Echo Chamber?...I think NOT!

[FCD]

What this website is, is freedom of expression, freedom of speech...something sorely missing from our society for so long!

Can you disagree?  Absolutely!!  Violently disagree with me...BUT, bring facts, as I am informed as you should be too!

Debate?  I love debate!  I don't call names, and I don't hyphenate political  candidates names.  I call democrats, "democrats", and I call biden, "biden".  Yes, i didn't capitalize his name only because in my opinion he doesn't deserve even that much respect.  biden was the worst president this country has ever seen in it's 250 year history...hand's down.  He deserves no capitalization...ever.

biden will go down in history as the person who destroyed the democratic party, and rightfully so.  He showed the party allegiance in the last 22 minutes.  "Me, My family, and ONLY ME". 

Brett Hume of FOX News said yesterday..."It will take a long time, if EVER, for the American people to forget these pardons".  Bad taste in America's mouth???  YOU DAMN BET it is!!!

The legacy of joe biden is the legacy of failure of this democratic democracy...x 500.  No one will ever go SO LOW.

America is ASHAMED of you, Joe Biden; I know I sure am!  You didn't represent me, or anyone even like me.  May you ROT in your failing, sad, years.  You were a disappointment to AMERICA!

[KKLoco]

ECHO....ECHo....ECho....Echo.....

I can't dispute one single statement that you made.

Fuck, where's all the trolls when you're looking for good debate?

[19Bones79]

If you're not allowed to question something or disagree then you are being controlled. 

Speaking of biden, remember this?






I wonder how many people hung onto those words?

I try not to let the spice simply flow, but fuck the Biden clan and their handlers from here to eternity.

A pox. 

A cancerous one.

[Nugget]

Sadly, I'm seeing a doubling down of liberals on different sites and peopleI know. The MS news is already giving them their talking points; "biden was right to save his family and J6 committee from targeted revenge by convicted criminal Trump because they've done nothing wrong!"

Biden said a Trump attack would leave them in finamcial ruin and tarnish their reputations, and liberals are blind to the fact that biden did that to Trump for four years.

The level of stupid dropped a bit when kamalala was offered as a viable candidate (LMAO) but putting out the dumpster fire biden et al created can't happen withouut some pain and you know the media is going to be all over what a horrible job Trump is doing.

I just hope the level of stupid doesn't rise back up to level it would take to elect another marxist, faschist, communistic regime.

The news tonight was interviewing people who are terrified because Trump is going to take the citizenship away from children born in the US to illegal immigrants. That's NOT what his EO would do, and reporters KNOW that, but they have to feed the stupid voters if they wish to ever regain control.

Suckerberg and Bezos make me sick; game playing billionaires just wanting to stay in the good seats on the money train.

I'd better quit before I go off on a rant....lol

[MykeNukem]

ECHO....ECHo....ECho....Echo.....

I can't dispute one single statement that you made.

Fuck, where's all the trolls when you're looking for good debate?

They're all wondering wtf just happened 

Like taking a kick to the balls, it takes a few seconds to catch your breath ..

[Ksihkehe]

I'm going to be weaving a bit, so bear with me as it does relate to the OP broadly.

As I mentioned before I had shared with some others that a Trump win seemed like a strong possibility. It looked like maybe being the expectation of those really pulling the strings a fair way out from the election and that seemed to become a near certainty with the first debate. It's hard to tell how incompetent organizations are, so sometimes things can be just pure stupidity. Other times things don't really fit that model and can't explained purely through incompetence. Biden may not have known he was going to get destroyed, plenty of the siloed morons in various positions of power may not have known, the sycophants that merely believe what they're told to definitely didn't know, but plenty of us did and there is no way that every level of their entire political infrastructure missed it. When you add Harris as the replacement it adds another layer that I find impossible to believe is pure incompetence or even the kind of hubris that they are in control such that they could elect a sack of potatoes.

