I believe in giving people a second chance, regardless of their karma. Of course, second/third/Nth chances follow the law of rapidly diminishing returns...

Sounds good to me. How about we allow them an Nth chance every 6 minutes? ;)

So, although I'm a libertarian futurist (gee, thought I was in the right place, LOL), my karma is -14. That, by itself, makes this site something of a joke.

The opposite is true.

The problem with pretty much all of this comment is that it made me feel very, very disinclined to participate in the discussion, or to read any further. Maybe I'm more sensitive than many LW readers and posters ("building karma" is a very good description of what I did with my first few weeks of commenting) but I can't be that much more sensitive, and it feels to me like most of this comment was intended as an attack.

Which is kind of disappointing, because there were some genuinely intriguing ideas in some of your other comments. Now that I dig around to find more, I find...this.

No. You still don't understand why you're being downvoted. It has nothing to do with people disagreeing with your political positions.

but something like 54 people at lesswrong identified themselves as "communists."

No. Five. 5 People at Less Wrong identified themselves as "communists". 352 people identified as libertarians. Even if all the communists who took the survey were online right now and downvoting all your comments that would still not explain all your downvotes. We have no problem with individualists and comments expressing or recommending libertarian positions are routinely well-upvoted. Moderators and funders have been published by Reason and Cato. People here practice corrective upvoting. If your political allies felt you were getting downvoted unfairly they would have reversed the downvotes. They have not because they are, instead, voting you down.

They are voting you down because your comments indicated that your mind has been killed by politics and when people pointed this out you started insulting everyone. They are downvoting you because you argue like you are trying to win, not convince. You resort to hyperbole and refuse to understand simple concepts like signal-noise ratio. You are certain when you do not have the evidence to be certain. When people disagree with you you only interpret that as evidence of their stupidity, insanity or evilness. You are just like the Democrat or Republican who supports every position his party leadership recommends.

Politics has killed your mind. Or you're trolling. It had killed my mind once so I understand. At times it threatens to retake it and it occasionally infects my comments here (after which I am rightly downvoted). But perhaps you're too far gone.

Perhaps I'm committing a fundamental attribution error right now, but you currently seem to me so mindkilled by politics that you seem to think anyone downvoting you must be a dirty communist -- as opposed to e.g. people that are turned off by your rudeness, your leaps to conclusions, etc, etc.

So mindkilled, that you didn't even notice that that self-reported communists in LW are 5, not 54. So mind-killed that you don't even check your assumptions.

Stalin (a self-identified communist) murdered 50,000,000 innocent people, Mao (another self-identified communist) murdered at leasty 60,000,000, and people still identify themselves with that ideology?

Communists say in turn "Hitler was a NOT-communist, and Attila the Hun was a NOT-communist, and Genghis-Khan was a not-communist, and the slave-owners of American South were not-communists, and the people who launched World War I were not-communists, and people still identify themselves with non-communism?"

Now a more *rational" argument you could have made would have been to statistically correlate increased/decreased misery/oppression under communist regimes over time, and to argue that this shows communism increases misery.