I avoid any threads that directly discuss politics but the ironic thing about this thread is that Erik's infamous Amir/ASR topic was a revelation to me about how politial and tribal identity has taken root in this hobby. Some of the posters in that thread hurled the most vile, unfounded, ridiculous insults at Amir for eloquently putting forward his philosophy regarding how measurements and bias relate to what we hear. Geez, if you don't like what he is saying, just ignore him!
The whole thing reminded me of how dysfunctional our political debate has become. Our poliics have become our identity and it's our tribe against the other tribe. We can't seem to have a civil discussion anymore.
In our esoteric, nerdy audio hobby we seem to have separated into two tribes as well. It's the subjective tribe vs. the objective tribe and one of those tribes feels threatened to their very core about what the other tribe is saying. Their response is to sling insults and question the motives and character of the the people who view the world differently than they do.
To bend a phrase, Audio politics are so viscious because the stakes are so low.