While in that conjecture I was also considering the general global political atmosphere. The authoritarian and anti-human agenda is not just a left wing thing, not really. It's a much bigger beast and the legs it stands on are things like censorship, thought manipulation, and broad control of individual behaviors... the latter depending on the former two for greater effect. Under censorship we can include information mafias like some branches of academia, networks, corporations, that control internal and external information flows in a way that effectively censors whole clusters of ideas. They don't just censor information, but embargo certain analytical methods and interpretations of even the existing information that hasn't been censored. Then the social controls of "isms" come in too. Racism, sexism, and on to all these phobias, and phobic accusations. Another arm of censorship are these tactics to stigmatize wrong-think both socially and morally. This whole cartel is really just a new culture, void of consistent standards and rife with shifting definitions at the whim of those that control it.

Under a Trump administration on the heels of the overt corruption, years of intentionally pushing radical subversions of moral ethics, and the coddling the most irrational and dysfunctional members of society, I can see where the goals of the authoritarians and anti-human megalomaniacs are quite likely to be advanced. They have subverted the press and media to such a degree that the true sentiment of the general masses has been totally obscured. The hardcore TDS crowd public can easily be marginalized by press embargo and the political figureheads of that movement already are seeing that their support structure crumble. In fighting will get worse under mounting legal pressures.

There is a primed and ready base of further support for Trump and all the press needs to do is pivot slowly. Even as we're allegedly already hitting back against these WEF types, we also have advancement of their goals with things like new attempts at outlawing anti-Semitism. A seemingly reasonable thing to many people if we were talking about a semantic definition of the term. It's not the definition as codified and applied in the real world. The real world is defining this as criticizing Israel or criticizing even a single Jewish person if they are part of whichever group feels the need to eliminate dissent. It only works for an information cartel, left, right, or whatever niche, so long as they have sufficient social power to enforce it. Alternative perspectives on ancient history are now racist. Criticism of pharmaceutical companies or vaccines is anti-Semitic. Support for any sort of orderly immigration policy is racist. Hell, in the UK arresting pedophiles is racist and wanting to deport them is right-wing extremism, which is probably the most insane thing yet. This kind of tactic is used on the right too and as sentiment shifts those that support these kinds of things will come out of the woodwork as they always do.

With a hard right turn in general sentiment, with neocons eager for expansionism and many looking for what amounts to revenge on those that cheered as the left wing embraced the anti-human agenda, there's plenty of room for advancement of anti-freedom policy dressed as helping further those two goals. There's the potential that within that new general sentiment it gets broad enough support for bad things to go through without much complaint.

I think Trump is a bump in the road at best. Even if Trump manages to slow the subversion agenda a bit, there are sufficient points of failure to ensure Trump has to prioritize and also compromise. The new financial shift they are talking about isn't a shift into the future, but shifting out of a past they destroyed. There is no plan for fixing it, just moving it to a phase that advances that same anti-human agenda in new ways. The most vulnerable people with the least resources will be suffering significant degradation of their standard of living during this. They have been losing for a long time, but it's harder to see when the general movement is upward and there's a press that does marketing rather than reporting. While we gained plastic junk and consumer tech goods within more of our price ranges, wages and other metrics have all declined versus the economic growth on paper. It's stretched too far and this depression will be the first time in quite a long time that people will have to confront exactly what it means. The prosperity has been hollow, mostly talking points. Our infrastructure, from digital to physical, was built largely with our taxes and we now pay companies and government agencies for the pleasure of using them as they further decay.

The economy is one problem, however bad you want to believe it will be. There are systemic issues with infrastructure too though. That's everything to physical, to staffing, to logistics both internally and externally. I think that in many cases there isn't a solution because there aren't enough people that understand the grand scales, interplay between different critical parts of that infrastructure, with the required skills to perform at ground level, and nobody that knows how to either find those people or train them. Complex systems that are robust enough to survive significant pressures and faults have to be maintained properly. When they aren't then you become less and less robustly protected from cascading failures. A ship hits a critical bridge blocking region movement of goods both into the port and across the bridge. Sucks, but you have workarounds. You add in peripheral failures. You have rail system failures, maybe a fuel crisis, and manufacturing issues with parts for the big rigs. As they start to compound they have broader impacts on other parts of the infrastructure. We already have what a true first world country in 2025 should be considered total infrastructure insufficiency, putting us was too close to collapses. Even if those collapses are currently temporary they are not being mitigated in planning now and will get worse. They will have greater downstream consequences. It's going to take a lot of attention to deal with along with everything else, while also trying to dismantle the US portion of what is effectively a uni-party corruption ring spanning the globe.

