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It’s not.
The quality of discussion is higher than anywhere on reddit, and unlike reddit, the admins have no interest in censoring certain political viewpoints; leftists and rightists alike are welcome.
Let's be honest here - nobody is censored here, but it turns out, people don't like arguing 20-on-1 anywhere in society, regardless of ideology. Which is true of left-leaning spaces as well, for conservatives. But, well, those spaces don't do the whole "we're not censoring viewpoints" thing, they just say forthrightly, 'yeah, this is a place for people who agree on x, y, and z. Like it or leave.'
I think this place is mostly forthright about saying, "Yeah, this is a place for people who are willing to expose themselves to 20-on-1 arguments based on the strengths of their arguments, regardless of political leanings. Like it or leave." That such an environment tends to draw a more right-wing crowd, I think, is mostly down to modern leftism rejecting liberalism, which leads both to leftists having access to more mainstream forums where challenges to their views get censored and to leftists just not wanting to go to places where such challenges are tolerated. And the vicious cycle that follows.
It's easy to say that when you know you'll always be on the side of the 20:1.
Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."
No, I think it's because most people here are right-wing. Which is fine to have solid views - God could come down from Earth, say, "actually, all abortion is evil according to your Creator, and all aborted babies end up in Limbo forever" and I'd say, "cool, I don't care. Sounds like you have a shitty ideology." But just admit that, instead of just being, "well, I've heard all the arguments and mine were the most logical and true."
That's the reason I only comment here to put forth the actual left-wing view on stuff, instead of the imagined one, to push back against obviously incorrect stuff, and stuff like this, where it's not really a political issue mostly,
Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.
I know the response will be 4chan and it's antecedents, but 4chan was always the place for edgy losers who couldn't follow the relatively loose standards of the Internet, and the fact the young Right is basically all 4-chan adjacent is probably why all decent youth polling still shows them as overwhelmingly left-leaning, because the alternative is the people who were seen as edgy weirdos in 2004, let alone 2024.
That's why even though I dislike it, I'm fine with Elon changing the rules on Twitter/X. Now, he's currently paying the price for it, because it turns out people don't like 'nudes in bio' bot responses, and all the other stuff that has bubbled up, but it's his house, his rules, as long as he's not breaking any other laws. Now, the way he has happily limited the free speech rights of certain groups when certain governments come calling makes him a hypocrite, but that's another story.
Minds can be changed all the time.
That's definitely easier with factual, rather than value-based points, though.
I don't think the right bar for persuadability (at least, when we mean it as a virtue) is whether a sufficiently capable rhetorician could persuade someone: I don't want good speakers to be able to convince me of false things, especially when I'm well grounded in reality and the reasons why what I think are right. Rather, it should be whether they respond to reason and evidence in a sufficiently unbiased manner.
I'll concede, though, that yeah, there's probably some bias.
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I think fictional made-up examples are less than worthless.
This is just a strawman. Approximately no one argues that "liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism." I am middle-aged, and I was there in the early 2000s too. Yes, there were TOSs and bans and such. What makes it still liberalism is that bans and such were meant to be viewpoint-neutral. This isn't an easy thing to strictly define, but certainly one side choosing to respond to an argument with offense or choosing to claim that it activates some "fight-or-flight mode" in them merely for seeing such arguments was clearly not considered proper grounds for such bans.
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Are you claiming that any space that claims to operate on a neutral principle of free speech is fundamentally duplicitous because it's just going to end up coalescing around a consensus viewpoint anyway?
I don't think it's always duplicitous, but I think anybody who seriously thinks the reason why this place is more right-leaning is some belief that in a free and open debate with nobody limiting it, the right-leaning argument wins is kind of lying to themselves, when in reality, the way the right wins these supposedly open spaces is saying enough things that trigger basically the fight or flight part of people's minds.
I'm a nearing middle-aged white guy, so the silly to frankly, terrible things said in this forum brush off my back, but a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc. So yeah, I can see why many people if in a community where what they think is open racism/sexism/bigotry against them is accepted, they say bye, and leave that community. Some people will hang around and still fight, but the reality is, most black people in 1960's America didn't have to argue about whether they deserved to use the same bathrooms as white people, and likely would've left any group arguing that. Obviously, not zero, but most people aren't argumentative weirdos like we are.
