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Originally Posted by FoolThemAll
When you post with the conviction that you'll get predictable responses and no real discussion, you self-fulfill that prophecy. You help. Your one-liners may not injure my mouse wheel, but brevity/laziness create something different from host-at-his-worst that is just as useless to real discussion.
Maybe it's not quite trolling, but in light of your comments in this thread, I think it reeks of a "can't beat 'em, join 'em halfheartedly" mentality. And that's assuming that 'they' are really as closed to discussion as you say.
Do you consider post #24 to be on-topic? I mostly don't agree with otto's critique, but what I see is host providing one great anecdotal example for otto's argument in this very thread.
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FoolThemAll, it is as if there is no recognition, or a deliberate refusal to recognize that "post #24" is the "bastard child" of post #21:
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
dc I have only so many hours in the day. I say my peace and sometimes respond but if I responded to every liberal who decided I was wrong about something on this forum it would be a full time job and fruitless. As a habit I've ignored some posts as by not reading so I don't feel the need to respond. Since I know I'm pissing into the wind here anyways, I don't feel too bad about it either. There are certain posters I do always read, as they often have something interesting and perhaps not typical to say, but that list has gotten smaller and smaller since I joined tfp. Again back when I joined tfp and had more energy for this I quickly discovered the moderators at the time didn't read a lot of the posts either from certain posters with perhaps the most amusing being I had to point out to moderators that telling me to 'get Karl Roves cock out of your mouth' wasn't in fact to board protocol, and that they had to even defend me as not trolling by predicting Bush would win in 2004.
As for poking the cages, sometimes its fun to point out some follies on the other side, even if I know it will get the expected response. When someone says 'hey remember the troops on Christmas' and you KNOW how it will end before the first response, there is a problem.
Sadly I don't think the problem can be solved. The politics board seems to have attracted some rather vocal members of the far to ultrafar left, people who really have no bearing on politics in the US. It is impossible to have a real conversation with them as their points of reference are to far out for there to be a dialog. It would be like trying to have a conversation on the finer points of evolution with a creationist. There is no middle ground.
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....because there is no right or wrong way to respond to "post #21", so, the choices made in what to include in "post #24" are as good, as any.
I'll be blunt. There would be no post #24, authored by "host" on this thread, if post #21 did not exist, or did not contain:
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The politics board seems to have attracted some rather vocal members of the far to ultrafar left, people who really have no bearing on politics in the US. It is impossible to have a real conversation with them as their points of reference are to far out for there to be a dialog. It would be like trying to have a conversation on the finer points of evolution with a creationist. There is no middle ground.
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...and we go through it, again and again, because there is no right or wrong way to respond to statements such as the one above. They are "beyond the pale", IMO.
Over and over:, "YOU ARE AN EXTREMIST"....ohhhh, no I'm not, "HERE IS WHY I AM NOT". The underlying current...."the sources of information about the outside world have a liberal bias", is always open to dispute. Since it is always there, and since I believe that it is the opinion that is at the root of the disconnect, I think that it should be challenged relentlessly.