Originally Posted by roachboy

politicophile: don't collapse yourself and the political frame of reference that may inform some (or all, i dont know) of your positions--this disinction is fundamental--if i meet someone in 3-d life who happens to be conservative in some or all ways, the conversation that happens may be marked by disagreement, but it would nonetheless involve listening and taking seriously what the other person would say. i do not conflate political opposition to an ideology with anything involving how i interact with folk as human beings. maybe it's a function of the gap between this roachboy fellow and who i am pulling his strings. maybe it's a function of how writing is in this kind of space: people are much more nuanced, much more complex than they appear in these tiny green boxes. many people express themselves in a much more interesting and thoughtful way in real time than they do when they write in general--maybe these features explain something of the reduction to caricature that every one of us undergoes via these personae that we write through. a couple friends who had thought about this kind of thing themselves have argued that this is a function of messageboards themselves, how they are structured and how they are used (e.g. at what points during a day people write)

sometimes i get the impression that folk across the political spectrum use this kind of space to experiment with political identities. i get the sense that there are folk here, for example, who are far more consistently conservative than they can be in their regular lives--maybe for personal reasons, maybe professional, maybe situational, i dont know. i say this because, from time to time in other forums, you see very different sides of them peeking around what they write. so you wonder how these elements fit together. maybe that is one way it happens.

fact is that there is a distinction--and a fairly hard one--between interactions in this kind of space, in this space, and those the same folk carry on every day in the 3-d world. there is no 1-to-1 relation between them. you really can't judge who people are in real life from how they appear here--this is not transparent.

i probably write too much when i post, so maybe when i say that i go after the ideology and not the person in debates here what i mean by that gets lost or overlooked. but this is what i do and why. so you are not the ideology, politicophile--you are not even politicophile----any more than i am roachboy, any more than what roachboy says gives you a view of who i am.
so i pass no judgement on you as a human being because this board--which is better than most nonetheless--does not permit it.

as for being able to dismiss conservative ideology: it's pretty easy--there is not much there there. maybe sometime we could have a general debate about this, even as this doesn't seem an optimal thread for it....