Tom and I disagree on this, sounds like you agree with Tom and not me.
Guess I misunderstood your post. I thought you were stating that if it’s primarily politics it should be in P&R, which I would agree with. If it’s a post about a specific game though, or a specific incident involving gaming, and happens to involve political crossover, then I think it should stay in Games. You’re saying such a post should move to P&R as well?
If a gaming thread degraded into politics and stayed there, I would prefer to pull the politics posts out and move them to P&R to try to save the gaming discussion. It is possible to discuss swatting without getting into a bitter argument over cops unjustly shooting minorities or whatever.
It hasn’t happened yet, but that is something I’d want to do for Movie Club. If we are, say down to three or four finalists for the monthly film, and one is an overtly political film and generates controversy, that’s cool. But I don’t want the political tit for tat to drown out righteous discussion of the other films’ (or the "political film’s) artistic merits/issues and have the thread be dominated by a partisan political debate that doesn’t have a thing to do with film as film. When the time comes, if it starts happening, I’d rather the tit for tat debate be moved to P & R. Merely to preserve other voices and discussions nor revolving around the political controversy. Heck some people (ahem, @ArmandoPenblade :)) may come merely to proselytize, but not really wanting to even participate in the club as a monthly movie club, but just to debate.
Having said all that, it all depends, right? Hypotheticals are wonderful, but the specifics matter. A hard and fast rule kinda doesn’t work, IMO.
I am not convinced in the USA 2018 you can separate “politics” from anything. Most particularly a hobby in which several games creators and politicians have been so very closely linked and in which many works self evidently are about issues of violence.
For wargames in particular I rather think the grog thread is handled well by self policing and helpful moderation (give yourselves a pat on the back grogs & mods). I mean we HAVE to discuss politics and conflict there. Hell even genocides & atrocities must be included to have an honest discussion about some specific wargames & the conflicts they address.
Good luck trying and I will of course abide by any community guidelines.
@Navaronegun said it well. I am not sure a simple rule is going to handle such a large range of topics and behaviours. Which is why I like the grog thread’s more active system. If I post something over the line there or of questionable accuracy. I get called out. Same for everyone, and (I like to think) we all have enough respect for each other we can take that correction and to move on.
Hugs Rod.
Proceeds to get in a bitter argument over the utility of Tanks in Jungle Warfare with Rod and insults his Mother.
@Navaronegun lol :) I will take the tanks in the jungle issue to the forums sir where I demand satisfaction! Which reminds me there is a great book about tanks in Vietnam I have somewhere.
Edit: Clausewitz was snappier than me
On war it is the “continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means”
That was completely unrelated though, like not related to the films actually being discuss. If we choose a film about politics, we better be prepared to discuss politics. It goes hand in hand. It’s pretty unreasonable to know that swatting is going to go into the realm of guns and politics so… maybe those individuals should just avoid the topic.
Oh, I don’t disagree, and I think it didn’t matter there. It was just fine in the tread. I was more thinking hypothetically. Say in 3 months there are 3 finalists. One deals with a hot-button issue. the other two don’t. I’d rather the Political debate about the issues in Mr. Hypothetical Hot Button Film (say, Dead Man Walking and the Death Penalty) be discussed elsewhere. Not becase we are hot house flowers. More because the other two films deserve to be heard about and the thread itself doesn’t need to morph into te the “Capital Punishment” thread.
Not if in that hypothetical, Dead Man Walking wins. Well, it would be just fine and germane to discuss Capital Punishment when discussing the film in thread (After Spoilers have been lifted).
It doesn’t have to. You can talk about swatting without bringing up gun control, police brutality, or black lives matter. Cops will always have guns, that swatting death was accidental, and the guy killed was white.
Anyway, it isn’t about segregating politics so much as the bitter, endless arguments that can often result from injecting politics into the conversation.
Your stance is pretty clear on this because you keep using words like degraded as if politics and life in discussions about games is a bad thing. It’s not, and it’s completely naive to believe you can talk about police officers killing an unarmed man will not shift into political type discussions just because the source of the disagreement revolves around a game. No one is injecting anything into this or probably most the topics you are unhappy about… they’re tied together.
Our political differences here arent so great as to make civilized discourse impossible, are they?
It’s a bad thing when it degrades into bitter arguments, which political discussions are known to do.
Well under that reasoning we shouldn’t discuss games either. There are games out there people have been arguing about for two decades, if not longer… still.
C’mon. It’s pretty unusual to get that worked up over videogames. You know what I’m talking about. Anyway Tom disagrees, so we won’t be doing it.
I was certainly part or most of taking the SWATing thread into a broader discussion of police shootings, but I didn’t think the thread was getting unacceptably heated. The most controversy I saw was one person pointing out that police are doing the best they can in difficult circumstances and others (including me) pushing back a bit. Am I wrong about that and misreading things?
I guess my point is that I didn’t think we were getting too far into “bringing up gun control, police brutality, or black lives matter”, but what do I know?
I didn’t read that thread lately, could have been a bad example. If not getting heated I have no concerns about it.
To me, yes. Because games are how I escape political nonsense. A gaming forum should be a safe haven from that sort of thing, in my opinion. I don’t mind if we don’t worry about separating threads, people can just mute a topic they no longer wish to follow and we are all adults.
We are a pretty articulate group and I agree its better just to have these things out on the table. There are the occasional folks who are simply not a good fit with whats considered mainstream on the board but they are rare.
I would also say that some negative reactions I have to certain posts may not really be associated with the subject of politics per se.
More its when a poster doesnt realise they have repeated their views so much they are kind of lessening enjoyment of the thread at hand.
I have been guilty of that within the Elite thread as an illustrative and harmless example. I think I ended up boring the pants off you and others by repeating my views ad nauseam and I appreciated you telling me so plainly.
I thought this came from the swatting topic because Tom created this topic shortly after like two people asked others to take it to P&R. That topic is specifically about swatting, so the expectation is… it’s going to hit politics so don’t read it. Any time there is a discussion about loot boxes, free to play games, mobile games, and now Valve’s new card game… it’s going to veer toward money and probably markets and developers and publishers and the reaction of gamers.
If people just want to walk-through guides, I assume they could go to GameFAQS, Wikias or YouTube. When you have people on a board talking about their experiences, those experiences are different and they will veer left or right based on unique experiences. There’s nothing wrong with that. For the most part, it’s usually pretty mild around here and yeah some personalities clash but so what, it happens.
The only thing weird about that topic was a person or two showing up and demanding a calm conversation be taken to P&R.
When we talked about splitting though, that whole conversation about taking pieces out of conversation and giving it a different topic, it was described as not being negative. I don’t think that’s the case, and as a result, I am pretty against it now. We can certainly call people out for being off topic but for the swatting, it’s completely on topic.