@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]: I've made a new thread (and accompanying community) for this, currently pinned to Local

We could add to one of the megathreads that a [honest question] tag or something could be used for that, without creating a whole new pinned thread.

I would encourage a thread that is framed as educational, rather than framed as "debate" or "discourse." Along the lines of, "You have a question you've been wanting to ask, ask it and those with more understanding will try to answer and walk you through the reasoning/sources/etc." If it's framed as debate or discourse, my concern would be that liberals would just use it as a platform to debate what shouldn't be platformed in the first place. Hope that makes sense. Seems like kind of a fine line to walk. It's important to get through to people, but also, some people could just view it as an intellectual challenge instead of serious stakes and muddy the waters.

That would be awesome to have something like that because random comment sections can be really chaotic.

Glad to have you here. Since you're already reading some books I'd also recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti.

Some people complained about hexbear and i thought let me check out what they’re complaining about. I went through a few posts and i was honestly thunderstruck. Here are people that feel exactly the way i feel and can actually explain to me why I’m feeling that way and exactly what’s wrong with everything around us.

Exactly my experience with the old Chapo Trap House subreddit

Glad to have you here, comrade

Which comment was that btw?

There is a much broader mass of people out there who are not liberal, most of them are just apolitical or only very superficially political in one direction or the other

Reaching out to these people is good, too, but I'm not sold that they're easier/more worthwhile to bring around than more committed libs (let's define that as regular Democratic Party voters):

1. As @[email protected] pointed out, a lot of "apolitical" people are still pretty dug in on their priors, they just... aren't that interested in politics. Maybe that changes with exposure to leftist politics, but maybe the effort we put in just gets us (more) armchair revolutionaries. A lot of more committed libs have done real-world stuff like phonebanking, canvassing, staffing events, maybe even some protesting.
2. A lasting change to your worldview usually requires significant learning, which takes time and attention. Committed libs already set aside time and attention for politics; it's a matter of getting them to read/watch something different in the time they already spend on politics, not carve out new time to read/watch something they might not be interested in at all.
3. As long as you're somewhat honest with yourself -- which is a prerequisite for being persuadable -- being dug in on a position can backfire if it's a bad one. If I'm a lib who's genuinely horrified at how the U.S. handles its southern border, leftists pointing out how Obama and Biden have worsened the situation is not something I'll dismiss out of hand. It'll stick with me.

"liberal" here is an unmarked term that thereby refers to both a broad group and a specific subset of it, like how "man" can mean both "humans generally" and "males specifically". Furthermore, most "apolitical" people are just casual liberals rather than dedicated ones, because we live in a neoliberal society.

Not wrong, but a catch-all “disagree and and want a proper discussion” would solve the “liberal only” complaint. In my experience chuds are easier to convert, but a chud thread would be a miserable idea.

Either way, if it had a specific comm with ban happy mods it might not be a bad thing.

There is a much broader mass of people out there who are not liberal, most of them are just apolitical or only very superficially political in one direction or the other

I was mostly thinking of those peoples, my bad if that wasn't clear.