The board is boring now

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Being new here I am not sure how trolling is defined per the ZZLP. I need some man or woman splainning. It was stated by ZZLPHEELS that 90% on here have the same political mindset and if this is true is it possible that perceived trolling by the 10% could simply be a counterpoint? Fox has a show, The Five, the 4 conserves gang up on and shut down the 1 lib at the table. Could that be the case here in reverse?
 
tar pal said:
Being new here I am not sure how trolling is defined per the ZZLP. I need some man or woman splainning. It was stated by ZZLPHEELS that 90% on here have the same political mindset and if this is true is it possible that perceived trolling by the 10% could simply be a counterpoint? Fox has a show, The Five, the 4 conserves gang up on and shut down the 1 lib at the table. Could that be the case here in reverse?
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If you stick around, you'll notice that it's the unsupported claims, outright lies (They're eating the pets) and misrepresentations that get shot down.

I'm only one person but, as others have said, I have absolutely no problem with a principled argument.
 
tar pal said:
Being new here I am not sure how trolling is defined per the ZZLP. I need some man or woman splainning. It was stated by ZZLPHEELS that 90% on here have the same political mindset and if this is true is it possible that perceived trolling by the 10% could simply be a counterpoint? Fox has a show, The Five, the 4 conserves gang up on and shut down the 1 lib at the table. Could that be the case here in reverse?
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My argument is that is exactly what happened frequently on the old ZZLP. I have not seen that happen on this board. On the old board if you had an opinion that went against the grain you could find yourself relentlessly harassed and targeted. To be fair, if someone was an ass to me I had no qualms with being an even bigger asshole back to them, which led to a poor board environment for everyone else caught in the crossfire.

This board is nothing like that, thank goodness. It seems as if the hotheads didn't make the trip over here. There are a couple of conservative posters who verge on being trolls, but no one really takes their bait.
 
tar pal said:
Being new here I am not sure how trolling is defined per the ZZLP. I need some man or woman splainning. It was stated by ZZLPHEELS that 90% on here have the same political mindset and if this is true is it possible that perceived trolling by the 10% could simply be a counterpoint? Fox has a show, The Five, the 4 conserves gang up on and shut down the 1 lib at the table. Could that be the case here
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This is a good analogy, even though I don’t watch fox and have never seen your show: The 5

But ZZLPHEELS defends this board for not being quite that way.
He admits he got booted from the previous board and claims that he was ganged up on just as you describe in The 5. And apparently that hasn’t happened to him on this site. Not yet at least.

But just like on the old IC basketball board, sometimes we like having a house dookie around… one who stirs the pot with talk about how “both sides lie”.

But I doubt many on here will tolerate too much Maga B.S. before somebody like Manhattanheel starts the beat down and the jackals swarm.
 
Centerpiece said:
This is a good analogy, even though I don’t watch fox and have never seen your show: The 5

But ZZLPHEELS defends this board for not being quite that way.
He admits he got booted from the previous board and claims that he was ganged up on just as you describe in The 5. And apparently that hasn’t happened to him on this site. Not yet at least.

But just like on the old IC basketball board, sometimes we like having a house dookie around… one who stirs the pot with talk about how “both sides lie”.

But I doubt many on here will tolerate too much Maga B.S. before somebody like Manhattanheel starts the beat down and the jackals swarm.
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I know you meant nycfan, but the reference to Manhattanheel made me smile.
 
hedge said:
What is HT?
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HeelTalk. It spun off when ZZL first split. It's mostly been a decent place to go but literally everyone is a couple of decades younger than me. I still drop by but it has gotten pretty slow and pretty predictable.
 
tar pal said:
Being new here I am not sure how trolling is defined per the ZZLP. I need some man or woman splainning. It was stated by ZZLPHEELS that 90% on here have the same political mindset and if this is true is it possible that perceived trolling by the 10% could simply be a counterpoint? Fox has a show, The Five, the 4 conserves gang up on and shut down the 1 lib at the table. Could that be the case here in reverse?
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No.
 
finesse said:
If you stick around, you'll notice that it's the unsupported claims, outright lies (They're eating the pets) and misrepresentations that get shot down.

