Quote:
Originally Posted by Patricia
The moderators are discussing this issue.
There is a case for just stopping ALL political threads. However, what exactly counts as political? DRM threads get political at times and its not always easy to see where a line should be drawn.
Last year we tried moving all serious political threads into a forum called the Conservatory. It was a disaster, and generated more rancor and bitterness than we had ever seen on MR. Alex eventually decided to close it because it had nothing to do with our central mission: to promote mobile reading it all its forms.
Now we have a resurgence of overtly political topics and some people have been very intemperate. We'd like to find a solution that allows members as much freedom as possible, without causing gratuitous offence to others. This is more difficult than you might think. For example, we had to ban the so-called "Rattler" earlier because he turned out to be a sockpuppet for Recluse.
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Yours (as a moderator) isn't an easy task. Great Books contain large ideas, and large ideas inspire controversy. Keeping politics and religion out of the Lounge is an admirable and worthy goal (I speak as one whose hands are not entirely clean), but there should be, I think, a place for those of us who would like to discuss these large ideas with our MobileRead friends who wish to do so. In any case, ad hominem attacks, racial insensitivity, and name-calling should not be tolerated.
Do we want to be a community where only safe and sanitized books can be discussed? Should Plato's works be banned from discussion because his ideas of government were anti-democratic? Should Marx? Should we not allow Tolstoy's
War and Peace because of the theological speculation within its pages that Napoleon might be the Anti-Christ?