While the radical left ideology is easy to point at as the cause of much of this current state of affairs, I think it's important to consider that this anti-human agenda has not been thwarted in the least by the right wing being in control in the past. Some have even advanced that agenda more than their left wing counterparts in other branches of government. Bush and Cheney come to mind.

What I see as the true enemy are all that support the legs that hold that beast up. Censorship under Bush is not really any different than censorship under Obama. Reasons, tactics, intensity, may all change, but there are benefits to this being within the accepted norms of our culture for those with that anti-human agenda. Dropping bombs on civilians, killing indiscriminately, furthers that agenda. The US, Russia, China, Israel, Ukraine, Syria, and everywhere else where it has become acceptable for whatever reason, it advances that agenda entirely independent of political beliefs and structures. It is a subversion of ethics and morals, not political ideologies. It infects the ethics and morals, without regard for the political platforms. It's this very subversion that allows a party with a platform that is overtly against corporate profiteering and war to do the bidding of billionaires and hedge funds to advance those very things. The threat doesn't disappear with Trump, but many will be fooled into thinking politics was the real problem and supporting him will fix it.

Forums that aren't censored take way the ability of these forces to have line-item veto over the ideas that circulate among the citizens. The short form presentation of new media causes disconnects between ideas. You can't have sweeping narratives that bring together many complicated ideas easily. Your body of work, as a collective of short form posts, can be line-item vetoed to shit. Bit by bit, by censors using everything from generic platform guidelines to specific rules about particular words or content, sweeping narratives are erased. That remaining is just slogans and mottos floating in cognitive vacuums, void of nuance and range. The constantly evolving rules, both social and technical, encourage brevity as well. One slip and your efforts are rendered null and void by deletion or a flood of accusations about some offense by activist drones.

There is no feeder system for developing strong thought leaders in this atmosphere, at least not outside political activism. They're almost all toxic, teaching dishonest rhetorical tactics that embrace lies, omissions, and use of subversive tools that poison the well of open discussion. The people running these forums increasingly are either just cleaning up digital litter or enforcing the growing list of rules ultimately handed down by the same ideological cabal that have overseen the intentional demise of forums. The Internet has been subverted, which I'm also now seeing happen with Bitcoin in almost the same way. It starts as a pathway of freedom from government, banking cartels, censorship, and slowly gets subverted. Bitcoin culture now cheers bank adoption and the creation of ETFs, futures, and leverage, which will lead to further abuse of derivatives trading and put the banks and hedge funds in control of prices. Since Bitcoin has no physical resource that ostensibly requires certifiable existence of those assets, there is even less of a check on that power. They already have millions of fake paper contracts on physical assets, BTC will be even easier to subvert. Not only will auditors needs to know derivatives and accounting, but blockchain forensics  as well. The Internet is seeing the late stages of this sort of ethical and moral subversion against the core ideals that made it appealing in the first place.

I don't know if it can all be turned around. These forums are niche and always were pretty niche. Even when there was a much greater abundance they were still pretty niche as far as how much of the population was using them. I think one of the best ways to fight, on the few remaining forums like this, is to put things out there. Put it out there like it's worth putting out there. Be as long as you have to to get a message across. Be free explore it in ways that can't be done in a single paragraph or on a controlled forum. There is no reason a forum post can't be just as good as a short investigative documentary on a streaming service. There is no reason a forum post has to paint between narrow lines to deliver on one simplified common denominator. It doesn't have to stay tight to avoid accidentally breaking some rule somewhere and having it be grounds to dismiss everything whole cloth or send it to the trash bin.

