Boilrig is the lifeblood of this forum (THINKPIECE) - Polidicks

Ben Shapiro OBLITERATES Boilrig >>>>> he will never recover <<<<< I think everyone recognises that FP has shrunk over the past few years. Maybe it was Newpunch, maybe it was the rise of reddit, maybe it was the non-integration of Rust players, maybe it was all of those things, but FP is not the bustling metropolis that it was at the start of the decade. Meanwhile politically speaking, the Western world has become more polarised than it used to be. Centrism has supplanted socialism as the political 'dirty word' of the day as people are pressed to take sides, and people increasingly see their political affiliation as the most important part of their identity. As a result, online communities are more like echo chambers than ever, and algorithms often ensure that if you disagree with the hivemind, your post won't even be seen. Step out of line and you'll be 'downvoted' to the bottom of the page, or just straight up banned. The main thrust of the content is often memes and jokes at the expense of the political 'other'. There are still debate forums and subreddits out there, but to me those places always feel stuffy and impersonal. There's no room for joking or humanity. Everyone came there for a serious political debate, and that's what they're going to stick to. The biggest thing I value about FP and PD is that to an extent, we do both. Threads can devolve into ridiculous memes and jokes, or they can spawn pages of detailed policy debate - and often both at the same time. I don't want to be part of a serious debate forum, but I also don't want to be stuck in a liberal circlejerk echo chamber. I like that FP manages to keep things loose and relaxed at times, while still expecting people to bring evidence to the table to support their arguments. Being part of a forum where the overwhelming majority of users disagrees with you is something I don't think I could do. I can't imagine spending my time on a conservative forum constantly trying to argue the case against Brexit. But if we didn't have users to play that role, this place would just be a bunch of people talking about how smart they all are, and it would be boring. So thank you to @Boilrig , and to all the other political minorities on this forum. We'll argue with you, we'll disagree with you, we'll even make fun of you, but we need you. There are less of you than us, but that means you all individually count for so much more than any of us. That's why if Boilrig ever holds a referendum on whether he should leave or remain a member of FP, I'll campaign vigorously for remain. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/165/e85501e9-0a40-42b0-9d93-d6b970609030/image.png

I've missed your news shitposts, Smurfy. Glad to see you finally back in proper form

This is why I posted that 'Serious Debate with Trump Supporters' thread a few months ago, but it devolved into people being insulting and dumb rating spam towards our <5 right wing people all the same. I totally agree with what you're saying though... To be honest, this forum already feels like an echo chamber on most issues, but I do think Trump is ridiculous enough that it doesn't normally bother me much. I think Brexit is more debatable than Trump due to there being a lot of truth to the sovereignty argument, however I do think Boilrig is incredibly overzealous and tends to sound so fervent in his beliefs that I almost think he's trolling sometimes. I never see @Sgman91 post here anymore, and I hope we don't lose people like Boilrig for the same reason, but I do think it must be very demoralising to constantly be bombarded with dumb ratings. It's probably the same way that my opinions on gun control in this forum often get me totally misunderstood and people are so over-sensitive to minor criticism on it that both sides are totally misconstrued and it just becomes a shit flinging match.

If you wanna use examples of people who don't post any more, maybe don't use someone who was shitposting, whining about people rating him dumb, had people give him advice and then proceeded to ignore all of it before whining more about how people don't like him.

There honestly aren't many right wing posters here at all, so it's difficult to think of examples, but this post by Sgman from my thread that tried to spur on cordial debate should highlight why it's beneficial to engage with people on the other side. We all have bad days sometimes, including me, and you'd probably be more likely to get frustrated and lash out if 98% of this forum was against you on everything. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/242634/2f92abcb-5ec1-4d12-b5b8-0927f8822e9e/image.png

I mean to still support Trump, even mere months after he took office, means there's either a lack of logic or clear thought in play, or something more insidious such as genuine racism. He has accomplished none of the positive things he said he'd do(more money for the lower and middle classes for example, not that it would have ever happened under even a competent Republican), and has since been shown to have literal concentration camps, has done his best to tear down the guardposts in place to limit his personal power, and has turned the US into a laughing stock. There is no debate to be had with Trump supporters, it will always devolve into name calling because they literally refuse to move an inch on anything, even when proven wrong with actual facts, which is incredibly frustrating.

The problem is that they think the exact same way about us. That girl who ended up leaving the Westboro Baptist Church only did so because somebody on Twitter actually treated her with dignity and respect, causing her views to change significantly over time. That image showing Sgman's views on transgenderism liberalise as a result of discussions here also bolster my point. Finally, my anti-gun stance has softened significantly since spending some time reading opposing arguments on this forum. Debate can work, even with Trump supporters - but it should be polite and not hostile if you expect anything but further polarisation and entrenchment.

We do have a few right wing posters, it's just that quite a few of them are gibbering idiots with a victim complex at best. Someone like Sgman doesn't get to whine about this shit. You can't jump to Trump's defense every single time while also proclaiming you don't like him. You can't cry 'oh, if you defend the right, you must be evil' when you constantly do just that and deflect with 'oh, I just think we need to look at both sides'. You can't bitch about how good discussions are gone when you yourself keep on fucking around with semantics, like clockwork, while ignoring legitimate questions that are thrown your way. Sg's shitposting constantly derailed threads and he has nobody but himself to blame for whatever nonsense he considers himself a victim of.

if you decided to ignore reality because it doesn't align with your political beliefs then I'd say it's your own goddamned fault if you find that "everyone is against you"

If boilrig leaves the forum the We can add an additional 350 million bans to the National Ban System and we can discuss a brand new posting deal with milkandcooki.

I prescribed to this idea in the past, and was very serious about it, but we're in a new world pal. In the past, Republicans always had shit views but for the most part never tried to warp the world around those views, they just refused to budge. Now, Trump and his supporters manufacture news so that they don't have to debate or come to terms with the reality of the situation. Don't like abortion? Make up news articles saying that Planned Parenthood murders newborn babies. Don't like gun control in any form? Say the Dems are trying to take all guns from your voters. Don't like the bad PR you're getting for literal concentration camps? Say that they're actually an improvement over Obama's facilities and the kids are being cared for very well(as you lose thousands of the children, and god knows how many more are being abused). They don't get civility anymore because they have officially left modern civilization. You wanna go back to 1940 so bad, better prepare to get treated as the fascists you are.

If you start the Change.org petition, I'll build the misleading bus ad.

the two are intertwined, it wouldn't be reddit anymore without it it's a good system to find content (news, memes, updates) but it's hilariously bad for any kind of discussion

Well when GOP/UKIP voter agrees with actually taking away the rights and freedom of a large portion of posters here, dont expect them to be friendly to it in response. You can paint it as "just supporting Trump", but it doesnt change the outcome of what this political camp is doing, today. Youre free to support theses parties, youre not free from criticism and consequences to what you do and say. If youre supporting a party that's actively working to take away my rights, how am I supposed to have patience for that. Ultra rights feelings being hurt because people disagree when they say awful things isn't the tragedy, and a forum isn't an echo chamber for disagreeing with the ultra right wing turn GOP and UKIP took. It's just having basic sanity and compassion.

Can't people just agree to disagree, politically speaking? It's always gonna be like this. Forever. You might as well try to always stay polite, even the other side sounds dumb and ignorant (which will also always be the case and goes both ways). If you truly want to make a better world, you should co-habit and understand your neighbor, not incite war against him and half of the country. This political hostility, intolerance, is why politics are so fucked nowadays. So yeah, peace and love bro.

It doesn't help when most of the time when someone swings right around here it's usually for trolling

If you just have upvotes, it's pure populism.

it's all good in theory until someone says that slavery and genocide is a valid political stance

This, tbh. I convinced someone to leave turning point USA at a turning point booth recently. Most of them don't actually believe the insane shit they just think that the insane shit is the best shot they have at having their beliefs integrated into society (I.e. conservative values). Most of them ignore the facist shit and if you respectfully point it out and how it leads to the radicalized leftists that they hate, the tone changes.

Well if someone's saying that, it's either trolling or extremism and those shouldn't be taken seriously. I'm talking about the more-or-less average rightist thinker, like Boilrig or whoever else.

Sgman really brought that on himself. Many of us did try to politely engage him but it accomplished exactly shit all. And when we tried to bring these issues to his attention, as I personally did on several occasions, he outright stated it wasn't his responsibility to deal with it. So we just stopped trying and resorted to running him out of threads as quickly as possible before he could derail them. If he'd made any efforts to actually improve the situation when given a chance, he wouldn't gotten ostracized like he did.

I said "good", not "great" when I need to find some good consolidated info on a new update for a game I don't mind too much checking reddit but for anything else I avoid it like the plague also it annoys me to no end that it's basically impossible to find a thread there once it drops off of the front page

To a certain extent, I think what you say is totally fair, but I'm more speaking to the psychology of debate than anyone specific - Sgman's views liberalising was just my way of exemplifying the benefits of polite discourse.

If you're just talking in general then yes, I more or less agree with you. But once someone has proven they're completely unreasonable then it's really completely on them, especially if people have repeatedly tried to get through to them in reasonable ways. You shouldn't be obligated to tolerate someone who's arguing in bad faith and has a history of doing so. They're already making the discussion toxic. But then you get other conservative users like Grenadiac, Albert Wesker, and so on who are completely reasonable and are willing to concede points if someone makes a convincing argument or defend their points with well-reasoned arguments and references. They seem to constantly get overlooked but they provide for quite a bit of actually productive discussion, even on the occasions those discussions don't change anyone's minds. Even joeyskylynx or however his name is spelled, despite the fact people often have a fairly bad opinion of him due to his borderline conspiracy theorist views, produces more productive discussion than Sgman or Boilrig most of the time.

Having ratings control the flow of information is, in my opinion, and inherently broken system. Doesn't matter the ratings or the extent of the control. That's why I like Facepunch's ratings. A post can have 1000 funnies, 1000 dumbs, or no ratings at all. Its position in the forum is the exact same in each case. The ratings should inform, not control.

He just gave you an example of someone from WBC changing their mind, similar things have been seen with KKK members and their ilk. Not saying the success rates with these people are very high, but painting all of Trump's supporters as fascists whose minds can never be changed is also just idiotic. Most of these people voted for Obama, or McCain, or Romney, or Clinton or a litany of others, politicians - while not without fault - that are far removed from fascism. The idea that people's minds can never be changed again is just hogwash.

well, for some very specific content there's nothing like it for instance /r/gatekeeping/, you just can't find all this stuff in the same place like this anywhere else so I mean you're right in a way, for a majority of things it's not exactly the best way to find stuff especially if the subreddit is about more than one specific topic

Hate is exhausting, so when your entire ideology expresses hate, and only hate, it is much easier to convince someone in the KKK or WBG to turn their backs on it, than it is to convince a Trump supporter to read actual news. Trump supporters aren't walking around virtually all day seething with rage, unlike the KKK or WBG, instead it's more of a slow burn for them. They go about their normal lives, and eventually pop onto their chosen totally legit news sites and read a headline that pisses them off, then they go back to their lives; rince and repeat. They've been told to hate the mainstream media, so you can't use 90% of all legit news sources out there to convince them to change their minds, they've been told to hate basically anyone who isn't right wing and have even been given convenient terms to dehumanise them(cuck, soyboy, libtard, etc) so you can't appeal to them with empathy since they hate you, and many of them aren't in the greatest economic or social position so they hate the world as well. These things culminate into an awful mess of barriers that make it unbelievably difficult to get through to them in any meaningful way.

