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Originally Posted by Angela  To all you naysayers: I'm missing something in what you're saying... you don't want to be exposed to political discussion, you want to be free of its influence here, where you feel it's detrimental to your personal development. You want to feel safely sequestered from that area of talk. Right? |
Yes.
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Why would you oppose a whole separate forum to house that kind of talk, so that you're safe from an accidental encounter? The moderators would pick up stray political posts and move them to the Political Forum. You would have to go out of your way to stumble across Ron Paul or Benazhir Bhutto. You would be safe, safer than you are now!
What am I missing?
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Thanks for asking Angela.
I read new threads through the "New Post" search function. I don't really go into individual forums much to look for new threads to read. Oftentimes, when I read a thread, I don't really even know what forum it is in. So, if you were to put all of the existing political threads into a political forum, it would not decrease my exposure to them. However, on the other hand, a separate political forum will naturally encourage people to start political threads. Thus, the net result is that I will see more political threads.
In regard to Erin's comment, it's not easy to ignore. It's not like a subject that I have no emotional connection to like Religious topics, or psychic stuff. I don't care about those topics, and I don't care what others think about those topics so it's easy for me to ignore.
However, a number of political topics carry a huge emotional connectivity, especially as I know that what people do think about the subject can affect me through passing of laws. Thus, it's not easy to ignore them. An example that perhaps you Erin can relate would be a thread titled "How to kidnap and torture children and btw here are pictures of Erin's kid and where they go to school" Maybe Erin, you're highly developed enough to find the example easy to ignore, but I know a lot of people wouldn't. They'd get defensive and jump on the thread if the policy was to allow such a thread. Then, there goes that person's intention to ask questions that were important to their personal development.
Thus for me, it's not easy to ignore a political thread as it is easy to ignore other threads. Politics, unfortunately, affect us. Even with my actively trying to ignore political threads on this forum, I've still got suckered into a few of them on this forum and regretted the time, and energy I spent on them.
I think some of you are probably wondering "Why do we highly developed people who want to intelligently talk about politics have to put up with these lesser developed people who can't just ignore such threads? These people need to do some personal development to improve themselves so it's easy for them to ignore such threads." Perhaps you'd be right, I know I would love to easily ignore such threads, but I'm not at the point yet, and it seems that a number of other people aren't at that point yet. This forum doesn't say "Personal Development for Highly Developed People". It's for "Smart People" who realize that all facets of your life can't automatically change overnight no matter how much you want it to. Thus, there's going to be people at all stages of personal development on here.
I do like Brutha's idea though, of creating a separate political user group so you have to check mark or sign up to have access to the political forum. That way, people who want to discuss politics can do so. Those of us who feel politics would be harmful to our personal development can choose to remain ignorant of it in the same way we non-mods are ignorant of what goes on in the mods forums. It's not a perfect solution, but it can perhaps meets the needs of both those who want to discuss politics with other forumites on here, and meets the needs of those who want no politics in here. One way this can be good for you "yes sayers" is that if someone gets carried away in the political forum and abuses it, but yet is a good poster in the regular part of the personal development forums, you can simply remove him from the political user group, without having to ban him from the entire forum. That'd probably make it a lot easier to moderate the forum - as I know it must be difficult to ban people who contribute a lot...yet cause problems. Not to mention, if you simply only allow those who have a large number of posts, say 100, to join the political user group, then you can help ensure that it'll be a lot easier to moderate the forum then say allowing everyone to jump in at any time. Furthermore, this political user-group can be good for us non-sayers because if you move all political threads there, then our exposure to political threads would dramatically go down.