To hell with them if they can't read well-written and thoughtful materials because it's more than two paragraphs or complex or a radically different perspective. They can go plenty of other places if they can't consume the ideas here and chew on them. You probably don't want to hear what they have to say anyway. If they can't be bothered to read or consume complex things as a general rule, then they probably aren't going to be writing much of value. I have known lots of great readers that never spent much time writing or became great at it, but I have rarely if ever encountered a great writer that didn't put in a whole lot of time reading.

I will do my best to ensure that those that want to subvert discussion with the tactics that advance the anti-human, anti-social, anti-freedom agenda, are quickly recognized and neutralized. That doesn't mean banning opinions, but halting tactics. Produce the content you want. If people show up and try to start using these tactics, don't respond in kind if they're being disruptive to the flow of discussion. On this forum people are entitled to participate, but they're not entitled to being taken seriously if they behave in ways contrary to the principals of free and open discussion. They're not entitled to your attention. They're not entitled to have their personal morality, often just some political brain worm they're infected with rather than an organic belief, enforced on others. They are free to discuss it and convince others to adopt it. Free and open discussion doesn't include lies or ignoring things that are inconvenient, either. Free discussion isn't the constant deployment of rhetorical spike strips to stop discussion, by staff or members.

That may just be a field of dreams for players that largely don't exist anymore, but we can still keep the grass mowed and the dugouts clean for whoever wants to play.

[FCD]

I'm going to be weaving a bit, so bear with me as it does relate to the OP broadly.

...

That may just be a field of dreams for players that largely don't exist anymore, but we can still keep the grass mowed and the dugouts clean for whoever wants to play.

Wow!  That's a pretty thorough assessment.  I only pared out the middle to make this reply shorter.  All excellent points!

I'm going to take some time today to provide some thoughts on several of your sections as I think I have some contributions to add.  I've got some meetings coming up, but after that I should have some time to provide some responses.

[19Bones79]

@ Ksihkehe, 

Still waiting on what will no doubt be THE thread on MPP. 

Even if it's a recipe thread. 


You write nice. 

[Ksihkehe]

I only pared out the middle to make this reply shorter.

You trimmed the quote.

   

Bones will understand without the explanation, but he just asked about quotes like 30 minutes ago and I told him that I hope the main thing people remember from the tutorial is to trim their fucking quotes... and you did.

[FCD]

I'm going to be weaving a bit, so bear with me as it does relate to the OP broadly.

As I mentioned before I had shared with some others that a Trump win seemed like a strong possibility. It looked like maybe being the expectation of those really pulling the strings a fair way out from the election and that seemed to become a near certainty with the first debate. It's hard to tell how incompetent organizations are, so sometimes things can be just pure stupidity. Other times things don't really fit that model and can't explained purely through incompetence. Biden may not have known he was going to get destroyed, plenty of the siloed morons in various positions of power may not have known, the sycophants that merely believe what they're told to definitely didn't know, but plenty of us did and there is no way that every level of their entire political infrastructure missed it. When you add Harris as the replacement it adds another layer that I find impossible to believe is pure incompetence or even the kind of hubris that they are in control such that they could elect a sack of potatoes.

As you noted, the federal government is very siloed, I would go as far as saying compartmentalized.  Actions and policies are a combination of factors, and two of the big ones are incompetence/lack of thinking and, well, laziness.  I see it first hand almost daily.  "It's this way because it's always been this way"...regardless if that way makes any sense at all.  That, and rather than replace a policy, procedure or form with a newer one, these same factors just add another policy, procedure or form on top of all the others.  One of the chief problems in federal government is there is no incentive for efficiency.  In fact, if anything efficiency is de-incentivized.  Promotions aren't based on it, pay isn't based on it...efficiency is the enemy.  Why?  Because efficiency doesn't drive hiring more bodies, but inefficiency does.  Hiring through lack of efficiency creates more places for the lazy to hide, and creates more bodies to point the finger of blame at.

