Me being the negative person I am, tend to believe the latter rather than the former.
It's a real chicken and the egg debate.
Do people come here because peak oil is some sort of trojan horse in which one -ism or the next (libertarianism being the dominant one) sees how it can be used to fruther their ideology?
What tends to happen, though, is the pub effect, which is once you get a bunch of people with the same ideology, they start to drive the discussion around some side topic that may have little or no direct relationship with what they're really supposed to be there for.
That's why I posted the "Excess baggage" image on the post about Building 7 (a Godwin's Law term if ever there was one).
Petty politics is another, in which people who I guess are bored enough about doom not to talk about it anymore, pass the time by hitting F5 over their favorite pundit (Zerohedge or FoxNews or whatever) like a mouse hitting the button on a food dispenser and then dumping the scandal of the moment here for everyone to snicker about how Obama is such a terrible president.
Big f-n deal. How is any elected official going to put more water into the aquifers, more topsoil into the heartland, less nitrogen runoff into the oceans, and on and on and on. Yet there is this continued conscious lie that people carry around with them that they can feel better as long as they have some everpresent scandal to bitch and moan about. It's like the digital equivalent of a punching bag or having a pillow to scream into at night. It's a joke.
Still, if you look at the posting history of a lot of people here, you'll see that they have an agenda. They want to influence people towards some end, and it rarely has anything to do with doom or doomer prep. So you've got Planty who has no purpose here other than to lower Obama's approval ratings. Or you have V-M who has no agenda other than to convince us that humans got their start via genetic tampering by aliens. Or you have the marijuana guy who thinks all the world's problems can be solved with "hemp".
What I really hate more than anything else is interfacing with shallow one-trick ponies who have latched onto some simplistic "answer" and who can't seem to think big-picture. It's fine when these people fire off their neurons in isolation, but when they push people's general anti-establishment bent it creates the equivalent of The Wave at a baseball park. It's something that seems to have no purpose, but everybody jumps on the bandwagon anyway almost out of a reflex.
If you've read through one "government is bad" echo chamber thread, you've read them all. Regardless of whether you agree or not, it's dull beyond belief. I'm amazed that people still go for these empty calories, like it actually accomplishes anything.
Anyway, that's the end of my hysterical rant. Have fun posting photoshops of Obama holding his phone upside down while the Holocene extinction continues apace.
![[smilie=dontknow.gif]](https://www.peakoil.com/forums/images/smilies/dontknow.gif "dontknow")
So if there aren't the kinds of threads you want on here, start posting them. 
Mos you think too much. You need to place both hands on the edge of your computer desk and push yourself away. Then get up and DO something. Rip out a room to the studs, insulate and new gyp board, mud, paint and paper then refinish the floor.If that's not doable then volunteer at Habitat for humanity or similar. spend some days pounding nails and carrying 2x6s. The break will really clear your mind.
