That would be my advice. We are never, ever, ever going to create a political blog that is free of, or even mostly free of, stupid comments, hypocritical comments, unfair comments, snarky comments, uninformed comments, mean spirited comments, etc., etc., etc. Those expecting such a place are guaranteed to be disappointed. Just make the best arguments you can make, ignore the people who consistently annoy you and try and enjoy yourself.

Micky Love summed it up nicely here: link

But she's a queen, and such are queens
that your laughter is sucked in their brains. -D. Bowie

...on this very topic. It was just after the GOP lost Congress, conservative morale was low, and tempers flared several times. Catchy's effort to get some dialog going was well-received, and some really insightful points were raised, so I thought I'd necropost the discussion here again for those who missed the first go round. Also, lest we repeat ourselves.

Catchy's in his diary, Conservatives at the Forvm, asked straight up why certain prominent conservative posters had left or were unhappy with the direction things were going. There was some great exchange in comments, and the next day Mac replied with a diary trying to explain his dissatisfaction. Since so many people are asking Mac to explain his reasons for leaving on the other thread, rather than ask him to repeat himself, you can get an explanation straight from him. Macallan's reading of the problem boils down to this:

That is, the overbearing smugness of certain liberal attitudes that can't possibly allow even the ghost of a chance for a) good faith on the part of a conservative interlocutor or b) bad faith on the part of any liberal position. True or not, fair or not, Liberal Bigotry seems to be the gist of Macallan's disenchantment with this place as I took it, and it seemed other conservatives agreed with him. Ask yourself whether somewhere, in the back of your mind, Liberal Bigotry doesn't sound like an oxymoron, and ask yourself why that should be. His solution; simple, elegant and gracious. Before you post here, imagine yourself saying the same thing, aloud, over dinner, to the person you're arguing with. I don't think we've exactly upheld that standard.

Earlier that month, Macallan posted one of the smartest pieces he or anyone else has put up on the innertubes in the past five years. IMHO, of course. It was a meditation on the Libby verdict, "perjury traps," and the concept of 'license,' and I still think about it quite a bit.

He starts with the observation, [Often], the very people who shouldn't say anything because it puts them into a hypocritical stance, are also the ones who feel the most justified in making that hypocritical stance. Kinda strange huh?

Anyhow, when the dispute arose over What Is Wrong With The Forvm that time, I found myself remembering that concept of license and thinking it was part of the problem. If you are going to insult somebody on the internet, or accuse them of complicity with heinous ideas (fascism, fifth columnists, woo hoo!), aren't you almost by definition taking license where you shouldn't? Using the wrongs done by other people in order to dismiss out of hand the (superficially similar) arguments of someone right in front of you, well, that's a Freeper kind of thing to do. Isn't it?

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH

Sulla lays it out pretty well for me. Although, as a Catholic deist I don't get as tired doing christian apologia.

Your effort is appreciated.

The Jingoist

exhibit A of the failure at theforvm.org can be found right here-

”Conservatives didn't run away from the Forvm with their tails between their legs because the big, mean Liberals didn't listen to them. They ran away because they got their butts handed to them over and over again.”

What is the evidence for this? How would such criteria be set up to judge the validity of such a claim? I, for one, am sick of dealing with presumptions like this (and this is only the latest one I’ve seen, it certainly won’t be the only baseless assumption about conservatives we’ll see today). While I appreciate Jordan’s attempt to curb the situation, Jordan isn’t there (nor should he be) every time during a discussion conservatives are accused, either implicitly or explicitly, of being authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobes, dupes of the carbon lobby, dupes of the wealthy, flat earthers, corporatist war mongers, etc., etc., etc. He isn’t there to point out the hypocrisy of calling the President every dirty name under the sun, but getting all bent out of shape when the same is done to Harry Reid. He isn’t there to point out the hypocrisy when polls are cited as enough justification for one argument but not another. He isn’t there to point out the hypocrisy of labeling peer reviewed scientific studies as having political bias for one topic but not another. He is not always there to ask why if elections were stolen in 2000, 2002, & 2004, why not 2006. He isn’t there to point out there is very little difference between Michael Moore and Ann Coulter. He isn’t there to counter every dumb ass argument that simply boils the world down to white people killing brown people. While it can be fun to sarcastically mock these things for a while (like Hillary’s VRWC), eventually it gets old. In addition, while I don’t have a religious calling myself, I’m also sick of defending people of faith against stereotypes which are exponentially worse than anything thrown at conservatives. At the end of the day, it seems to me there is the absence of good faith for the other side. It isn’t that conservatives are wrong on an issue, that would be expected, but that they can either be classified as stupid dupes or evil manipulators, and that when they get fed up with trying to pry away such preconceived notions from the reality based community this serves as proof of their butts getting handed to them over and over again. So if Mac can create a place that maintains an environment where good faith on the part of your opponent is presumed, all the while allowing for humorous jabs, I would be happy to give it a go, because with a few exceptions that is not the case here.