So yeah, the general tilt of any community will eventually become more of that, one way or the other. Also, in many cases (this isn't true here), there's a silent majority that's not as extreme, but also are effected by the community. YT comments section are kind of a perfect example - in a lot of cases, they're utterly rancid, no matter the topic, even when a creator doesn't want that. Because somebody whose basic belief about a YT video is, "that was all right," isn't going to post.
Could it be that the (current) left is generally self-selected as a group of people that could be said to have 'thin-skin'?
If a single woman has some strength of character and she hears some kind of offensive speech, she's not going to immediately demand censorship by the government. Then that woman can go on and listen and research more right-wing arguments once past the shock of 'somebody disagrees with my teacher, the talking heads on TV, journalists, etc'. And she can become right-wing.
If she doesn't have character, then she can stay within the safe confines of the media-approved opinions, and she'll cowardly switch opinions every few months when the newest update of progressive beliefs comes in.
It's a fragile coalition as well, for example your Other includes TERFs and transpeople, or LGBT and muslims, or open borders supporters and Ukrainian nationalists...
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You aren't wrong that it's understandable why The Other, as you put it, mostly wouldn't want to participate here. But what solution do you propose? I think it's appropriate for boardgaming and RPG forums to have rules saying "no Holocaust deniers" or "You cannot say black people have low IQs," because even if there is some intelligent debate to be had there, it's so contentious and inflammatory that it would eclipse what everyone is ostensibly there for. The failure mode in those places is that the consensus opinion settles on not only "No Holocaust denial" but also "No opinions at all that would upset a leftist social justice activist."
And it's not that leftists are particularly censorious compared to rightists. It's just that almost all the hobby and public discourse spaces are dominated by leftists. Righties who are so fond of pointing out that leftists ban all wrongthink are kidding themselves if they think their side ever was, or would be, more tolerant of "free speech" by the other side. (Some are even open about this, and merely bemoan the fact that they happen to be - currently - on the losing side.)
So here, we allow all the disreputable and shady and inflammatory opinions that are too toxic for other places, and the inevitable side effect of that is that people who find those views too toxic are not going to stick around and engage with them.
Either you have actual free speech (which means putting up with ideologues full of hate for their outgroup, who will drive everyone in their outgroup off) or you don't, in which case you have a forum that basically allows only one point of view and will polarize against any form of ideological diversity.
Once you've reached "no Holocaust deniers" you've already set your feet on the slippery slope known as "viewpoint discrimination". The last conceivable step is "no politics except directly related to <hobby>", and that (and the previous one of "no politics at all") both depend on moderators not willing to agree with or fall for the whole "Your views are politics and mine are just common decency" thing.
Here's the thing about slippery slopes: they exist, but every rule is a "slippery slope" of some kind. Maybe you think a hobby forum shouldn't draw the line at Holocaust denial. Fine, let the Holocaust deniers have free reign (and drive off almost everyone else). How about white supremacists talking about how we should send all the niggers back to Africa? Would that be okay? If not, then whoops, there you are practicing "viewpoint discrimination" again.
Even here, we don't allow people to actually call other people niggers. And we've gotten complaints about that.
Yes, that's on the slippery slope too. We know this because we've seen it. This always reaches at least as far as "your viewpoint implies something which could be harmful to me and mine, thus amounts to an attack on me, and therefore should be banned" covering a wide variety of ordinary right-wing viewpoints.
Yes, it is on the slippery slope. My point is that you can't decide you will never put any restrictions in place that are on a "slippery slope" or you cannot have restrictions at all. Do you want a place with zero restrictions? We've talked about this many times before. We know what those places look like.
Everything else is just negotiating where the line will be.
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I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that. That's certainly not what I was saying here.
This explanation assumes that leftist constituencies have a unique monopoly on being emotionally/materially invested in political issues, which is simply not true.
It's easy to find examples of anti-white/anti-male rhetoric in leftist spaces (I really did try my best to join the discussion on radfem blogs in the early '10s where most commenters thought that men were uniquely and irredeemably violent, that they were the cause of all social problems, that women should live apart from them and reduce the male population as much as possible, but I usually didn't last long before getting banned). Or just pick any hot button issue, unrestricted immigration from Central/South America, trans surgeries for kids, AA/DEI programs that explicitly take job offers and college admissions spots from whites and give them to non-whites... these are not abstract intellectual exercises, people perceive these things as very real and direct threats to their way of life. If rightists are still willing to entertain leftist viewpoints on these issues, then that does in fact indicate a higher baseline propensity among rightists to listen to and engage with opposing viewpoints. Blacks/women/immigrants are not the only ones who have ever felt "vulnerable".
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