DAPoliticalForum: A Retrospective

How's that for a title, eh?

I put up a poll asking whether people thought dA was getting, overall, better or worse, and what surprised me was that the people who commented mostly talked about the forums, where I was wondering about the site at large. I haven't really thought about the political forum for a while now, but I guess that, combined with Lolly's recent series of (fucking excellent) reminisces about dA's past have got me in a mood to write myself some closure about that, if only for myself.

I haven't posted there for a few months now, and what's odd is that I feel no real desire to. I'd take forum 'breaks' in the past that lasted for days or just hours-I just couldn't stop myself from coming back for more. Now? Nothing of the sort. I'd say there were two big things that led to my exit. First, last July, I noted TBSchemer and Unvalanced asking them to block me, because, for various reasons, I just couldn't handle dealing with them anymore. To their credit, they were both very polite and obliging about it all. I did and probably still would get along with them fine when the topic is not political.

Yeah, sorry, kiddos. I'm aware of how entertaining our tiffs were for other forumgoers, but it was taking a serious toll on my mental health, and quitting cold turkey was probably the best thing I've done for myself in that department. Amazingly, months later, I'll still occasionally come across some story in the news that has a lot of our old arguments wrapped up in it, and I'll imagine the sort of response they'd come up with, and the long rebuttal I'd feel obligated to make, and become visibly angry about it all. So yes, it's probably better if I just stay away. Argument is a theoretically rewarding exercise, but it can take control of your life just like anything else, and I do believe that the rational, fact-based part of your brain can play just as many tricks on you as the parts that control instincts or primal urges. Sometimes you just need to walk away.

A few weeks after, OuroborosCobra deactivated (and has apparently returned, somehow, which I found out when checking his page today: I honestly don't know what's going on there). For anyone who knew him in the political forum, he's a man who needs no introduction. SwordOfScotland said it best when he said he could feel one of the pillars of the forum crumbling beside him. But that was just the latest in a long string of that sort of stuff: A lot of my favorite posters have deactivated (AxD, Ithiel), or stopped posting as much (zeruch, thisbusinessofart, katyorr, avfc4me), or their posts just lack the old-school zing (no names here: I've made enough enemies!) There's still a lot of good people in the forum, and I wish them the best, but I can't deny that I felt less and less like there was a reason to go there as the ranks of old-timers kept thinning.

I kept drifting in and out for a few weeks. One thread that was somewhat a slap in the face was a Panpanther thread about how all journalism was inherently unreliable because blah blah epistemology blah blah liberal bias (I might be editing it for effect), and TBSchemer chimed in to say he agreed, and provided back up in the form of (wait for it) a link to CATO. Good grief, if I couldn't hear the undertones of "take your open-minded rational debate and shove it" from the forum's libertarian wing after that, I'd be deaf. And the libertarians are the ones who kept me engaged, despite our often, um, antagonistic relationship. It's just more difficult to have that 100th debate on abortion when 90% of the forum already leans one way on it.

So there's all that. And, dirty Marxist that I am, I' m always looking to blame the system instead of the individual. What I think here is that the platonic ideal of a political forum denizen, someone who is genuinely interested in meaningful intellectual debate, has a lot of respect for their ideological opponents, doesn't really have an agenda to push or partisan alliegances to defend (that sort of persona can be used to hide a lot of bullshit-peddling, by the way, but that's a whole different topic), well, they don't come along that often. People who gravitate towards a political forum on an art site tend to think that they're hot shit in some way: they've got this theory that's going to blow everyone's minds, they want to prove their ideology to others, they want to show off their knowledge, etc. (maybe I'm off-base here, or viewing the past through jaundiced eyes, but it does seem like this type is more common then the purely intellectual boy scout.)

Those who can't handle the most rudimentary questioning of their beliefs will tend to storm off in a huff. Those who can take the heat will stick around, develop their beliefs, learn more about their opponents' beliefs, gain more knowledge about politics and philosophy, and so on. Great circle of life and all that. Of course, this circle has an end to it. Eventually, you're going to kind of figure out what it is you believe. You're going to grow tired of the same debates with the same people. The newbies who show up asking the same questions you asked two years ago are going to make you feel like your hard work has all been for naught. In short, you're going to get all there is to get gotten from that particular forum, and move on to greener pastures. Or maybe it's just me: obviously, there's some people there still chugging away, who were doing so long before I showed up. Either way, all I know is that I, personally, am sick of it.

I think that kind of relates to the decline and fall of the DAPoliticalForumClub, which I still view with some sadness but which I also think was kind of inevitable. SwordOfScotland (who I still respect tremendously, and so should all of you) and I had some good conversations about that. I told him my feeling was that the group was ill-conceived, because its purpose was never defined. It was a place for discussion about a place…where you could already go to discuss things. The club page editorials that Sword wanted front and center (he offered points to people who wrote them, as I recall), had no reason to not be on the forum itself. So what you had left was a place to post forum-themed art, talk about meta-forumy crap, and just kind of wear like a badge showing that you posted in a forum located somewhere else on the site. Ultimately, just not enough to sustain a vibrant club, even if it's still kind of trucking along as a sort of clearinghouse for politically-themed art (not the only Group doing that, of course).

I also think it has something to do with people going in there with an agenda. If you're there to promote objectivism/socialism/whatever, or just to sharpen your own wit and improve your own debating skills, what it comes down to is that you don't have much of an interest in building a community spirit of sorts. Communities need an identity to be communities, and while "politics junkies" is an identity, I'd say it's not a very cohesive one. It's not one where people can necessarily build something bigger than themselves that they can all agree on. And it's not a very warm and fuzzy one either (for all the joking about how people are vicious inside the forum and polite outside of it, there's some real antagonism there, and it doesn't go away just because people say so).

Compare it, to, say color-me-club CMC is the big destination for colorists on dA: it's not a club about something else on the website where people can just go there instead. It's got a built in activity-coloring lineart-that people already like and that doesn't have to be invented the way, say, a forum-themed art contest would. I'm not sure if any of this is making sense, but my main point is that a club about the dA political forum was just not a good sustainable idea for a club-there wasn't much there to hold it together. That doesn't change the fact that I think the club, in its various incarnations, was a noble effort by SwordofScotland to do what he loved and get other people interested in it. I think he deserves that ` by his name: it's much more difficult to fight for what you believe in, in an ultimately futile effort, because you think it deserves respect than to just do something that will more likely bring you love and popularity, and I think him finally getting recognized was a fitting end to all his hard work.

So I guess that's the story as to why I left the forum. I keep intending to work more on art, but I never seem to have the spark, and my inveterate laziness is always a factor. I'm still talking politics on other sites, all of which are pretty left-of-center. Yes, I know I'm a bad bad partisan liberal for doing that, but what do you want from me? Getting back to TBSchemer and Unvalanced, even if we broke things off on respectful terms, objectivism as an ideology was worse than dead to me: I considered it the modern world's greatest evil and it's only gone downhill from there. Maybe I'm paranoid and hyperbolic, but either way, objectivism has nothing to offer me, and I have nothing to offer it or its followers. There's no point in beating the dead horse into a powder. And you know the funny thing about commenting on politics sites where people pretty much already agree with you? The conversation can get more interesting and in-depth, because you're not constantly hitting the brakes to fight with people who don't even accept the same basic principles about reality as you do. It's not like you should close yourself off entirely, but people who are interested in debate should also recognize when they're getting nothing from it, and move on.