I have trouble reconciling the existence of the thing with the community expectations that we ban bigots and nationalists. "Here's a forum to post about your political views, but if you post these ones then you're banned" rubs me wrong as a concept.
I'd be more comfortable just saying "we're not a politics forum, we're a cricket forum with a diverse member base and value people feeling safe knowing they won't be vilified based on their inherent characteristics or identity over free and open fringe political discussions" given that's what members seem to want, but I struggle to reconcile it with having a politics forum. If you're gonna have one you shouldn't really ban people for posting their **** opinions in it. Having politics threads but not a forum would make it feel less contradictory to me.
People are going to talk about it whether we have a forum for it or not. Better to separate it and keep it from flowing into unrelated threads. I don't go in there because I'm not particularly interested in reading the political opinions of people I have very little respect for - and if the forum isn't there you bet I'll be reading them in random threads in Off Topic within the week.
The issue is that a lot of that flows into other threads, whether we like it or not. While the specific cases of SS and weldone (and perhaps before that, Robbie and Watson, if they were different people) etc. does show issues from their side (and I agree with almost all the mod decisions on those), the pile on and bullying culture here is very evident and that is what Jimmy101 has pointed out. I can tell you he was one of the posters who reached out to me when I stopped posting here for a while for the exact same reasons. So its not like he only speaks up when posters like Robbie or SS are banned. That is such a shitty way to look at it and shows the exact cliquey bullying nature that has become a fabric of CW, whether we like it or not.
To me, calling out someone on their political leanings is fine but CW is just another online place where we have many whom, I suspect, won't care much for another person in real life, leave alone helping them, but will say a lot of stuff to be "famous" and get "likes" etc. I have no doubt guys like Shady Slim means well and the example he quoted of L&L was a good one, but we have evidence in this very thread that L&L felt the same way that others have been pointing out here.
Any rational discussion or discourse cannot happen when you get people who are so firmly entrenched in their opinions of right and wrong that everything boils down to "I know better than you", which is exactly how the discussion in that Indian Politics thread went down. It is funny how often we speak of the "political spectrum" and yet so much of this forum believes in having to categorize/pigeon hole everyone when it comes to politics. A little humility in realizing that you don't become an expert on anything by reading the wikipedia page on the topic will be helpful.
Sadly, I believe we are way past it, not just at CW, but everywhere. I am constantly amazed and dismayed by how many in my workplace think they know everything about something because they read the wiki page on it. We live in a world where opinions are used to inflate egos and then it leads to its own vicious cycle. The world is not gonna stop just because you don't share your opinion on something, and yet, its what entire online population thinks these days.
EDIT: When I said "So much of this forum" I should point I mean it is among the people who post most frequently and everywhere in CW. Not taking the forum as a whole.
Should also point out, I feel the British Politics thread in the time I have followed it from last year, has been an excellent one and an example of good-faith rational discussion and debate on politics and policy without the idea of having to pigeonhole every poster there as either a Nazi or a leftie etc.