Regarding what happened to Biden, I actually think there may have been some divine intervention there.  It was clear after the 1st debate Biden was in rough shape, far rougher than many in the party realized. Pelosi in particular.  But there was a gigantic problem, one the democrats simply cannot overlook...the money.  What to do with all the money which had been donated to the Biden campaign.  This gave the witch called The Pelosi a moment of pause.  But the first debate sealed it, she had to do something, but she had no time (thank Gawd).  And, she made a huge blunder also.  It was check or checkmate, and she chose check, and got checkmated in the process.  What she should have done was put Obama in as #2, then had Biden resign.  (Harris would have been president for a minute, and Johnson would have been VP)  Then Harris likely would have been elected after which she would resign giving Obama a legal 3rd term.  But she needed to message this plan somehow and the collective intelligence of her party would have never understood this chess game unless she spelled it out in 10 foot tall block letters..."CHEAT!  END-AROUND!  MASSIVE POLITICAL MANIPULATION TO WIN AT ANY COST!"  America would not have sat down for this, but that was her only move.

While in that conjecture I was also considering the general global political atmosphere. The authoritarian and anti-human agenda is not just a left wing thing, not really. It's a much bigger beast and the legs it stands on are things like censorship, thought manipulation, and broad control of individual behaviors... the latter depending on the former two for greater effect. Under censorship we can include information mafias like some branches of academia, networks, corporations, that control internal and external information flows in a way that effectively censors whole clusters of ideas. They don't just censor information, but embargo certain analytical methods and interpretations of even the existing information that hasn't been censored. Then the social controls of "isms" come in too. Racism, sexism, and on to all these phobias, and phobic accusations. Another arm of censorship are these tactics to stigmatize wrong-think both socially and morally. This whole cartel is really just a new culture, void of consistent standards and rife with shifting definitions at the whim of those that control it.

This is an excellent observation, but I think there's also more to it.  Many of the manipulators on the authoritarian / anti-human agenda have themselves been manipulated, and this is where the leftist / socialist mentality creeps in.  They blindly follow.  Many people have this notion that the "NWO" or whatever people want to call it is made up of just a few dozen people.  It's far bigger than this (as you also note).  And what I think people don't realize is, all of these factions are not necessarily aligned or on the same page.  The manipulators 'assume' they are all in alignment though, so they blindly take up their message as their agenda.  In reality, these factions are really at odd, at war even, with each other, but those conflicts never see the light of day, thus the common man never sees them.  This is one of the reasons the annual CFR meetings are so tightly held.  Many of these disagreements are debated there.  There is one thing all these factions agree on though, and this is the fact that information is power.  Therefore, the less information the common people have, all the better.  So, censorship, or controlling the message is king.  Propaganda is king.

Under a Trump administration on the heels of the overt corruption, years of intentionally pushing radical subversions of moral ethics, and the coddling the most irrational and dysfunctional members of society, I can see where the goals of the authoritarians and anti-human megalomaniacs are quite likely to be advanced. They have subverted the press and media to such a degree that the true sentiment of the general masses has been totally obscured. The hardcore TDS crowd public can easily be marginalized by press embargo and the political figureheads of that movement already are seeing that their support structure crumble. In fighting will get worse under mounting legal pressures.

Agree with everything you said here.  Part of the reason for this is, it has been allowed to occur, and the public has allowed it.  This is what I call "incrementalism"; moving the agenda ball imperceptibly forward by tiny amounts so small that people don't notice, and then they believe..."Well, it's always been that way"...when in fact it hasn't.  The good news here is, I think the general populous is getting wiser to the MSM and social media propaganda angle.  Now, just being aware of it and actually doing something about it are two completely different things, but I do think the awareness is improving.  Strangely, as much as a loathe most social media, I think social media has helped get this propaganda message out there.

There is a primed and ready base of further support for Trump and all the press needs to do is pivot slowly. Even as we're allegedly already hitting back against these WEF types, we also have advancement of their goals with things like new attempts at outlawing anti-Semitism. A seemingly reasonable thing to many people if we were talking about a semantic definition of the term. It's not the definition as codified and applied in the real world. The real world is defining this as criticizing Israel or criticizing even a single Jewish person if they are part of whichever group feels the need to eliminate dissent. It only works for an information cartel, left, right, or whatever niche, so long as they have sufficient social power to enforce it. Alternative perspectives on ancient history are now racist. Criticism of pharmaceutical companies or vaccines is anti-Semitic. Support for any sort of orderly immigration policy is racist. Hell, in the UK arresting pedophiles is racist and wanting to deport them is right-wing extremism, which is probably the most insane thing yet. This kind of tactic is used on the right too and as sentiment shifts those that support these kinds of things will come out of the woodwork as they always do.

