conservative population here thinks that their false ideas about liberalism are literally true, and any accusations about conservatism involving similar logic are absolutely false, they assume that the only person being offensive is me. In reality, the default notions conservatives here express about liberalism are equal antagonists.
The trouble with the heavy conservative lean here is that these kinds of ideas are accepted as a baseline objective fact, instead of being recognized as just inflammatory anti-liberal propaganda
and dismissed as such.
When the President confronted the Republicans at their retreat, he was basically talking about exactly this issue. We have become so divided in our politics that there are people genuinely preparing to start killing liberals. That's not paranoia, it's already happened. We have an example of that level of extremism getting to the boiling point right here on this board. And the thing that is so absolutely staggering is that *those* threats are dismissed as just meaningless swagger, and any fierce opposition to anti-liberal hate is met with dire calls for the removal of the offending person from the board.
This is the double standard born of a too-long tolerance of conservative hatred for the left. I am sure there are people right now, fingers tensed to write some sort of retort to this post. I am sure they are saying to themselves "do I go with the Victim Card defense, or something else?". That doesn't change the point I am making. On one hand, you have tolerance for anything up to and including actual threats of violence against elected officials. On the other hand you have zero tolerance for anything that even gets heated. It's time to bring both of those things back in line.
_________________
It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show
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