All Things in Moderation

On today’s earlier thread, ashot posed what seemed to me to be an intriguing question. In the face of lms’ hopefully only temporary departure, he asked:

So this is going to become a boys club and a largely conservative one at that?

The perception that ATiM is or would become a largely conservative place struck me as very odd. I don’t feel that way at all, so I was compelled to do a bit of accounting.

By my count, we have 17 people who comment on a fairly regular basis. Having been reading them all for at least a year now and in many instance a lot longer, I think they can be sensibly distributed across 6 general political classifications: conservative, moderately conservative, moderate, moderately liberal, liberal, and libertarian. Right now, I’d say that we have 4 conservatives, 1 moderate conservative, 2 moderates, 1 moderate liberals, 7 progressives, and 2 libertarians. This is my distribution.

Cons – quarterback, McWing, Brent, myself
Mod Cons – Kevin
Mods – Mark, Bannedagain
Mod Lib – ashot,
Lib – lmsinca, Michigoose, okiegirl, bsimon, Fairlingtonblade, yelljkt, msjs0315
Libertarian – novahockey, jnc4p

There is, of course, room for dispute. I’m not entirely sure about a couple of these classifications, for example msjs. Would she call herself a moderate liberal or liberal? And maybe a couple more of those classified as liberals would object and declare themselves moderate liberals. But that is more a question of degree, not kind. Banned, since he generally only comments on the markets, is tough to judge too. But I think this generally gives a good sense of where we all fall politically.

So if my accounting is accurate, we’ve currently got 5 conservatives, 8 liberals, 2 moderates, and 2 libertarians, which seems fairly balanced with a slight lean to the left. Even if we throw the libertarians in with the conservatives (which, I suspect, both the cons and the liberts would object to in principle), we get rid of the slight lean, but maintain the overall balance. If we start to include the less frequent posters (ruk, mcurtis, abc, mike), then we most definitely start to lean left.

So I think ATiM has achieved a pretty good balance across the political spectrum, and in any event is certainly not “largely conservative”. Am I wrong? Have I offended anyone by classifying them as a liberal?

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I’m trying to decide if my continued participation here is necessary or even valuable for the blog in general or for me personally.  As one of the founders of the blog this is an important question for me but in the overall scheme of my life and interests it’s actually pretty minor.  In other words, it wouldn’t be that difficult to just walk away.  I have other projects waiting in the wings and as someone on the edge of becoming a senior citizen (yikes), I’m beginning to feel the increased value of time well spent.

I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m being thin skinned or overly sensitive to disagreement or intense questioning of my opinions, it’s actually a little more of a respect issue for me.  Perhaps I’ve simply over estimated my value as a dissenting voice and a woman’s perspective, I really can’t tell.  I’m not generally confused by stuff like this, but for now I haven’t been able to work through it, so I’m going to be on hiatus a little longer until I figure it out.

I have two issues, one is that during the last big ATiM kerfuffle, or the “thread that shall not be named”, I worked very hard publicly and privately, behind the scenes, to help  save the blog and keep “all” participants on board.  I swallowed a lot of pride and nearly prostrated myself at the feet of others in order to resolve our differences.  I didn’t mind too much, but it was difficult as I didn’t necessarily believe it was all about mistakes I had made.   It’s fine, we moved on and I think became better for it in the long run.  ****A number of us across the political divide worked together to bridge our differences rather than assigning blame.  I think I’m surprised there hasn’t been the same reciprocal effort in this case.  After reading the comments there appears to be a hardening of positions rather than the opposite which fosters further understanding.

In the thread regarding the VA legislation there was one issue the three of us, Michi, Okie and myself, couldn’t get the men to respond to, the issue of coercion/ invasion of personal space.  Mark and ashot were the only two who seemed to even respond to it or recognize it for a legitimate concern.  There was a lot of dancing around other issues which I don’t want to rehash, some were valid and some weren’t IMO, but as someone who raised five teenagers one of our major focuses here as parents was the distinction in sexual matters between force/coercion and free will.  I wouldn’t expect everyone else to agree that this legislation crossed those boundaries but I do believe recognition that this was the primary issue for some of us was in order, and yes we did feel summarily dismissed on this.

And so, I’m continuing my hiatus while I assess my value here and whether the blog is still valuable to me.  I’m honestly not looking for a lot of discussion, I just felt a certain responsibility as someone who dragged so many people over here with me to give you all an explanation of my thoughts on this, and then continue to work through it on my own.

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UPDATE:  Regardless of anything else I will be here for the discussion of ABC’s book on the weekend of April 13th.  This is an ATiM feature I was excited about on several levels, so I do hope some of you are reading the book.

****Post edited slightly

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