Pointedstick wrote: ↑Sun Jul 31, 2022 8:08 pm
It's easy to play the civility card, and I definitely think that's part of it, but I also see something else as the root cause.
This used to be the Permanent Portfolio forum, back in its early years. We were a bunch of oddballs connected together by our shared interest in this unconventional portfolio, approaching the topic from different perspectives, but bound together by the PP. Together we learned about the PP--how it works and why it works; about MMR and MMT; the relationship between gold and interest rates; safe withdrawal rates plotted against volatility; and about other topics related to financial resilience.
But eventually consensuses arose and those topics got played out. Some people even exited the PP, moving into "PP-like" portfolios, or conventional portfolios with a bit of gold added, or even totally un-PP-like portfolios (I'm in this group)
We'd all developed social relationships and had fun so we stuck around. But we needed new things to discuss--this being a discussion board. So over time we moved more and more more into politics. And there, the relationships we'd built up discussing PP topics became strained.
It's easy to be civil to people in the same tribe, and in the beginning were still "PP tribe," but as politics took over as the dominant topics of conversation, some increasingly identified within this community as "red tribe," "blue tribe," "yellow tribe," and so on. Retaining civility when interacting with people who you don't identify as a member of your tribe is much harder. It's a skill that must be learned and nurtured, not an impulse that comes naturally. Many of us have faltered at times, myself included. But it's important, because civility is the social lubricant that allows people of different mindsets to interact without coming away wanting to kill each other, in the same way that real lubricants keep intermeshing machine parts from grinding each other into metal shavings. It's an integral part of making it work. Try running an internal combustion engine without oil and see how long it works!
I want to hold up Mountaineer as a person who I think gets it right. He and I agree on a lot, but also disagree on a lot, yet we can have interesting discussions that are unlikely to convince the other of anything, and it remains cordial and fun. IMO a huge part of it is because Mountaineer has always been civil, tolerant, and courteous to me, and this encourages me to treat him likewise. If we want to be able to discuss diverse and political topics without our social fabric degrading, we all need to do more of that.
So I think as a community we are faced with two options:
1. Return to being a single-topic community, rallying around the PP with a much smaller relative volume of content in the off-topic section. This way we see each other as tribe-members and civility comes naturally.
2. Acknowledge the need to explicitly work on our civility and tolerance skills, so we can remain a heterogeneous community of oddballs with weird opinions and political positions without coming away hating one another or descending into mockery, disingenuousness, or crabby negativity.
I feel like I understand now why so many single-topic forums explicitly prohibit political discussions. Threading that needle sure is tough. But our core of frequent posters is relatively small, so I think we can actually succeed if enough of those people choose to embrace civility when they discuss politics that they make it into a cultural tenet that's followed by others.