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#1: Lauren (lorispad) on Nov 23, 2009

Unbelievable. I can't get away from crazy political messages on a puzzle website.

Glenn Beck is an idiot. You are just pathetic.

Wow. And you guys talk about ME being mean. LOL

wow is right.

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What we really need in the US is for some of the people who think Obama is a Muslim socialist and some of us who think that the things he is trying to do are the only hope for the country to sit down together and have a nice long talk.

We really don't need more echo chamber organizations where people from group A sit down together and talk each other a frenzy without the least input from anyone with a different opinion. If you love America, then part of what you love has to be democracy, and democracy is all about sitting down and talking to people with different points of views, trying to understand why they hold those points of views, and finding the common ground that can lead to real improvements that work for everyone. Gathering together a like-minded mob, working them into a froth of passion for a cause by invoking unexamined truisms and waving the flag is not a celebration of American values. My German grandparents would have recognized that kind of thing. That's not patriotism.

Well said! My grandparents were also German, and although they rarely liked to talk about it, there were enough stories told of why and how they left their homeland to forever make me dislike zealot 'groupthink' organizations like Beck's '9-12 Project'. The alarm bells instantly start to go off in my head. I don't have a recipe for fixing America's problems, but I'm pretty sure 'The 9-12 Project' isn't on the list of ingredients. Sadly, Beck and those that share his mindset don't seem interested in an open discussion, only in recruitment of more disciples. It's disturbing.

I think this is happening on the left as well as the right though. Not so much in the form of little organized groups that hold meetings to reverberate off each other, but certainly in the form of mostly talking to only to like minded people and listening to media outlets that favor their points of view until you reach the point where the things the other side say don't make any sense at all. When you reach that point, where you can't do anything with your political opponents except demonize them and yell at them, then democracy fails.

I suspect that the greater tendency of the right to form these little in-groups has to do with the right's stronger ties to the traditional Christian Church, so they feel more comfortable gathering in things that resemble the traditional bible study groups, but just broaden the discussion subjects. Liberals don't have as strong a tradition of getting together in little groups like that.

Valid points. I agree that problems arise from the far left as well as the far right. I don't think extremism, in any form, is a good thing.

11 years later, same problems.

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