Posting Political/Religious Threads in the Main Forum

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by jAZ

It's not very gray IMO. If it's political or religious, then it stays in the DC, no matter who posts it (a DC regular, a Lounge-only regular, or a total noob).

The LONE exception is a major news event, one that rises above politics, then it stays in the Lounge until it's hijacked (then moved).

That exception is handled by the mods and they usually get it right. That's a gray area I'm comfortable with.

Whether you realize it or not, that's a huge gray area when you've got people like Frazod around. You may know it when you see it, but different people have different opinions about where the line is drawn.

In any event, it's worth repeating that you are one of the biggest reasons there's a problem with political topics in the Lounge to begin with. You were one of the two or three who couldn't contain yourself enough to avoid spamming the board late in the 2004 election cycle and now we all pay for your sins. You're a little like the drug addict who first argued for the banishment to save the board from yourself and who, after going into recovery, now argues in favor of harsh sentences for other drug users.

Originally Posted by jAZ

But the question being raised here is people who are deliberately and repeatedly trying to take minor stories with a political or religious angle and turning it into a debate in the Lounge.

That's worthy of punishment.

That's actually not the question being raised here. I almost never post a thread in the Lounge. I even more rarely post a thread that has any tangential relationship to politics here. Frazod makes it clear that he considers my recent Cheney prayer thread to be objectionable. By your own standards, a prayer thread belongs in the Lounge where the prayer thread prefix is available and even if DC had prayer prefixes, it's still just a news story as long as it isn't about political positions or a political campaign, IMO. Despite all this, Frazod and a few others didn't "know it when they saw it" the same way you say you would. Furthermore, several of the people who complain about politics in the Lounge actively worked to turn the Cheney prayer thread political, some even went so far as to post irrelevant content about abortion in the effort.

If anyone is worthy of punishment in that scenario (and I'm not advocating punishment here), it's not the guy who just wanted to generate positive thoughts for another human being. It's the people who don't want politics in the Lounge so much that they apparently couldn't resist trying to load the thread down with politics.