10 Years of Posting

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It has been 10 years and a day since I joined the forum as "EvilMexicanDictator". When I joined, I was almost 13 years old, a young politician named Barack Hussein Obama had begun to captivate the public, the housing bubble was bursting and most of us were blissfully unaware of how impactful this was going to be, Tony Blair was still PM, the Iraq War was still a quagmire and the "surge" had yet to bear any sort of fruit, people still talked about peak oil.

Suffice it to say: things have changed a great deal since then. I'd go so far as to argue that this forum no longer has much of a reason to exist. When I first joined the forum, it was somewhat normal to have a some level of confidence in the government and some sort of faith in the basic decency of (some) politicians. This meant that the politics of the "horse race" was seen as a bit of fun, equivalent to rooting for a team. This is no longer the case. Politics is now poisoned. Neo-Nazis are allowed to post propaganda throughout the forum (and in real life). Political discourse online is an open sewer that is thoroughly vile.

I don't mean to suggest that anything going on today is unprecedented but rather that it would be unthinkable to any of old-timers like me that the forum would be what it is today or that, far more importantly, politics would evolve in the manner that it has. An insane orange clown is President, Britain, under the helm of a lame Maggie Thatcher impersonator, is exiting the EU, what we think of as "liberal democracy" is receding around the world, globalization is being rolled back etc. To be blunt: the past 10 years have been a horrifying time to be alive for anyone who is idealistic or who believes in a brighter tomorrow. It's wild that I discussed these dark trends with y'all over the past ten years, as I was coming of age.

[Technocracy Timmy]

Yeah but think of all the dank memes we've created since. That's a solid pro to keep in mind.

[Ronnie]

Hey, it was my 9th birthday on this forum just a couple days ago!  I was in a similar boat as you when I joined; I was only 14, and in the midst of the 2008 presidential campaign, I had a reasonably optimistic view about politics.  I was conservative and supported John McCain, but I still admired Obama, and didn't shed a tear when he won.  The extent to which elections have transformed, at least on the presidential level, from appealing to hope and the future to despair and the past, is jarring, and I too feel pretty despondent about things.  Nevertheless, while it might not be fun, we have to actively protect our institutions and our democracy right now, or else the country might start looking a lot like North Carolina.

For that reason, I have to disagree with you when you say that Atlas doesn't need to exist anymore.  There were pretty long stretches of Obama's presidency when I was inactive or occasionally lurking on here, whereas now I feel compelled to follow news and politics really closely.  I don't know about you, but I'm sticking around.

[Virginiá]

I can see why someone could become disillusioned with our elections, but someone objectively awful in almost every way was bound to win eventually if the country got itself into dire straights for long enough. Just throwing your hands up and saying "whats the point" seems more like defeat, and if everyone not approving of the current situation did that, that's basically what it would mean. I'm not sure what your overall point is, but it sounds like you've just lost faith in politics in general.

At any rate, I genuinely think things will get better after Trump, so to me it's just a matter of waiting this out while acknowledging things will probably get worse at least over the next 2 if not 4 years, before it gets better.

[Mike Thick]

At first I thought the OP was hyperbolic, but then I realized that I've never actually experienced a time when politics wasn't a giant, partisan dumpster fire.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I think people are misunderstanding what I'm saying. Politics is probably more important now than it was 10 years ago, much less 15 years ago. We're in the midst of some sort of inflection point that will form the basis for new policy regimes, ideological tendencies and so on. I don't want to exaggerate or overstate the case for this. These moments happen more frequently than people like to believe and oftentimes don't portend dramatic change. This does not change the fact that we could experience a torrent of dramatic shifts that transform our political process and society.

With this in mind, my argument/point is that the manner in which this forum has traditionally viewed politics no longer makes sense. The horse race is no longer entertaining, it is nauseating. The worshipful attitude most posters display/used to display towards political figures is strange. The focus on PVIs, hard stats, polls and so on feels increasingly outdated; polls are becoming more and more useless, PVIs clearly don't say much during turbulent times etc.

The forum has changed a lot and its changes have been in the image of societal changes but, simultaneously, the forum's attitudes remain quaint and out of step with society to the point that it's hard to take it seriously. I say this as someone who is a forum vet.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I presume you believe that there is perhaps more potential than in recent history for those in power to cause harm, curtail freedoms, and so on. If such proves/is/were true, it would seem that the amoral study of percentages and trends is at once both absurdly banal and serves essentially as an accomplice to such harm.

-Would you say that the observation of politics, now more than ever, ought to occur in a normative fashion, a descriptive fashion, or both?
-Aside from the worship of political figures, what other forum attitudes are "out of step"?

[Virginiá]

With this in mind, my argument/point is that the manner in which this forum has traditionally viewed politics no longer makes sense. The horse race is no longer entertaining, it is nauseating. The worshipful attitude most posters display/used to display towards political figures is strange. The focus on PVIs, hard stats, polls and so on feels increasingly outdated; polls are becoming more and more useless, PVIs clearly don't say much during turbulent times etc.

Fair enough. Admittedly it's hard to see it from that perspective, but that is probably because I've only been here for a little shy of a year and a half and only following politics for a year-two longer.

There are a lot of changes going on, but we'll adapt (hopefully)