Sigh...The Israel element is SO difficult to discuss.  The very instant someone brings up anything critical about Israel they are immediately branded antisemitic, making any further rational discussion impossible.  The facts are, Israel has one of the most effective media machines on this planet.  Candidly, it is a very pro-Israel propaganda machine which is set up to frame any (ANY) criticism of Israel as antisemitic.  It's frustrating, very.  I am not antisemitic in any way, but no one is perfect, and this type of behavior only creates more problems.  Frankly, it only contributes to the antisemitic radicals we see protesting.  Someone here recently opined whether the Israeli's actually invite these types of protests, whether they 'need' them, and I think there's some validity to these questions.  Without them, their voice gets diminished and they get off the front page (not a place they want to be...off the front page).

With a hard right turn in general sentiment, with neocons eager for expansionism and many looking for what amounts to revenge on those that cheered as the left wing embraced the anti-human agenda, there's plenty of room for advancement of anti-freedom policy dressed as helping further those two goals. There's the potential that within that new general sentiment it gets broad enough support for bad things to go through without much complaint.

Agreed.  The Patriot Act is a great example here.  That Act is no friend of freedom, or America.

I think Trump is a bump in the road at best. Even if Trump manages to slow the subversion agenda a bit, there are sufficient points of failure to ensure Trump has to prioritize and also compromise. The new financial shift they are talking about isn't a shift into the future, but shifting out of a past they destroyed. There is no plan for fixing it, just moving it to a phase that advances that same anti-human agenda in new ways. The most vulnerable people with the least resources will be suffering significant degradation of their standard of living during this. They have been losing for a long time, but it's harder to see when the general movement is upward and there's a press that does marketing rather than reporting. While we gained plastic junk and consumer tech goods within more of our price ranges, wages and other metrics have all declined versus the economic growth on paper. It's stretched too far and this depression will be the first time in quite a long time that people will have to confront exactly what it means. The prosperity has been hollow, mostly talking points. Our infrastructure, from digital to physical, was built largely with our taxes and we now pay companies and government agencies for the pleasure of using them as they further decay.

I'm not sure I agree 100% here.  No doubt we will see, but I've never heard Trump advocate for the elimination of public assistance.  And, I would hope one promise he made, the simplest of all of them, is the one promise he holds fast to...and that is "Common Sense".  It doesn't make sense to exact any sort of revenge on the disadvantaged, and there will always be some in this country.  What does make sense is not just throwing money at these problems and hoping they go away, but rather looking at larger, more holistic and longer term solutions.  Once again, the liberal mentality has only contributed to the problems of the disadvantaged.  Some, not all, disadvantaged simply cannot be rehabilitated into productive society either due to mental or physical disadvantages.  But rather than face this problem, the liberal left just said institutionalization was cruel and walked away.  Part of the solution may be a form of long term institutionalization for those who are simply beyond rehabilitation.  It's better than just tossing them out on the street.

The economy is one problem, however bad you want to believe it will be. There are systemic issues with infrastructure too though. That's everything to physical, to staffing, to logistics both internally and externally. I think that in many cases there isn't a solution because there aren't enough people that understand the grand scales, interplay between different critical parts of that infrastructure, with the required skills to perform at ground level, and nobody that knows how to either find those people or train them. Complex systems that are robust enough to survive significant pressures and faults have to be maintained properly. When they aren't then you become less and less robustly protected from cascading failures. A ship hits a critical bridge blocking region movement of goods both into the port and across the bridge. Sucks, but you have workarounds. You add in peripheral failures. You have rail system failures, maybe a fuel crisis, and manufacturing issues with parts for the big rigs. As they start to compound they have broader impacts on other parts of the infrastructure. We already have what a true first world country in 2025 should be considered total infrastructure insufficiency, putting us was too close to collapses. Even if those collapses are currently temporary they are not being mitigated in planning now and will get worse. They will have greater downstream consequences. It's going to take a lot of attention to deal with along with everything else, while also trying to dismantle the US portion of what is effectively a uni-party corruption ring spanning the globe.

