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The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
Humans broadly don't want to hear political opinions that differ greatly from theirs. It's just not in our nature.
Themotte is genuinely the best I've seen by a long shot, even though it has tons of flaws.
Same.
I do wish we had more lefty commenters, but it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental, fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.
Its definitely the one place where the average response doesn't drastically misinterpret a person's post and respond to the persons' hallucinated point rather than the plain words they said.
That's what drives me away from other forums, meanwhile here I don't have to constantly say "No, that is not what I meant, please read the words I actually wrote and I'll happily explain myself further if needed."
Interesting.
Your mileage may vary. I am routinely imputed views I don't hold. This forum is roughly equivalent to an above average political subreddit, just with the ideological inflection reversed.
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I think the righties do this too here. I think the most blatant example was responses to my effort post defending ASOIAF and George R. R. Martin. Many responses were from people who hadn't read the books very carefully, and even more egregiously, from people who hadn't read my post carefully at all.
I think the kind of effect that we see here is due to the fact the kinds of topics that we like to debate on this form are usually ones in which the right is clear-pilled (immigration, economics) much more so than the left. There are other issues that I think the right is weaker on (car-brain, media literacy, veganism, etc.) that don't get as much attention on this forum.
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This is a common assertion for people to make about their ideological opponents. People on the left constantly make the same claim about people on the right. And the intellectuals on the left and right both do so with detailed receipts about why their own side is working with facts and their ideological opponents are basing their ideology on lies.
It turns out it is possible for groups to make mirror-image accusations of each other, yet one group is substantially correct and the other almost-wholly wrong.
Occam’s Razor, however, would suggest that when observing two groups whose accusations mirrors one another that either (a) both are correct, or (b) both are wrong.
Bringing in Occam's Razor is totally unhelpful--is it "simpler" to say that both sides are right, both are wrong, or one is right and one is wrong? The question is virtually meaningless at this level; it's unclear what "simple" even means in this context.
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Occam's Razor makes no such suggestion.
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It’s also possible, and I’d argue likely, that both are correct. Partisans from every corner regularly discard inconvenient facts.
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slightly offtopic - I was writing a response to this video (which I don't recommend watching), but the response can be succintly summarized as:
That video is infuriating because he almost gets it. He describes the rake in excruciating detail, elucidates exactly why and how people step on that rake, and then, with great pomp and ceremony but zero self-awareness, proceeds to step on the rake himself.
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Its probably a top 3 pet peeve of internet discourse for me.
Its the "So you hate Waffles?" issue.
People will aggressively impute thoughts and motives to the speaker and then draw conclusions about their words that wildly diverge from the simplest interpretation of the sentences.
Then attack them on that basis, which instantly derails any communication that might have been possible.
I spent a LONG time learning how to write as directly and clearly as possible (within the constraints of the English language) and it still happens to me.
That said, in day-to-day communications, reading between the lines or recognizing when someone IS motivated to manipulate you is a useful skill, so its not like its 'wrong' to try to parse someone's words like that.
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