Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

(SORRY IN ADVANCE FOR THE LENGTH!!!!!)

First off, I implore you to please watch this video before going any further.
I know 8 minutes of your time is a lot to ask, but I really want a consistent context and vocabulary to start off this discussion, given how many ways the term "political discrimination" could be interpreted.



Skip this paragraph if you actually watched the video
If you can't be bothered to watch it, basically, it argues that most forms of discrimination these days stem from political identification, not actual racism, sexism, religious intolerance (be it either Christian, Muslim, or any others), and such. That's not to say there aren't exceptions where political identy isn't the driving force behind some discrimination, of course, but the argument that it's not women that people take issue with, but feminists, or not African Americans but BLM advocates, or not Christians but Westboro type interpretations of Christianity, which really grind people's gears.


Now, if you actually watched the video, of course it obviously isn't perfect. There are more than two parties, and even the major two parties can be divided into smaller groups. And of course, a few citations does not make a full proof argument.

All that said, however, it rung true to my own individual, subjective, and anecdotal observations true enough that I felt compelled to post this. Actual sexism, religious intolerance, racism, and homophobia is at negligble or effectively negligble levels on this site, in my opinion. Of course, there's obviously exceptions, and trans issues aren't always quite as friendly, but for the most part, other than the occasional troll or such, you don't have to worry about being harassed or getting an automatic bad reputation for your race, religious views, sex, or being lgbt.

That is not the case when it comes to politics, or at least that is what I claim. In an attempt to illustrate my point, here's an "experiment" of sorts.
I'm going to search KnowYourMeme.com (presumably the entire website) using Google and see how many pages contain a term in question, using the search prompt:
site:knowyourmeme.com "term to be searched"

Now, for the results, as of September 19th, 2016, between 8:00 am and 8:30 am, UTC-06:00
I'm too lazy to make a table so here's a list.

• anti-vaxxers (purpose: "control") 58 results
• vegans (purpose: "control") 1470 results
• Spongebob (purpose: "control") 69600 results
• feminism (purpose: high chance of civil debate) 6190
• sjw (purpose: moderate chance of civil debate) 3710 results
• triggered (purpose: moderately low chance of civil debate) 7500 results


Of course, this is by no means a "real experiment". If anything, it's just a bunch of data for people to interpret that hopefully is more reliable than my own experiences.

The conclusions I draw here (which I believe support my earlier point) are that have politics become a significant part of the site (considering the term "triggered" occurs on more than 10% of the number of pages that "Spongebob", a term associated with a "meme franchise" (i.e. there are a lot of Spongebob fans and memes on the site), appears.

Additionally, the more pejorative of the three (feminism, sjws, and triggered) appears as text in the most number of pages, and has a lead over other "common targets" such as vegans.

I'm not saying that this proves political prejudice exists, or that the arguments of any specific political ideology are automatically correct. However, I hope it does illustrate the general "political fatigue" that (along with fandom hate, another topic for another time) slowly wore me down, so to speak. I know that politics are memes, but it gets tiresome once people start bringing up politics early and consistently in generally non-political related things, like augmented reality.

Apologies for all the rambling, I'll try to sum things up. Basically, the reason I'm not around as much anymore is because instead of becoming accustomed to all the charged emotions and passionate views that I see on the sites regarding people who hold specific ideas or opinions (be it a console war, a fandom bashing, or a political concept), I've actually found myself more and more sensitive to these "bad vibes" for lack of a better term.

I'm not blaming anyone, I'm not saying my reactions are justified, and I'm not saying anybody is necessarily right or wrong. I'm not sure if political discrimination is actually occurring, or if it actually matters or not. It's just that this video made helped me to ask the right questions to provide at least somewhat of an explanation of why I'm going to be inactive in the foreseeable future.

I apologize for the lack of brevity of this post, and if I seem self-important. I honestly don't think the motivation behind the frequency of which I visit the site is all that important, but I felt it was only polite to provide an explanation for any possible seekers of this answer I didn't have until now.

