Neven, if (and I agree with you) activism is at this point more important than monitoring, perhaps team up with some of the burgeoning movements like XR or Earth Strike by helping them get the word out, or helping them think about their demands...
That's something I hope to do in the near future.
I just don't think that the quality of the arguments in the political threads as of late make them persuasive to anyone, and it's clear that they've alienated quite a few.
I agree, and as usual, I've let things play out for too long. But eventually I was faced with a choice. I thought about closing the political threads, but things don't get solved by not talking about them, and I don't want to get the Cryosphere infested by political talk (like happened on the ASIB). I went out of my way to put Lurk and others on moderation, because I didn't agree with their style, even though I agreed with their content (I now snip their comments before approving them, and oftentimes just delete them). I also got involved more, but failed in getting my main point across. It didn't work, I was still a Putin-bot.
So, the choice was: Do I let mainstream thought dominate the political threads, or do I let radical thought have the upper hand? I've now opted for the latter, because I'm a radical and it's not like mainstream thought is being curbed on the Internet or in the media. So, if someone is copypasting Mueller Investigation hysteria on a daily basis, it gets moved to the special Political Theatre thread. The same for someone writing TICK-TOCK every second comment, going nuts about whatever it is Trump has done this time. People who deny George HW Bush was a war criminal, are urged to find some neoliberal/neoconservative forum that will be more to their liking. People who arrogantly champion the greenwashing of consumer culture as a solution to AGW (Do you have a better idea? Huh, do you, do you?), receive push-back. The same with nuclear advocates. And so on.
I prefer if people stay on board, but I can't force anyone, and I'm also not going to endlessly try to please everyone. If you think the Cryosphere section is no longer worth visiting because someone says that Corporate Democrats are the reason Trump is president on the other side of the ASIF, then so be it. I'm very, very serious about AGW, and so I'm going to do this the way I see fit.
Does this mean that the political threads will now be an 'echo chamber that consists of me, Lurk, Terry, and Red patting each other on the back'? I don't think so, but we'll see. I don't see a reason why things can't continue as they have so far, with the occasional heated argument, based on actual events. Things aren't static, they evolve, just like this forum.