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SNL's Family Freud Political Edition: Team Clinton v Team Trump

...from the above skit: (Larry David as Senator Bernie Sanders)

I saw this last night. One of the best lines of the whole show

I have been packing for a move and starting that move today. I will be here more when I get settled in my new location.

I will stop by later, if I am not too tired, to address the "echo chamber" thing. I do have some thoughts on that.

Ta!!!! Time for another 60 mile roundtrip.

As Phil pointed out, you can bet on getting a pretty fair discussion here on RR. An oddity of the many blogs where righties tend to post is a format where there are no separate topics - there is just one constant stream of comments (which they like to refer to as 'discussions'). But the closest thing you can have to a discussion is, in river parlance, to "eddy out" with one or two people for a few minutes. Everyone else just keeps drifting downstream because there is no way to find the topic again once you disengage, except to scroll back through everything. If you comment again, the only person that gets notice is the one who was replied to directly. If you try to keep someone engaged, especially to get a meaningful response from them, you get blasted for 'badgering'.

Those blogs are not there for discussions, they are there for paintball wars and for chattering. And the so-called moderators tend to be deplorably biased in their enforcement of the rules. 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. The most common citations, when they occur, are tweets from unknown wingnuts. The second most common sources are WND, Breitbart, and FOX. CNN is considered to be Socialist.

Alternet has two really good articles on the behavior and psychology of blog trolls:

How Do Internet Trolls Justify Their Nasty, Misogynist, Life-Ruining Behavior?

- and -

The One Psychological Characteristic That Online Trolls Tend to Share



It's interesting that some bloggers choose to use many various identities (both male and female - sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal) when engaging discussions and end-up being banned all of the time. I've been on Disqus for over three years and have never been banned - even from Greta Van Susteren's old site.

I think the real reason for frequent banishment is because many think they're so witty and clever as to "pull one over" on other bloggers and that the other bloggers don't know who these trolls are using their plethora of identities. The term "sock puppet" is used for that account of this type blogger who engages in that type of deceitful blogging.

No one wants to engage in a troll like that. From a moderator's perspective, that type of blogger is a pain in the ass and really adds no value to the discussion other than to troll and looking for fights to pick.

Having a Disqus blog myself, I have had to deal with such bloggers as described above on way too many occasions. Disqus used to allow us to ban the IP address - which was preferable and eliminated the "sock puppet" resurrections. Now we have to play Whack-A-Mole every time these sh!thead trolls appear.

My Disqus blog has had many good discussions in the past and it is possible to engage in discussions as has been demonstrated. I get that some prefer nice, clean, responses like here on UBB, choosing to participate on different formats requires flexibility and adaptability, and I can see where a blog troll would find inflexibility to be a hassle - because where's the fun if you can't bait people for all to see?

Good luck on the move. Hope to hear from you soon!

Nobody, and I truly mean nobody, has ever been removed or banned because they were conservative. Trolling isn't a liberal or conservative debate technique, it is intended to destroy debate.

Conservatives LEAVE RR for only one reason, they cannot "win" by extraordinary means and they can't beat back facts with rhetoric.

They find that discouraging so they stop posting, and in some cases they leave altogether.

But what confuses me is, why is winning a debate more important than learning from it? I've lost a mighty large number of arguments here.
I didn't have the facts, or my facts were wrong, or my original argument was weak.
I just had to lick my wounds and figure out where I fell short and what I needed to rethink, that's all.

I'm much more interested in untangling the spaghetti-like bundle of illusions that make up much of what the typical voter sees as the prevailing wisdom and figuring out who benefits from constructing those illusions.
Unfortunately for me it seems to always point to a single orchestrated campaign to protect wealthy interests.
But that doesn't discourage me from posting here.

Bring in some more conservative voices, bring in some fresh blood.
By all means, invite new people to come here, we can use the philosophical DNA to revitalize things around here.

Where a "what"?

Read the two Alternet articles I linked in that post regarding: Blog Trolls

(people who have multiple accounts, use both male and female monikers, use both conservative and liberal points of view - all because they have no life - because their opinion and getting it out there is all that matters to them. So very sad.)