First and foremost, let me say that I appreciate you actually engaging in a real discussion on Lemmy!
Why did I make this community? Well, mostly in response to the rest of Lemmy and the way many otherwise interesting discussion threads fall apart into downvoting and groupthink.
I don’t like people making baseless accusations and defend people on all sides when people are wrong about their opposition. I hate it when people think they know what others think and project incorrect (and often evil) bullshit on each other. It’s important to maintain solid reasoning and conclusions, not just one or the other.
I hate people being wilfully wrong because their group fetishizes a certain angle of the truth instead of the boring reality of the situation.
Ideas are important and I don’t feel we can get out of the current shitty slump we’re in with political discourse unless we are able to clearly articulate ourselves and discuss the world we’re in.
So let’s talk like people. What do you want to talk about?
I always find starting a conversation is hard without an ice breaker. Not necessarily something cheesy, but perhaps let’s talk about what general discussion forums already exist and what we like about them. There was often genuinely fun and interesting chat at AskReddit, "would you rather"is a good starter, and maybe we could have a “philosophy Friday” to get into the weeds on deeper topics?
Alternatively we could discuss why “forums” annoys me. It should be “fora”, dammit!
My opinion is that if you’re communicating with an ancient Roman you should pluralize according to ancient latin. If you’re communicating with a modern english speaker, you should choose your words to convey what you intend.
I.E. you should use “fora” if it’s your purpose to portray your penchant for pedantic pluralization prescriptions.
It may the exquisite alliteration that swayed me, but I agree.
I’m thinking many of them could be started by news articles, but approaching it from a completely different angle than most of Lemmy. Over the next few days I hope to set a tone with interesting “icebreaker” articles like you mentioned.
The idea with posting them to this community would be to have some kind of commentary or discussion about it with a focus on understanding instead of pushing a specific view.
The last thing I want to see here is a clickbait-y article with 1600 upvotes, and 400 comments basically saying some version of “outgroup bad.” It’s why I’m specifically encouraging people to play Devil’s Advocate.
If you look through my comment history you’ll see I frequently ask people what the reasoning is for thinking a certain way, but rarely get responses.
Maybe I just miss “fora” though!