Apparently a futile exercise, Flacc! It takes two to tango and my experience here is that a great many people on the Left here throw out all kinds of rash statements, attacks and accusations, but when you CHALLENGE them on the factuality of it, to back it up somehow, most of them just give you a laugh, a thumbs down, or call you a functional braindead moron or other insult then say that you are simply too far below the brains of a slug for them to even bother wasting time on. I call that a bomb-thrower. Many call that TROLLING.
We even have a rule against that:
View attachment 530965
I've chased after some people after they threw a bomb of incendiary words then refused to explain at all or even back up with some supporting evidence for the validity of the remark to no avail. They troll and run because the above rule has no teeth, it is not enforced, and I've not seen one person here take heat for saying crap then taking off despite repeated efforts to get them to back up or at least embellish on their statements. In other words, to DISCUSS their claims.
And with that, the prospects of any DISCUSSION become rather moot. Trolling runs amok here because it is a lot easier than sticking to things with substance that you are prepared to defend.
And many here put little or nothing into this place. They troll coming here mainly to insult conservatives, troll Trump, and to disrupt. A good indicator of the state of a person is whether they use an unflattering picture of, say, Trump as their avatar. If someone sports a goofy photoshoped picture or cartoon of Trump, for instance, you can't very well expect any serious discussion of the man from them. They have already announced that their every view of Trump, etc., will be nothing but nonsense and comedy.
And therein lies the conflict. On the one end of the spectrum there is TOTAL FREE EXPRESSION, but the flaw there is that you end up with a lot of people freely trolling and venting garbage that they KNOW is garbage just to disrupt threads and get a rise out of others.
On the other end of the spectrum you have really good DISCUSSION, but in order to achieve that, you must have some boundaries to your expression to where trolling is suppressed and people are expected to answer questions and back up their statements with reasonable evidence. You need to attract quality people and keep track of people who excessively troll, throw bombs, ridicule, insult for no other reason than to inflame rather than to make a point, refuse to answer questions or back up claims, and have a high number of reports on them, complaints, others ignoring them, perennially just giving out funnies or dislikes.
There are easily 30-60 people here who would not be here at all if they couldn't just freely troll threads and people saying stupid things. Even if they do bother to write back to your comments, it isn't with any desire or willingness to actually DISCUSS. Most of them come from other forums and are only here to try to monopolize USMB because unlike many other boards, USMB lets conservatives get their views out AT ALL.
What I've found is that you get the most return out of members who show some history of a qualitative input. True DISCUSSION is at odds with absolutely FREE EXPRESSION. Until USMB finds a better way of weeding out undesirables unable or unwilling to really DISCUSS things in an open, fair and qualitative way, we will always be plagued by and overrun with Flame Zone and Flame Zone Light, where people can make most any outrageous claim, unsupported, and just . . . carry on.
And central to that problem is the ONE WORD missing in all the myriad rules on our board: ------ NO WHERE in the guidelines or rules does it ever say anything about the QUALITY of the content you contribute nor the INTEGRITY of the individual; you see, when you care not about the quality a person is willing to bring to a thread, you tend to end up with just a lot of FREE EXPRESSION, but not much quality, and the opposite of quality is TROLLING for trolling's sake.
As the saying goes, . . . a few good men---, you can go a lot farther by setting STANDARDS of membership and getting 10 good men than you'll ever get with 100 mostly idiots.
But then, that problem is again reflected in the failings of our Reaction and Points scores where a person playing mere spelling word games rattling off two word comments every 10 seconds gets the same point consideration and weighting as people who spend hours and days on a single post researching and carefully typing thoroughly worded dissertations about social issues.
