2016 Postmortem

During the primaries you guys turned this place into the site of a practical civil war. Don't get me wrong there were plenty of Bernie supporters who said sometimes terrible things, but the Hillary camp were the ones who really pushed the 'us and them' narrative. I lost count of the number of posts in the Hillary forum saying things like 'I can't ever bear to speak to those people any more'.

Then when Hillary won, you all rejoiced in the bloodletting. Saying anything positive about Bernie was grounds for being mocked, insulted and ostracized, with the new forum rules allowing all the people who had rightly been banned for openly trolling to come pouring back and take up where they had left off.

Many of us at that point went to join JPR as we wanted a place we could talk freely without being attacked. Personally I think I posted there maybe twice before deciding it wasn't a place that represented my views. On coming back and posting here again, immediately I had people jumping on me, telling me that because I was a member there I must be a terrible person who agreed with the very worst things anyone there had ever said.

It's pathetic quite frankly.

So now the election is over, and heartbreakingly the very exact things we warned about have come true. Well now is the time to rebuild and get ready to fix this terrible mess, and we're not going to achieve that by labelling people based on what website they visited or which candidate they supported in a previous election. Either we get our shit together, or this is going to happen again in 2020.