Good God I just took a look over at the Retreat site. They should change the name to "The Old South Tea Party"
On one level, that name sounds so hospitable and genteel. I picture ladies sitting on the veranda, sipping Earl Grey from fine china. On another level, it's a double whammy of scary politics.
You know, I kinda miss the conservatives. My blood hasn't boiled much since they left. 
Word.
But yes, the political and social commentary here continues to provide lots of laughs over there.
This is exactly what I liked about the Retreat. I enjoyed going there in the days when they'd go on huge rants about some little thing someone from BetterMost posted and how ridiculous or evil or stupid it was. I was often the subject of those rants, and -- what can I say? I'm narcissistic enough to be interested in posts even by people who are trashing me. The ones on the Retreat were so wildly mis- and underinformed, so seething with contempt and outrage at a figure that hardly even resembled me, that they didn't hurt my feelings. They just seem odd and funny.
I think at one point I finally did ask Brokeplex to please post something correcting a rant about how, um, this particular poster was sick of writing checks to pay for my house. Hunh?? I pay for my own house! I bought it just the regular way from the woman who owned it, not with some special federal program or anything. I put half its value down when I bought it, and have never missed a mortgage payment, let alone somehow got the government to cover it for me (which I guess is what's implied by the check-writing thing). Anyway, I believe Bill did post something quite sensible in response.
At one point I even signed up for a Retreat membership! Bill had alerted me to a particularly virulent thread about something I had written that was available only to members. I signed up under a new name (can't even remember what it was, now). Jess, understandably, immediately spotted that this new member was from Minnesota, of course suspected (she was the people on the pavement!) and sent a politely worded welcoming message asking what brought me there. Unlike Ennis, I immediately told her who I was. I really wasn't into sneaking around or anything, I just wanted to access that stuff. But apparently, according to Bill, she then deleted the thread about me so I never did get to see it. I think I maybe posted there once or twice -- Bill kept encouraging me to jump right into the political arguments, because I think he likes the challenge of a debate, too. Say what you will about Brokeplex; he's not interested in enveloping himself in some kind of conservative-only cocoon.
But I had no interest in stirring up trouble there, or even getting in any big arguments. The Retreat members had very clearly indicated that they were not interested in posting here, in an environment where their views are an anathema to many other people, and where they were almost always in the minority. I am sorry about their decision, but I can understand it. So why should I invade their turf? Besides, the other site was run by a popular, charismatic, interesting and often charming leader to whom people felt a lot of affection and loyalty, and I can understand why they flocked to her.
I do have to hand it to Milo, though. Milo, you're one of the few if not the only BetterMost conservative who has hung in here. I believe it's partly because you also genuinely relish the challenge of presenting contradictory ideas, and I fully understand that impulse.
Eventually, I forgot my Retreat username and password, lost interest, didn't see as many of those anti-BetterMost posts that had held my interest. I'm not super interested in what the far right thinks about Obama. And last time I went there, like maybe four or five months ago, the Retreat seemed to consist of a lot of threads in which just one person would post every single post. So, say, Artiste would post 24 times in a row or something. I lost the URL to the site.
Brokeplex himself left, he told me, in order to spend more time on some other political site. He and I had a friendly correspondence going on for a while, and he strongly urged me to sign up at this new site. But frankly, I'm not really interested in arguing politics with strangers. If I'm going to argue politics, I want to do it with people with whom I share six years of history and a transformative-verging-on-mystical movie-going experience.
