Originally Posted by logtroll
One site even had the regulars ganging up on the more liberal participants with a clear purpose of driving us off - in my case, banning me. Those blogs are echo chambers, where the regulars are not interested in discussing contrary ideas, they just want them to shut up while they bloviate on whatever crap floats through their minds.
One thing that makes rational discussion extremely difficult is the lack of consistent meaning of words and labels. For instance, "Conservative" once meant something fairly definable and dependable. Now there is no telling what someone means by it. On the site I referred to above, Golem also participated, but was barely tolerated because he was suspected of being too "Liberal" (another label that has a widely variable meaning these days), especially after he supported a few of the comments I made on that site. It was impossible there to discuss any of this, it was all just blind attacking without any consideration for what I was saying. Now that's what I call an echo chamber.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller