On 29 Sep 2011
in
OMG! Shrek is dead!,
ahasuerus99 said:
The south is nowhere near the most racist part of the country. Boston is notoriously racist and is almost certainly as racist as the south (see the fairly recent ESPN article about athletes' perceptions of racism). Alabama and Mississippi both have extremely large African-American populations, so they would be stupid states for racists to choose to live in. Have you ever been to a city in the south? Memphis is half African-American, Atlanta is over a third African-American. Over forty percent of the African Americans in Congress represent southern states. I'm not sure what more the south should do to prove it is no longer the confederacy than electing African Americans to represent them in congress. Racial harmony in the south is better than it has ever been. Is it perfect? No, nowhere near it. But when you consider the rampant racism against Latinos in much of the southwest, or the racism of many in the northeast against Haitians, or even the racism against those of Asian descent that I saw all the time in Seattle, I think you are pushing it to make a claim that the south is currently more racist than anywhere else. Are there no racists in San Francisco? http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=b5df7611cb906045c8c64ab91b4fbcc2 If your claim of racism in the Tea Party is true, the Tea Party should be very popular in San Francisco.
So, does the new Be Nice or Leave policy apply to the use of teabagger or not? Because there is page after page of uses of that word if you search the forums. You were talking about people avoiding the forums because of ShrekGrinch, and I don't doubt it is true. I always felt he was more of a liability than a help when discussing issues. But the attitudes of many long-time posters here and the animosity towards the Tea Party is just as causeless as ShrekGrinch's view of Obama, with common accusations that the Tea Partiers are teabaggers and Fascists.
Patrick, I also don't really see how on the one hand you ask for donations to keep this site alive, while on the other you make blanket statements such as "The liberals try to talk about facts and the conservatives couldn't care less about facts." You also literally compared conservatives to dogs. Why should I open up my wallet to donate to your site when you make such statements?
I was saddened when you broadened the scope of this site from real estate to opinions on health care, but I understood that it was important to you, and that it is your site. But you long ago jumped the shark on the politics section, and have broadened it from just health care to posting articles dismissive of conservatives in general. Again, why should I donate money to a site that believes I am an idiot for my political beliefs, and shares links to reflect that belief on a near daily basis.
I also don't understand how you are capable of holding mutually contradictory thoughts. How is that conservatives have no interest in facts, but liberals do, yet of the links you post, the ones most interested in facts and mathematics rather than just conjecture are to opinion pieces written by non-liberals such as Karl Denninger and Mike Shedlock? For example, Denninger and Shedlock both believe that the healthcare law is terrible for the country and must be stopped. Are you arguing that both of these men, who provide far more facts to back up their conjectures than anyone on this site, don't care about facts?
In short, I believe that this site has become a haven of hypocrisy, and that saddens me. What was once a wonderful place to read about the housing bubble has become an echo chamber of liberal ideology, and the posters have convinced themselves that they are somehow a brilliant elite that can make blanket statements about conservatives without any attempt to back those statements up with facts, while simultaneously accusing the other side of not having any facts. And all the while, every time I try to have a political conversation I risk being called a teabagger or a Fascist because I interpret the constitution differently, and have different beliefs regarding entitlements.
Perhaps this is the nature of the internet itself, that everything good eventually devolves into a shouting match. And I am the first to admit that my side is equally at fault (as much as I dislike being called names, I dislike even more having my arguments hijacked by my supposed allies with hyperbolic arguments or character assassinations), but I don't see it getting any better. Starting to read this thread had given me some hope that an attempt was going to be made to police the forums, somewhat like Denninger's policy that any claim not backed by actual demonstrable facts is cause for banning (strange that a site frequented mostly by people of a more conservative persuasion actually requires fact despite your claim that only liberals are interested in facts), but by the end of the thread we are back to conjecture that the Tea Party is more racist than the general population with nothing to back the claim but potential google searches and a strange logical jump based on geographical racism from fifty years ago.
