There's an extreme political ideology that's at the root of their major problem, but it's not really a traditional one, it's not "left" or "right" as most people, especially Americans, perceive it. The amusing aspect in that regard is how they consider themselves "left of left" while the rest of their forum is a centrist-Nazi hellpit and places that aren't lockstep in a dominant strain of self-proclaimed leftism are therefore right of right of Attila The Hun, all the while they spend most of their time posting about how women need to cover up, sexual expression is bad, people who don't abide by gender/racial/ethnic stereotypes are not to be trusted, and major corporations and elites can do no wrong even if the "people" disagree, etc.
But the main problem is that their self-humorless. It was the same way when they were here before they bolted and it led to the same problems here. Oh, sure, "we have fun" and "look how wacky and random us personalities are" and so on. But self-deprecation exists only in its passive aggressive, and shall I say, weaponized form that's actually insulting others. I could go on, but the greatest tell about the lack of self-humor is how endlessly they discuss what is and is not comedic.
There's a King of the Hill episode in which Bobby goes to clown class and learns the proper ways of clowning instead of his old fart jokes and crude humor. He learns TRUE comedy. The ha-guffaw-aw-haha formula.
This fails, and he is booed by the students. Hank is there to save the day though and tosses him a whoopie cushion. He jokes about the principal farting and is carried off to cheers.
The clown professor yells at the audience "THIS LAUGHTER IS ILL-INFORMED!"
ResetERA.com is not as clever as that episode's satire, but they are nevertheless in the mindset of the clown professor. Thus the obsession with the demand that comedy must not "punch down" and every other endless thread debating comedy and its purpose being literally everything
but laughter.
What they actually mean when they talk about how "everything has politics" is really that the only politics that matters is
power politics and this is expressed in this analysis of comedy, gaming, big-boobed anime chicks and everything else they spend all their words on. And it best expresses in how the prominent members treat the very forum itself.
Everything is about power. And power relations. This view inherently demands that one must be above another. This demands an incessant need to determine who and what is above who and what else. The claims of safety, of marginalization, of discrimination, etc. especially on the forum itself is a perverse twisting of the state in which power is obtained by the willing forfeiture by others. A trans poster on an internet discussion forum is not inherently marginalized or discriminated against on the forum itself in a recognizable way. The power of their arguments, the quality of their character, everything else creates their "status" unless they can change this equation. To do so, they must move from the broadly anonymous into a very public persona. It's not enough that you recognize their username or their avatar, you must know actual "legitimate" details about them to place them properly within the power relation framework. And since you're a good liberal, and a good person, you're willing to grant leeway if they have some kind of disadvantage. Except this disadvantage does not manifest on the forum itself, them being an asshole with terrible arguments who does nothing but ruin threads is not and should not be explained away by the fact that they come from a real world power relation that leaves them marginalized, discriminated against, victimized, etc. This is clearly and utterly absurd.
Unless the state of everything is transformed into pure power relations. It's not enough for the moderators to do their jobs poorly or inconsistently or just be stupid like Slayven, no, instead it must be a war on a specific marginalized community that is being undeserved by the privileged staff like the trans community. Ignore that they wield purely dominant power from any objective metrics, that's not the point as we've already established. The "real world" is irrelevant to literally all of this. The only role it ever plays is to establish the particular details of the current battle over forum-based power relations.
On King of the Hill someone demanding "this laughter is ill-informed" is a comedic moment, someone to laugh
at. On ResetERA.com it becomes a wielding of power that to challenge is "downplaying" real world concerns when the only actual stakes are stupid posts on a stupid forum. "This laughter is ill-informed" is a brutal broadside against the ignorant who watch South Park and think it's funny because fart jokes are funny. Those people display their ignorance, their acquiescence to the privileged status quo by refusing to stand up and declare "I agree, this laughter IS ill-informed!"
The entire thing is an endless display of social signaling within power relations that matter and exist only and entirely within the forum that sometimes gets picked up by other idiots elsewhere who don't realize they're doing the same thing within their same spheres and forums and instead believe that they are actually tangibly warring in true
power politics of which they never will come close to sniffing, same as the other seven billion losers on the planet.
It angers them. To not play is betrayal. Not casting off your family is betrayal. Not giving your life to the cause that is posting on ResetERA.com is betrayal. Visiting other forums is betrayal or worse. Those are all steps outside of the forum's power relations, into others, into other support and community structures, into areas outside the watchful eyes of the forum activists, into places full of ill-informed existence.
They're right, it's an utterly toxic and corrosive ecosystem. But in their hunt for saboteurs (something that recent thread literally used multiple times to describe people who did not dedicate to ResetERA.com enough) and fighting of entirely internal wars they cannot even begin to consider that the true force is not solely their perceived enemies.
www.resetera.com
)
