There are two comments here on the Motte that have, for the past month or so, been sitting amidst the 71 tabs I've got opened in my browser.
The two comments are fairly different;
The first is a more personal meditation on the human desire to 'be a good person', and how that may or may not align with the equally-human desires to 'fit in', and 'pursue Truth'.
The second is a political argument over whether Democrats/progressives/libs are the real hypocrites, and whether or not they were the ones to 'defect first' in the game of American partisan politics; pretty standard stuff around here, really.
The thing they have in common is that I've been intending to respond to them.
And yet, I haven't.
Part of this is due to a dynamic that ought to be familiar to anyone with a maladaptive relationship with deadlines- if you're late turning something in, the longer you wait afterwards to get around to it, the harder it becomes to ever actually do it; it's easy to put it off for a day or two or three, and before you know it, a week's gone by, and length of the delay in your response might raise some eyebrows when you eventually do respond. Repeat this cycle a few times, and eventually a month or two has passed you by- at which point, you might as well just not bother to respond at all- assuming you're even still in the same headspace necessary to give a coherent response, and that events in the meantime haven't made your response irrelevant, the other person's really going to wondering about your penchant for necro-ing old threads.
A larger part, however, comes down to a much simpler -and much less easily overcome- barrier:
Why bother?
In my very first comment on this site, I noted that the 'two screens' effect is very real, and that the picture that the screen the self-identified 'Red Tribers' on this site are watching is showing a very different picture than the one the few self-identified 'Blue Tribers' still active on this site are watching.
This isn't particularly surprising. For decades, Americans have been slowly but steadily self-segregating along 'tribal' lines; fewer and fewer of us spend much time interacting with other Americans radically different from ourselves. We might live in the same neighborhoods, frequent the same shops and restaurants, and be theoretically 'close' to each other (or not; the same self-segregating dynamic increasingly applies to physical locations as well), but it's increasingly rare for us to ever actually interact with our Others to any real extent.
Combined with the general shifts in how people interact with and perceive what are 'their' communities (triply so in the online age!), the balkanization of 'common' hobbies & interests, the fracturing of the media landscape, and the overall decline in common cultural touchstones and trusted authorities, the end is result is that nowadays its easier than ever for all of us to live in our own Bespoke Realities™. It isn't just that political polarization & disagreements are tenser & higher-profile then they've been in decades (though they are!); now, we no longer even need to have similar conceptions of what it is we're even arguing over in the first place!
I can rage over how Republicans are trying to destroy the government and intentionally harm millions of the worst-off Americans with their new tariff, tax, & budget idiocies- and you can scoff and dispute my entire framing, say how I'm being absurdly hyperbolic and hysterical.
You can denounce the large-scale concerted push by progressives to trans the nations youth; to turn them into Marxist-indoctrinated eunuchs conscripted as soldiers in the frontlines of the culture wars. I can roll my eyes and say there is no such phenomenon, and it's all a conservative bogeyman.
Etc, etc.
So in light of this situation, where we not only argue endlessly about the most basic facts of any given political disagreement, without either side ever having to concede to either the opposition's arguments, or even their basic worldview and underlying framing of the situation...
Why bother?
Why bother continuing to argue (and especially why bother continuing to argue online- an exercise in futility if I ever heard one!) when doing so is unlikely to change the other person's mind?
Why bother continuing to argue when the people I'm disagreeing with seem to have beliefs & experiences so wildly opposite of my own that I have to wonder if we're even living in the same country?
Why bother continuing to argue when people I disagree with just seem like they fundamentally can't be reasoned with at all?
And especially why bother continuing to argue when doing so is only likely to be """rewarded""" with mass-downvotes and distributed dogpiles by commentators on a forum you don't even really like, and only stick around on out of some sort of... IDK, perverse masochism, I guess?
Seems kinda pointless to me, tbh.
Despite my faint hopes, the dysfunction in this country appears to be acclerating.
We seem to be waiting on the precipice, holding our breath to see if the next few days heralds the opening salvos of the beginning of true, active civil conflict.
So I ask again- why bother? Is the time for talking over?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
One tip that can help: block the upvote/downvote numbers through Ublock origin. I'm using this filter:
You can also create the rule by right clicking, clicking "block element", then hovering over the upvote numbers.
Upvotes and downvotes really have no place on a political discussion site like this, as all they do is add unnecessary heat and a "boo outgroup" button for partisans to click. I found it very annoying when some MAGA clown would post low-effort sneers to my posts and get tons of upvotes since this site leans heavily right, and I found it'd cause me to react in ways that weren't helpful. Forcefully ignoring the upvotes has made the site much more tranquil in my eyes.
Another tip that can help: make concrete rules around discussions you want to have, and then stick to them, and then be willing to block people who break them. The mods on this site, while better than on many sites, are still pretty arbitrary and capricious. It's not uncommon for them to modhat leftists or centrists for things right-leaning commenters get away with all the time. The solution: block people who violate the rules. For me, I've started drawing a line at personal attacks and ad hominems. I (almost) never do those things to other posters here, and if anyone does it to me I block them in short order. What I've noticed is that a lot of the people who do that (like zeke and SlowBoy and FirmWeird) just post low effort partisan swipes almost exclusively, so you don't really lose much by blocking them. I did block Gattsuru when he was making personal attacks against me and refused to stop, which was somewhat sad since he posts a combination of low effort partisans wipes along with higher quality partisan swipes, so blocking isn't completely costless, but it's still good overall.
As for what arguments are actually for, I've found them quite useful to see the strongest arguments the other side has presented in short order. If you have a few arguments and they just have no clear response to something, you can be pretty sure that what you're saying is right on the money. For example, I had an argument with JarJarJedi on allegations that Joe Biden was accepting bribes and although he talked a bit game about how I was delusional if I disagreed with him on this point, it became clear he just had no evidence on this point. I'm now much more confident in my assertion that anyone saying Joe Biden took bribes is just spouting nonsense.
That's a fair take and I respect it, but it's different than my experience. I am often surprised which of my posts get upvoted and which are controversial or unremarkable. I find the feedback kind of interesting, although I don't update on it much.
For any site above tiny the modding can never be perfectly even. I disagree with your judgment on balance, though I'm sure there are valid examples, and evaluating their salience is kind of subjective.
One thing I have noticed is that long-time quality contributers do sometimes get more slack than most. But I think this applies regardless of one's political and social positions. Darwin got at least as much slack as Hlynka did.
For me the voting patterns were very consistent: anything I posted that was pro-right was upvoted even if it was devoid of logic. Anything I posted that was neutral (like on AI stuff) was generally upvoted if it was high-effort. Anything I posted that was anti-MAGA was highly contentious or net-downvoted, with poorly thought out responses by others on the level of "have you ever considered that maybe you're too retarded to understand Trump's brilliant 4D chess move?????" getting broadly upvoted. In other words, the upvotes and downvotes are mostly just an inverse mirror of /r/politics.
I'm actually fine with long time quality posters getting a bit more slack than randos, although I have some problems with how quality is determined, as there's a fair few AAQCs every month that are just swipes at the (leftist) outgroup in eloquent language.
It's a good thing there's no other possible distinguishing characteristics, here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link