Baltimore is something I'm pretty familiar with as my wife is a native Balti-"moron" (as I tease her).  But yes, people always want to build grand things, and they enjoy them while they work, but when "common sense" maintenance and improvements get tabled..."OOOhhhh, that's WAY too expensive!  Let's wait and see what happens."...is the attitude.  Welp, Baltimore saw exactly what happens, BUT the handwriting was on the wall for decades with the Key Bridge.  Even the US Navy has stated one of the biggest reasons they don't have more US Naval ships in the Port of Baltimore is because of the Key Bridge and the risk of being trapped if the vulnerable bridge were to collapse.  And for such a critical piece of infrastructure to not have island barriers on both sides of the bridge was unbelievable.  I don't know much about Baltimore budgets, but I'm not aware of such proposals ever even being floated to the City.  That's just a complete lack of...wait for it...common sense.  In any case, you will find no bigger advocate than me for maintaining, and improving existing infrastructure than me.  Building something once is expensive, but building something twice through lack of maintenance is, well, stupid.

While the radical left ideology is easy to point at as the cause of much of this current state of affairs, I think it's important to consider that this anti-human agenda has not been thwarted in the least by the right wing being in control in the past. Some have even advanced that agenda more than their left wing counterparts in other branches of government. Bush and Cheney come to mind.

What I see as the true enemy are all that support the legs that hold that beast up. Censorship under Bush is not really any different than censorship under Obama. Reasons, tactics, intensity, may all change, but there are benefits to this being within the accepted norms of our culture for those with that anti-human agenda. Dropping bombs on civilians, killing indiscriminately, furthers that agenda. The US, Russia, China, Israel, Ukraine, Syria, and everywhere else where it has become acceptable for whatever reason, it advances that agenda entirely independent of political beliefs and structures. It is a subversion of ethics and morals, not political ideologies. It infects the ethics and morals, without regard for the political platforms. It's this very subversion that allows a party with a platform that is overtly against corporate profiteering and war to do the bidding of billionaires and hedge funds to advance those very things. The threat doesn't disappear with Trump, but many will be fooled into thinking politics was the real problem and supporting him will fix it.

Again, I agree here.  There is no "magic bullet", and one man alone simply cannot be expected to fix everything.  People cannot sit back and wait for shit to magically happen; it won't.  And, I completely agree; the overall problems are not caused exclusively by the left, so the right doesn't get an automatic pass.  It will take unified efforts to solve the many problems we face.  But the first step, and this is one which does involve the left, is acknowledging these problems exist in the first place AND participating in developing REALISTIC solutions (not "blue sky" ones).

Forums that aren't censored take way the ability of these forces to have line-item veto over the ideas that circulate among the citizens. The short form presentation of new media causes disconnects between ideas. You can't have sweeping narratives that bring together many complicated ideas easily. Your body of work, as a collective of short form posts, can be line-item vetoed to shit. Bit by bit, by censors using everything from generic platform guidelines to specific rules about particular words or content, sweeping narratives are erased. That remaining is just slogans and mottos floating in cognitive vacuums, void of nuance and range. The constantly evolving rules, both social and technical, encourage brevity as well. One slip and your efforts are rendered null and void by deletion or a flood of accusations about some offense by activist drones.

Short form social media is, in my opinion, a cancer which must be relegated to its proper place in society.  Right now short form social media carries far too much weight.  People take this form of communication as the gospel on issues, and this leads to all sorts of problems

There is no feeder system for developing strong thought leaders in this atmosphere, ...

