Back between the primaries and the general election, I got so very disgusted with the thread bickering between supposed Sanders and Clinton supporters/bashers/provocateurs that I started placing dozens and dozens of people on my ignore list. It reduced what I could see on DU by about half, but made it possible to view DU without spiking my blood pressure.
I go check out the individuals on my ignore list now, and while I have haven't checked them all (there are so many!), a random sampling shows that approximately half of them have not posted here in the past 90 days.
Now, while I'm a low-post-count person myself, I've been registered for many years, and a visitor before that, almost from the beginnings of DU. I simply don't have the time or desire to post much. So, some of these on my ignore list could just be low-count posters like myself, who were fired up in the heated months this past summer but post infrequently enough now that they have zero points in the past 90 days. But others...? I had never seen anything like what was going on last summer and fall on here in the years I've been visiting DU. I don't know all the terms that people in the field of debate or communications might apply to what was going on here, things like strawman arguments, baiting, etc., but there was an enormous amount of it, and there were numerous textbook examples of this crap filling the discussion boards with threads containing hundreds of replies, the bulk of which had the intellectual and emotional weight of "I know you are but what am I." And I see it sparking up again in recent days here.
I firmly believe we were trolled this summer and fall, and are still being trolled, and the problem is exacerbated by a number of "valid" posters on here who are gullible enough and passionate enough to get prodded on by these provocateurs into continuing to dredge up the dissent and divisiveness and hard feelings, and it does us not one stitch of good. It divides us, it weakens us, at a time that we need to be focusing our energies on coalescing and energizing (and perhaps even broadening) our base, and taking back our country from those powerful and moneyed and greedy and traitorous beasts that would destroy it for their personal gain. I heard a snippet of Elizabeth Warren on Rachel Maddow on the car radio yesterday evening, and I agree with her, we must pick our battles and focus our energies.
IGNORE the trolls. Don't reply to them, don't engage them. Focus on the important and deadly serious work at hand.
Rant off.
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