So, if you're unbelievably patient enough to read all of this, I guess just ignore all the pointless personal stuff and discuss the idea of political prejudice, if you're interested. Is it a valid concept? Is it a meaningful one? Does it play out differently online than in person? Has it been increasing over time or in certain countries? And so on. (And my apologies in advance for just posting all of this and probably not checking replies.)

Maybe it's because you only make a comment if you have an opinion

And comments only become massive threads if someone else decides to argue with you

But yeah it's really offputting that micropolitics has become something that you can judge a person on

The surge in political discussion is directly related to the ongoing the US election campaign in my opinion. Give it a few months after the results and it should die down somewhat. Same thing happened with Brexit – arguments about the UK economy seem to have softened into occassional discussions whenever news about free trade deals come up (although to be fair they haven't actually left the EU yet).

But yeah I agree that political topics have become a bit too heavy-handed on this website.

The tribalistic political shitslinging is a country mile worse with YouTube Comments, Reddit and Twitter than it is here.

I'd mention Tumblr and 8chan, but those sites are exclusively liberal or exclusively conservative. There's only one echo chamber, not two echo chambers that treat eachother like fucking garbage.

Keep in mind it's a presidential election year. The same kind of shit happened in 2012--complete with the "why are there so many [Republican candidate] meme entries compared to [Democratic candidate]?" By December, everything will return to the #twittercontroversies.

I feel like the culture war aspect (feminism, gamergate, SJW, etc.) should be separated from the political aspect (elections, political party policies, etc.). While it's true that there tends to be a left/right divide when it comes to arguments about those topics, they aren't inherently political in nature. There's conservative feminists just as there's liberal gamergaters and the fact is, there's always going to be debating and arguing over cultural issues.

As for the discrimination part, everyone tries to find the "bad apples" in the opposing ideological issue to theirs, both to point out flaws and issues with it and to try and negatively portray the issue.

@Firestorm Neos
I've never understood this notion that a website with tens or hundreds of millions of users can be easily sorted into an ideological box.

I completely understand where you're coming from, and in fact I've been visiting KYM less and less for similar reasons. It just gets incredible tiring to see people argue about things every single day, especially when both sides are absolutely convinced their opinion is completely infallible.

I think John Coffey said it best.

As others have stated, it's more than likely related to the presidential elections. It comes up in 2 months so by the end it shouldn't be as big of a part in discussions.

The constant political trending bar doesn't help matters.

The problem with me is honestly I'm a very moderate person. I just go by what seems logical.
Gun control isn't as good as an idea that people think because criminals get a hold of guns illegally anyway, so you're only depriving people of defense. However we should only let people who aren't convicted felons or mentally unstable get guns.
We should strengthen the border because it's honestly just a chain-length fence at this point. However we should still accept immigrants that go in the right way.
We should accept refugees but we should screen them not because of their religion, but just to make sure they aren't terrorists.

However, in today's politics you're pretty much forced to pick a side. So I pretty much have to choose whatever side has more things that I agree with, but even then they still have some issues that I don't agree with that they support. However everyone seems to judge me and think that I completely agree with whoever I'm supporting, which couldn't be further from the truth.

As well, with today's election, it's pretty futile to change who I'm voting for. I'm not really voting based on what the candidate supports (I think they're both bad in their own ways), I'm going based on what'll help my family best. I mean seriously? You're trying to convince me to vote for someone who'll hurt my family in the long run?
I mean could you look at your family the same way again after that? Knowing you could've done something that could've helped them, but didn't because a bunch of people on the internet told you not to?
If I had it my way neither of the current candidates would be running.

I don't think it's easily done either, but some websites have given a pretty good go at it thus far. Tumblr and 8chan are probably two of the only sites I could say have "succeeded."

You see that's the problem with trying to fit every issue in the world within 2 sides

They don't fit.