People who go to baseball games seem to care enough about the game, the team, and the players, that they can spout statistics and comparative data like an expert. Wouldn’t you think that that would be the case with politics, too?If you grabbed 100 random people entering a MLB park on a weekend to watch a game, how many of those 100 would be able to "spout statistics and comparative data like an expert"? Nowhere near 100, I'd bet, and likely well less than half. (Without doing the experiment myself, I'd put the over/under at 25.)
Why would a political (or any other) website be different? Yes, that number is going to be higher, as the website sample is self-selecting to be the people who actually care enough to post something, but there's going to be a significant percentage who treat the site as a social gathering rather than a "cause".
Then there are those who are simply "party crashers", no better than the obnoxious drunk boor three rows up smoking a cheap cigar in a "no smoking zone", who seem to delight in p*ssing other people off.
Finally, there's the highly-involved-to-the-point-of-myopia folks who seem the public gathering as an opportunity to hammer their own personal opinions and priorities, regardless of the topic at hand. These are the people who show up to the stadium with political-themed signs and are the same mentality as those who post a specific opinion on message board threads that are completely unrelated to the topic.
The short version: people who behave properly aren't noticed. The minority who act like idiots and jerks stick out like sore thumbs. In real life, or on the web.
And now back to our scheduled thread derailment...
Ping for your expertise.