nobody should worry about disagreeing here, that's the last thing i want. you’re not going to get a bollocking from me just for disagreeing, the situation’s more fraught with third because there’s some history there.
in terms of successful dissent, it happens all the time without any issues at all. just today on choon of the day luke and corspe disagreed with me about something. people are disagreeing on the da baby thread without any problems. the madteo thread .the 2010’s thread, etc. etc. no problems at all.
as it happens i do think threads are better when people play along rather than these tugs of war being set up though. so for example the premise of the ‘beyond soul’ thread is that the music i listen to is soulless. of course i disagree with that, but i played along instead of trying to refute it and it was an infinitely better thread because of it. ideas were generated, conversations were opened up, etc. i was talking “the man” earlier in this thread and i don’t even believe in “the man”, it’s just a way of coming up with something fun and novel.
in terms of this evening it felt to me at least that we went from this open conversation where new ideas were being generated to shifting gears and just repeating a conversation we’ve had- without exaggeration- dozens of times over the last year or two. also i felt the conversational scope was narrowing down into “barty vs third”, which is a dynamic that’s ruined lots of threads in the past and doesn’t really achieve anything; it stops conversations dead in their tracks and excludes other posters.
as i said the me and third dynamic has caused problems before and there have been a couple o other users who’ve felt inhibited posting for similar reasons.
all that being said maybe my attempts to nip it in the bud were premature or unwarranted in which case sorry about that.