I also missed some of the issues in my previous post.
First, One of the issue is why I do my best (even though I slip once in a while) of avoiding the daily news, including political news. This goes to Steve's article about why he broke his news addiction by avoiding the daily news:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/200...ews-addiction/ He stated:
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Originally Posted by Steve's article When I stepped back and looked at the big picture, I realized that news was worse than worthless to me. It provides the compelling illusion of valuable, factual information, but when you bite into it, you get nothing but poisoned air. |
Adding a political forum to this place...invites the political and daily news in. That just seems so wrong, and so against the spirit of what Steve was talking about in this article.
At the end of May of 07, the article inspired me and I did a 30-day trial on not watching any TV news. I was successful in breaking through a habit of watching TV news for several hours a day. I followed that with a trial of stopping the reading of all online news, including political websites that I had followed for eight years. I succeeded. During the fall, I joined a Ron Paul meetup group as I already knew a lot about Ron Paul before he ever ran for President and was excited to meet like-minded people. However, after I realized I was once again getting too involved in politics and started to see the shift in my thinking back to the negative fear-based thinking, I resigned from the meetup group, and stopped all Ron Paul email groups. I've even avoided using Yahoo Mail new email interface in favor of its old interface because there is no way to shut off the news on the front page of the new email interface. So I've done a lot to avoid political and daily news. Now, for us, to invite politics and daily news into this site that inspired me to avoid politics and news...seems like the world turning upside down.
Second, there is an argument that politics is an extension of personal development. However, you can use that argument with just about any kind of topics. That's because gaining any kind of knowledge is a form of personal development. However, it's not the core of personal development, it's not the crust of why people go into personal development. It's more of a sideline, an extension. One could use the argument that having a forum on how best to rape someone is a personal development issue, as that involves acquiring knowledge and improving one's skill in achieving one's aim. But is it really the direction we want to go in?
Third, there is an argument that because there is a demand from some people to have a forum, we should. However, if we choose what to have on here simply by demand, then what about spam? There clearly is a huge demand for spam on this forum by counting the number of times people attempt to post spam. So, why aren't we advocating the creation of a side forum for spam? Judging by demand is not the answer to figuring out what kind of forums we want to have.
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Originally Posted by Erin Pavlina One of the reasons I want the forum is to hear everyone's point of view. I haven't made up my mind on a lot of issues and I want to hear what others have to say. I recognize that I am not an expert at world affairs and want to learn more. |
Erin, it feels that you're not going to get everyone's point of view regardless. As we've read in this thread, a number of us do not wants to talk about politics, or read about it or see the headlines of it. So you're already only going to have a portion of the users in this forum interested in answering your questions, regardless of how it's set up.
Finally, Erin, I know you're interested in having some influence in the political realm, and you've said beforehand that perhaps Steve or you may run for a political office some day in the distance future. So you're wise to educate yourself on these topics. However, realize that your attempt to educate yourself through this forum by creating an open political forum can and will denigrate this forum for a number of us.