"We should not tie the hands of law enforcement in the effort to bring these terrorists to justice"- Leon E. Panetta

when there's no clearly-defined purpose in the first place?

I think there are roughly three different possibilities for a site like this, in decreasing order of entropy:

1) the participants have passionately-held views and comment in order to either proselytize the other side or lament their ignorance and/or perfidy. Discussions have an undercurrent of hostility.

2) the participants have strongly-held views but understand that others can disagree, and they comment because they like to mix things up and test out their arguments. Discussions are snarky but not unpleasant.

3) the participants don't have strongly-held views and are open to ideas from anywhere. They comment in order to further the discussion and have some hope of reaching agreement, or at least clarifying points of disagreement.

I think the sweet spot for most people here would be #2; in actuality, it's been veering closer to #1 too often. What I'm looking for, and perhaps Mac as well, is option #3.

what the goals are and how they are to be accomplished. I agree with Gabriel that the lack of feedback that one normally gets from an actual conversation is a problem, but I also don't think that there is a solution for that other than setting up some sort of videoconferencing or podcasting posts. That would be technically possible, but our hosting fees would skyrocket. I also think it would lead to less well thought out and expressed opinions.

There's a basic tension between being open to all comers and requiring civility, besides the fact that people define civility differently there's the problem of enforcement. This is a voluntary association, and unless someone has a personal obsession with the site it's asking an awful lot of moderators to monitor every comment in real time.

I guess I'd like to hear specific complaints about what the site is failing to do. I'm on the record that we need to encourage new participation (and there's even been disagreement about that). Maybe some feel that a site like this requires a benevolent dictator, however that's not how we're organized and in all honesty I don't think this site could be organized that way. We elect moderators, but they have different views on how to interpret and enforce rules, so we're back where we started. What some consider a humorous comment others interpret as an attack, what some consider an accurate representation of a political figure others consider a slur. I just don't see that it's an organizational or structural problem, if you invite people who have differing opinions you will get ... different opinions, expressed in different ways. Take on passionate subjects and you'll get passionate responses. I don't see a way around that unless you restrict posts to such anodyne ideas and presentation that there is no great disagreement - and no great participation, either.

I've put a lot of effort into persuading people to participate here, and I still think that is the only approach that will work in the long run - persuasion, not enforcement. There are countless places to read and comment on the internets, and people do it as a pastime, not a job. But no matter what I or anyone else does, we will never be able to maintain a site that will be all things to all people. I'd be happy to hear suggestions on how we can broaden our appeal, but we'll never be a Kos or Red State. We'll also suffer from the problem that people will always say they want a place for bipartisan conversation, but in actuality most prefer to be told that they're correct and have their views reinforced. That's just the way the world is and the way people are.

I blame it all on the Internet

Both sides are consistently presenting their opinions; those opinions are more than occasionally supported by citations, and discussions rocket down either to disputed facts (via citations) or unshared values pretty quickly.

I mean, the fact that my continued exposure to modern conservative approaches has served to radicalize me further isn't a failure of the site by any means -- it's a function of the fact that I've come to truly understand my values and how profoundly they differ from what I've come to believe conservative values and approaches currently are.

It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.

1) The biggest problem by far that sites like this have is that the written word, specially the quickly written word, lacks the context that voice and body language provide in real life. I have several friends, including my boss, who are to the right of most conservatives here and we get together to debate many of the same topics and there's never a problem.

2) Related to point 1) most snark needs to be tempered or prohibited if a website like what Mac wants is to be successful in the long run.

3) Here's another crucial point. You need to agree on the basic facts before you start debating what is only opinion. If people can't even agree on what they are debating about then I don't see how you can argue anything.

4) My final point. Posters and readers need to be open, really open, to the idea they are wrong on what they believe. If you think you have nothing to learn, or that your viewpoint (liberal or conservative) is all you need to guide you in debate then why post in a site like this? Some time ago I suggested we try to post a diary 'from the other side'. The idea was basically rejected. But if people can't imagine the other side has insights they can learn from why bother debating?

This place is my vacation.