Ignoring the fact that this is some kind of pseudo psychological analysis, you do realise you started out by saying really hateful people (WBC, KKK) can't keep hating because it's exhausting, and then in contrast to this you mention Trump supporters who apparently also hate everything and that is why you can never convince them of anything. I'm sorry but I have to say that I find myself pretty unconvinced by your take on this.

People may not believe it but at some point I was probably for the UK remaining in the EU and maybe at some level I still believe in that especially for maintaining the status-quo, job security etc. However I did not enjoy seeing the path the EU wished to go down and what it will take for those countries to let go of certain controls (taxation, budgetary, military) to achieve the aim of the EU as combined state. It is one of those things that requires everyone to go all in to work, but who would realistically want to give away their own power. I've personally never considered the UK to be part of Europe, it has always been a foot outside the door with its own affairs, so I saw no real big loss there apart from voting at the EU, but honestly, the EU has a direction its going in and even a country with the vote share the size of the UK was never going to change that, the UK could merely slow it down. But of what I said above about believing maybe Remaining was better, people need to take the Referendum into account. I did a write up about this a while back about how it was quite a rare event and examples of how other countries have done non-binding referendum before but treated them as binding, coupled with how it was framed, pushed by the government, it is legitimate and should weight highly into peoples views. People quote me on the 'but you said it was anit-democratic to have a referendum', its anti-democratic to have another referendum on the same topic in such a short time frame and to actually use the Brexit card to throw away the ability to do referendums in the future. To the general public, you've just told them to fuck off and actually make the concern and/or hatred of the EU even stronger as everyone on here should know the track record of 'vote again' referendums that have happened across the continent. We're talking a population that find the political class increasingly distant who then turn around and say 'sorry chaps, you voted wrong', you end up with more people voting leave next time just out of spite of the ruling class and to 'stick one to 'em'. The government, regardless of party in, even Labour, will never bring along another referendum on Brexit, at least for the next 10-20-30 years, and to everyones disappointment, I see them voting on whatever deal is put forward as they know the alternative is no-deal as time would have run out. To the arguments I put forward on economic issues, they are simple, the UK has one of the worlds biggest economies and its own currency, coupled with the City of London and the UK's meme dependencies, put it in a much better position to ride out the issues than any other country to be quite honest. Will it face issues, yes. Is it going to suffer?, probably in some way, however saying just the UK will suffer in this globalised world is simply ignorant. Are all the banks going to up and leave? No, refer to one of my posts from a while back, New York will win the most out of this, not European financial centers. Is dropping the tax rate to the lowest in the G20 a good idea? Probably not, but it will technically attempt to jump start the economy. People have said, and even recently that Scotland would somehow do fine on its own, but the UK wouldn't. But at the same don't accept that a border through the towns would be erected as this isn't a special NI situation, and that Scotland has nothing in the way of its own currency, military etc, not even a guarantee to enter the EU, because being the worst deficit in the OECD simply isn't going to get the sign off from the 27, as well as their industries and actually livelihoods being funded by the UK if any of you read that latest report about their monetary situation. Leaving the EU is not joke, even in a situation of no-deal, life will continue, it will be a rough over the next couple of years, however not enough to override a referendum. If people really think the UK was as incompetent as people say it is on these forums, it simply wouldn't exist right now, parties come and go, referendums happen, but government... government is forever. Enough about Brexit, some may not understand my views, and I've had this discussion a lot with people from overseas, and it comes down to life in my country. We are a rather built up country, in the middle of nowhere, a population of roughly 4.9 million, no constitution and basically one big farm with a small tech sector and a large central government. Over here we are in the middle of a housing crisis, homeless crisis and climate change is more or less sinking our future etc. So that's why I hold my view on immigration, political change, referendums, the economy etc, not so much as what people consider me trolling. So @smurfy and others, I love this place, it offers nearly every view point and probably a majority of the time I agree with them, I just may not post that. Trump, Brexit, radical global change, downsizing of global institutions, not to mention the next global market crash, its going to be very interesting times ahead.