Arguing basic premises all day long keeps discussion from actually going anywhere. Actual discussion flourishes among a group who can agree on the basics and actually want to talk about something more substantive than “is authority bad or is it actually good???”

This community has so far been garbage because it’s just anarchists posting links then people (largely from lemmygrad) starting fights on them over and over and over. That doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

Yeah totally you’re right, spaces should never be able to define a range in which discussion occurs and we should just all bend over to whoever wants to pop in and derail. Great suggestion.

Contained and respectful debate on the topic can certainly be useful, though. If anyone creates a community specifically for that kind of thing, I’d be glad to pop it in the sidebar.

Homeschooling in America is segregationist bullshit.

In a vaccuum I’m not against the idea of parents teaching their kids, but in reality it’s almost never just that. Here at least.

I’m going to paste my comment from a similar topic:

I find that conversation flourishes when you limit it to a certain degree. In spaces which are completely open and have a massive range of opinion, what you’ll find is mostly yelling at each other over broad talking points that everyone is already familiar with. After a while, nothing of interest comes out of the far left clashing with the far right all the time. But when you limit it, time can be spent doing other things than yelling at the dickhead on the other side who you have little to no overlap with and see as a dire enemy. You can talk about nuances in principles, differences in organizing, etc. It makes for richer, more interesting conversation.

There’s also quite a huge range within the umbrella of leftism, and honestly we already have a huge enough gap there that there’s a lot of worthless clashing. Broadening that would only make the site worse.

“Whataboutism” as a claim can be abused a lot to avoid criticism of the other evil that is being referenced, but there is no reason to believe that’s the case on an anarchist forum where you would be very hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t also extremely opposed to the US and other western empires. Given the demographics of a site like this, it’s also likely that most of their activism is targeted toward them as well. There is no reason that criticism of a potential evil has to wait for a larger evil to be toppled.

You’re not actually making a point here, just hurling insults.

I don’t even know what to believe with this shit and I’m not an anarchist but this is the most ridiculous objection I’ve seen. “WHAT ABOUT [worse thing that anarchists also oppose]” is fucking meaningless and leaves you looking less like a good Marxist and more like you’re just looking for any reason to dunk on nerds on the internet.