Political Games - Where the fuck’s the reset button?

I stumbled across an article today on a new website called Liberals Only. Now being a liberal myself I was immediately interested. The idea of not having to deal with people that disagree with me is… interesting. I’ve been on my fair share of debate forums, and have engaged in many a heated debate. I don’t actually visit any of these forums anymore because I found it difficult to have an intelligent conversation with people that really just wanted to call me names and let me know how wrong I was… just because I didn’t agree with them. That gets annoying, and I have better things to do than deal with that crap.

So… let’s get back to this website. Anthony Levensalor, the creator of the website says that it is a community for,

“liberals and progressives who want a decent conversation and debate”

One of my first thoughts was that this is going to give everyone on the right an excuse to say: “Oh liberals claim they will fight for your right of free speech, but look at them now.” I know they’ll say it because I’ve heard it a million times. As a “liberal” I believe that I should be better than those at the FreeRepublic. I feel that I should allow everyone to speak their mind. Now if people are going to come on this website and spam it or continually call names and generally be a hateful douche… then your ideas and thoughts won’t get much respect from me because you don’t take the time to respect mine. But I will not ban someone just because they believe something different. I try to question everything, and I shy away from any group or organization that represses dissenting opinions.

Now, some people might say that this is just an effort to eliminate trolls and whatnot from interupting an intelligent reasonable discussion. That seems understandable. But I have one serious problem with this. The creator of the LiberalsOnly site says:

“Liberals Only is dedicated to making this a site for intelligent debate among people intelligent enough to know how to debate.”

Okay. So I understand that you don’t want hateful annoying trolls interupting your discussion, but… to say that you are creating a site for “liberals only” and then say that it’s a place for intelligent “debate”… ummmm, sorry… but… not buying it. First of all, this is making a very bad assumption. He’s presuming that Republicans and other conservatives aren’t intelligent enough for a serious debate. Granted there are some really annoying people out there, but I don’t think this means you should damn everyone with that particular viewpoint just because a few annoying assholes with too much free time like to call you a “commie.” I know some pretty damn smart conservatives, and even though I don’t agree with them, I cannot deny the cold hard truth that a lot of them are probably smarter than I am… at least as far as GPA goes. So I don’t think it’s completely fair to say that conservatives aren’t allowed in because someone might troll. Believe it or not there are liberal trolls out there too.

I mean, it’s only natural for us to be attracted to people that agree with us or respect our ideas. And admittedly I do it too. *gasp* I know… I talk to people that agree with me. Wow. But the difference is that I also talk to people that disagree with me, and when I am confronted with an opposing viewpoint that I do not fully understand I challenge people to prove their point to me. I want people to make me question what I believe, because for me, that is the only way I can make myself a better, more intelligent person. Now I understand why this appeals to some people. It’s nice to have someone say “hey… you’re right,” every once in awhile. But that’s not debate! If I have a conversation where myself and another completely random individual that let’s call “Steve”, and in this conversation “Steve” and I do nothing but say “you’re right, blah blah blah…” Guess what? That’s not a debate! We’re having a discussion, yes. We’re having an intelligent conversation free of hateful comments, yes. But we are not having a debate. But even so, there are many varying viewpoints within the liberal community (which might explain why they can’t ever get shit done). So… that might lead to a debate within the liberal community right? But really, if you are supressing the ideas of many people, than is it really the kind of meaningful debate that it should be? And who gets to decide what’s a liberal idea and what isn’t? Something like socialism is pretty clearly liberal, but not everything is that clearcut. And what about people that hold varying beliefs from the left and the right? Are they kicked out because they aren’t completely liberal?… Okay you get the point.

As a liberal I say, let’s be better than this. There are a lot of conservative websites banning liberals from their forums… hell I just got banned from Stop the ACLU not even 3 or 4 days ago, for doing nothing other than disagreeing with them. But that shouldn’t be what we do. I’m better than that, and as liberals we’re supposed to stand up for the free expression of ideas, not the supression of them.

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” ~ Avram Noam Chomsky

~Justin

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