You could have stopped right there.  That's a key point!  In fact, I would argue that sentence could be even more pared down to..."There is no feeder system for developing strong leaders, period."  On the one hand we have a toxic political environment that any true leader in his right mind would avoid like the plague.  And, on the other hand, we have the same toxic political environment which is filled with career politicians who are interested in one thing and one thing only...what's in it for THEM, and them ONLY.  That's not a culture which breeds leadership.  That's also a fixable solution to a certain degree, but again it's based on some of the other things which Trump said..."Merit based employment".  Fixing the elected and appointed parts are a little more difficult, but if the past election is any indication, voters now at least understand that their votes do matter.

...at least not outside political activism. They're almost all toxic, teaching dishonest rhetorical tactics that embrace lies, omissions, and use of subversive tools that poison the well of open discussion. The people running these forums increasingly are either just cleaning up digital litter or enforcing the growing list of rules ultimately handed down by the same ideological cabal that have overseen the intentional demise of forums. The Internet has been subverted, which I'm also now seeing happen with Bitcoin in almost the same way. It starts as a pathway of freedom from government, banking cartels, censorship, and slowly gets subverted. Bitcoin culture now cheers bank adoption and the creation of ETFs, futures, and leverage, which will lead to further abuse of derivatives trading and put the banks and hedge funds in control of prices. Since Bitcoin has no physical resource that ostensibly requires certifiable existence of those assets, there is even less of a check on that power. They already have millions of fake paper contracts on physical assets, BTC will be even easier to subvert. Not only will auditors needs to know derivatives and accounting, but blockchain forensics  as well. The Internet is seeing the late stages of this sort of ethical and moral subversion against the core ideals that made it appealing in the first place.

Yeah, and I guess my response here would be..."And then there's the REST of the 'Swamp'".  But, like any swamp, you just have to muck your way through it; it's the only way.

I don't know if it can all be turned around. These forums are niche and always were pretty niche. Even when there was a much greater abundance they were still pretty niche as far as how much of the population was using them. I think one of the best ways to fight, on the few remaining forums like this, is to put things out there. Put it out there like it's worth putting out there. Be as long as you have to to get a message across. Be free explore it in ways that can't be done in a single paragraph or on a controlled forum. There is no reason a forum post can't be just as good as a short investigative documentary on a streaming service. There is no reason a forum post has to paint between narrow lines to deliver on one simplified common denominator. It doesn't have to stay tight to avoid accidentally breaking some rule somewhere and having it be grounds to dismiss everything whole cloth or send it to the trash bin.

I'm not sure it "all" has to be solved in Trump's time.  This would be a super-human feat for more than just Trump to accomplish in just four short years.  But I do think that if people begin to see progress in the right directions it will only further their convictions to vote in the directions which bring more of the same.

To hell with them if they can't read well-written and thoughtful materials because it's more than two paragraphs or complex or a radically different perspective. They can go plenty of other places if they can't consume the ideas here and chew on them. You probably don't want to hear what they have to say anyway. If they can't be bothered to read or consume complex things as a general rule, then they probably aren't going to be writing much of value. I have known lots of great readers that never spent much time writing or became great at it, but I have rarely if ever encountered a great writer that didn't put in a whole lot of time reading.

I will do my best to ensure that those that want to subvert discussion with the tactics that advance the anti-human, anti-social, anti-freedom agenda, are quickly recognized and neutralized. That doesn't mean banning opinions, but halting tactics. Produce the content you want. If people show up and try to start using these tactics, don't respond in kind if they're being disruptive to the flow of discussion. On this forum people are entitled to participate, but they're not entitled to being taken seriously if they behave in ways contrary to the principals of free and open discussion. They're not entitled to your attention. They're not entitled to have their personal morality, often just some political brain worm they're infected with rather than an organic belief, enforced on others. They are free to discuss it and convince others to adopt it. Free and open discussion doesn't include lies or ignoring things that are inconvenient, either. Free discussion isn't the constant deployment of rhetorical spike strips to stop discussion, by staff or members.

That may just be a field of dreams for players that largely don't exist anymore, but we can still keep the grass mowed and the dugouts clean for whoever wants to play.

You're doing a fine job!  Keep up the great work.

For my part, I will continue to fight for COMMON SENSE in government, something we Americans are truly lacking these past few years.[/quote]