The Agora
In the spirit of the Ancient Greek Agora, we invite you to join our vibrant community - a contemporary meeting place for the exchange of ideas, inspired by the practices of old. Just as the Agora served as the heart of public life in Ancient Athens, our platform is designed to be the epicenter of meaningful discussion and thought-provoking dialogue.
Here, you are encouraged to speak your mind, share your insights, and engage in stimulating discussions. This is your opportunity to shape and influence our collective journey, just like the free citizens of Athens who gathered at the Agora to make significant decisions that impacted their society.
You're not alone in your quest for knowledge and understanding. In this community, you'll find support from like-minded individuals who, like you, are eager to explore new perspectives, challenge their preconceptions, and grow intellectually.
Remember, every voice matters and your contribution can make a difference. We believe that through open dialogue, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to discovery, we can foster a community that embodies the democratic spirit of the Agora in our modern world.
Community guidelines
New posts should begin with one of the following:
- [Question]
- [Discussion]
- [Poll]
Only moderators may create a [Vote] post.
Voting History & Results
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FORTY PERCENT APPROVE?!
That's your standard for the success of polite naysaying - a slight dip from the majority buying the world's worst liar's reheated horseshit, after he got elected?
And your first example is COVID, a plague which surely killed one hundred thousand more Americans because of right-wing disinformation. Masking alone! Fucking-- enough people bought the lies about the 2020 election that THERE WAS A FAILED COUP, and all the people who participated have been pardoned, because that shit worked.
Thank god we merely tutted and corrected long after people got tricked, instead of actively preventing people from getting tricked in the first place.
The COVID death rate was a bit all over the place. Florida was lower than California and New York, and Texas was between those two. New York and California had much more strict policies than Florida and Texas, yet they had a higher morality rate.
Why? It's not because masks don't work when worn properly, it's because epidemics are complicated. Maybe people in Texas and Florida got more exercise, maybe not wearing masks exposed people to smaller doses sooner so they got natural immunity sooner, or maybe it's something else entirely.
It's a complex subject. I like how my state (Utah) handled it:
We had a lot fewer restrictions than most areas, but there were enough to remind people that things weren't completely normal. And I think it worked well! Utah had among the lowest deaths in the country, partly because of our high percentage of kids and because outdoor recreation stayed open (so people would recreate outside instead of inside with other people).
That wasn't because people bought the nonsense about the election, at least not directly. The people who showed up to the capitol and fought with the police there weren't there because they were mad about the voting system, they were there because they wanted to start something, and this was a good enough excuse. They don't represent the average conservative, these were far right groups looking for an excuse.
Here's an article about perception of the 2020/election:
That's something like 60% believe it was fair weeks after the election. That's pretty low, but I think there's also a fair amount of less than truthful answers, such as people intentionally misinterpreting the question as whether Trump should've won, and of course the people who refuse to say one way or the other.
So it wasn't like all Republicans thought Biden rigged the election, it's just a vocal minority who riled up enough of the quiet majority to answer a survey saying it was rigged to make it more than a blip.
The fattest turd in this punchbowl.
Two in five people are convinced of dangerous horseshit, and the best you've got is verbosely muttering 'but it's not the majority.'
It doesn't fucking have to be!
There's two main responses to dealing with someone who believes a conspiracy theory:
The first is exactly what you'd expect from a conspiracy trying to cover something up, whereas the second is more likely to be genuine.
If this instance is preventing the latter, we should defederate, and that's what happened with the_donald. But if they're open to good faith discussions and their users and mods are respectful of our rules, we should stay federated. I don't think we have enough evidence to say which it is.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. Some asshole going 'Ah-HA!' does not matter, if they'll do that in response to aaanythiiing. Preventing their nonsense from spreading is the correct answer. You have to protect people from abuse that works.
Abuse that works forty percent of the time, apparently. Thank god a mere plurality is insufficient to ever cause problems.
TD was a successful propaganda megaphone that only got shut down after it shit up millions of people's feeds for most of a decade. It successfully radicalized god knows how many politically interested young minds. The right answer was to ban that shit, immediately. And when they try mewling about how calling reactionary bigots Nazis makes you the Nazi, ban them again.
Some questions have these things called "answers." We do not need to endlessly discuss them, with assholes, on sites by and for their specific brand of reality-denying assholes. Sometimes "both sides" is the right side and the wrong side - and contrarian chin-stroking is poorly distinguished from frothing wackadoodle denialism.
This god damn website is named heil.hitler and you wanna take a wait-and-see approach to whether they'll cause problems. Frothing wackadoodle denialism is their brand. We don't need to federate with flat.earth, or thejews.did.it, or hexbear. You are allowed to recognize when people openly cause problems on purpose, and not sit around waiting for problems to happen, like it's a fucking surprise.
If someone is arguing in bad faith, report them. If mods don't address it, escalate to the admins. If the admins can't resolve it, then we discuss defederation.
Jumping to defederation because an instance seems to share beliefs with groups that use that tactic isn't right.
No, we must always question what we think we know for certain, but also always use the best information we have. Maybe 99% of the time the answer is unchanged, but that 1% of the time makes the exercise worthwhile.
I know that's not quite what you were getting at, I just think it's important to take the contrarian perspective periodically and see where that leads.
Whether that's useful comes down to execution. Basically, is there quality evidence to back up that view? If not, how can we test it?
It's not, and a lot of the MAGA crowd is criticizing the current administration. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, she had been a long-time mouthpiece for the MAGA movement, and now she's pushing back (see the recent Daily Show piece by Desi Lydic for a comedic summary). She's the last I'd expect to question the president and other Republicans, yet here we are.
Going based on the domain name isn't enough IMO, unless it is literally something like you mentioned. Let the admins show if they'll side with truth or messaging, if it's the former, stay federated, and if the latter, defederate.
We must always question whether woman are people. What if the answer's different, this time?
We must always debate which race is best race. We must always entertain the idea trans people cause hurricanes. We must always seriously consider and politely discuss the blood libel.
If you know that kind of open-ended wank wasn't what I was talking about, why did you fucking say it?
We're not talking about academic criticism of open-ended questions with troubling loose ends. We are discussing bigots. This is a forum of bigots, by bigots, for bigots. The questions they ask are not worth your time or mine, even when they are sincere.
If you'd still split hairs about 'real conservatives' like they're not marginal fair-weather whiners when the horrifying shit they proudly voted for harms them - this site is not for them. This site is for the rest of the assholes, the diehards, the reactionary extreme. Hence the fucking name.
Based on what evidence? The name? A handful of posts, that could likely be randos posting to trigger others? It's a small instance with very few posts, we don't have much data on what the users and admin(s) there want.
If it's not worth your time, just ignore them. Block the instance and move on. Until they actually cause harm, there's really no reason to defederate. That's my point.