I'm only one person but, as others have said, I have absolutely no problem with a principled argument.
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I actually appreciate a good data driven argument. If my position is wrong I appreciate people pointing that out with facts and data, so that I can adjust.
 
superrific said:
This doesn't explain the dramatic decrease in the civic comprehension of Americans in the last fifteen years. There was a time, I think, that Trump's lying would have been disqualifying (along with many other issues with his conduct). There was a time when Americans could keep two thoughts in their head at once. Heck, people do that in non-political settings all the time, and then act like fucking morons when it comes time to ponder the future of the country.

So what changed? Why does the electorate suck so much more now? I think it points to the centrality of the conspiratorial element -- which you expressly point to, and I would argue that it should be even more centered in our public discourse. The wide availability and general acceptance of a conspiratorial mindset is both such an important part of what ails us, and what connects our experience to the rest of the world, where right-wingers are on the rise. And that's because social media puts out an infinite quantity of that bullshit.
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I think what happened ~15 years ago is the emergence of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party/conservative ecosphere. Or, as I think of it, "The Rise of the Idiots".

We tend to think of conservative media telling conservative listeners what to do and the listeners doing so, and that happens a lot, but it's not fully accurate. If something rises to a position of prominence within the conservative movement, conservative media (and the power brokers behind it) will certainly accept and co-opt whatever the niche movement is. (They did this with Trump's rise within the primaries in 2015.) And so when the Tea Party emerged and took shape out of the 2008 election, conservative media jumped right in to support it. However, the Tea Party movement was already well versed in creating an "alternative reality" to shape its beliefs as many of the adherents had long ago openly rejected provable reality as a basis for belief. And so as the Tea Party gained traction, along with it came a more broad-based rejection of facts and data in favor of "truthiness" and "ideas that feel right" as major foundations of conservative thought.

Of course, you can't ignore the rise of social media (namely Facebook) in that same period and the introduction of algorithms within a couple of years. If the Tea Party was lighted match of non-factual discourse, Facebook became an enormous gas tank just waiting to explode. With the rise of Facebook (and later other social media sites), it wasn't long before non-factual discourse took over the Republican Party to the extent that the legacy conservative media (Fox News, Newsmax, Rush, etc) were forced to adapt this mode of belief. Of course, it wasn't as if the majority had to be forced into it kicking and screaming, but it was a significant adaptation when conservative media learned that the more they lied, the better their numbers and the more they were believed.

So, to answer your question, I think the major change ~15 years ago was the rise of the Tea Party as a first wave of the "stupid Republicans" wresting control from the party leadership and what we've had since then has been a continuation and completion of that effort.
 
SnoopRob said:
So, to answer your question, I think the major change ~15 years ago was the rise of the Tea Party as a first wave of the "stupid Republicans" wresting control from the party leadership and what we've had since then has been a continuation and completion of that effort.
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Fair enough. I agree with you mostly. As a technical matter, I recall the Tea Party being more astroturf. It was organized by Glenn Beck IIRC. That doesn't really affect your overall point though, which is well-taken.

You can't get to where we are today with a few sudden jolts. You're right that it has been building up for a long time, and that was before the Tea Party. The Tea Party was an extension or outgrowth of the party of stupid approach that Gingrich set in motion. And that was itself an extension of previous trends. The paranoid style has been around for a long time.

But we also like to point to discrete events because it makes conversation and comprehension a bit easier. And if we're going to do that, Tea Party (which could also be called Palinism) is a good candidate.
 
finesse said:
HeelTalk. It spun off when ZZL first split. It's mostly been a decent place to go but literally everyone is a couple of decades younger than me. I still drop by but it has gotten pretty slow and pretty predictable.
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Looks like HT is having an issue right now. Anyone able to access it?
 
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