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comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  2564 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "Any forum with free speech and little to no moderation becomes right wing"

I'd welcome more libertarian/conservative voices here. I think it's a bummer that more conservative voices from Hubski's past, like cliffelam no longer actively comment.

We have plenty of people that challenge conventional liberal thinking though. I'd say that kleinbl00, cgod and you, among others, all do this.





wasoxygen  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

From my perspective, Hubski is a dynamic hotbed of provocative discussion. But for several months, this has happened almost entirely in personal correspondence and not in public.

I would prefer to be more open, but a tiny number of vocal users tend to spice their intellectual disagreement with doses of condescension, mockery, and name-calling. While I recognize that these aspects do not diminish the strength of their ideas, it is sufficiently annoying that I prefer to keep out of public discussions.

Among the thousands of words I have excreted into public dialog, I hope very few of them were antagonistic toward another person, unsparing as I may have been in criticizing their ideas. I keep in touch with a couple of other former users, both scrupulously polite, who have quit the site after encountering needless hostility toward their non-Hubski-mainstream views. And I find myself always wishing that my favorite non-conforming users would expand more, rather than keeping to short, throwaway comments.

I don't think moderation can fix this, though I am still partial to my proposal. There is a kind of Gresham's Law in any open forum by which the bad (vitriol) drives out the good (civility). Nevertheless, Hubski is the best public discussion forum ever conceived.

thenewgreen  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Among the thousands of words I have excreted into public dialog, I hope very few of them were antagonistic toward another person, unsparing as I may have been in criticizing their ideas.

I don't think I've ever seen you be antagonistic towards a person, however you're pretty good at being a provocateur. Which, by the way, is something I admire about you. Please, do it out in the open. I promise, I won't make fun of you. I'll leave that for PM.

kleinbl00  ·  2564 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's difficult for either side to keep it out of the realm of "you're living wrong" and, as tribal as conservative thinking tends to be, it generally goes ad-hominem.

OftenBen  ·  2564 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I have a dream that we could live in a version of America where we all believed different things about each other, but agreed that it was most important to be good and kind to each other first, and keep our opinions about the state of other peoples souls/bedrooms/genitals to ourselves.

A fairy tale where a true capital C Conservative Christian can think that his gay neighbors are doomed to eternal hellfire and damnation when they die, but treats them with respect when they are forced to see each other getting the mail or mowing the lawn.

Dan Carlin calls this the '1950's textbook vision of America' and it's the one I like the best.