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In Reply to: censorship posted by susie on August 04, 2004 at 00:31:16:
Perhaps we could start a separate board for political discussions?
We did weigh the negative and positive effects of allowing politics to be discussed on our current boards. Unfortunately there are several drawbacks to allowing it.
What we didn't want was for our boards to be dominated by political arguments, with people repeating themselves over and over on the same points, while neglecting the purpose and mandate of our boards - to be a discussion forum for those of us processing our cultic experience.
The nature of our bulletin boards is that fresh important topics have a limited shelf life, and they get old and unnoticed as soon as they are pushed down the TOC. When there's a flood of impassioned political posts, especially by a few dominant personalities, important topics related to our cultic experience get shoved out of the way, down the TOC and out of sight rather quickly.
There are also a lot of sensitive visitors and occasional posters, who get intimidated by the amount of harshness and dogma that pervades when political discussions take over.
The fact is that not everyone thinks of politics with a sense of humor or in as friendly a manner as you might do. The "healthy contention" part seems to get taken over by aggressive crusades to insult others and remake them in their own image. The friendly helping hand aspect is replaced by the slashin bashing aspect. The net result is people are polarized and divided, and several sensitive fragile friendships established in the wake of our common traumatic cultic experience were actually lost.
IMO, the ugliest side of this is the way some of the dominant aggressive posters cannot stand anyone who disagrees with them only 10%, and even moderates get slashed at from all sides.
Perhaps political discussions are beyond the level of processing our cultic experience? Then again, perhaps not...
Perhaps we are interfering with an important part of processing our cultic experience... Perhaps if there is an ugly side, it needs to get out and be given some air time...
Perhaps some of us are carrying over our cultic dogma into the political arena. Perhaps our lack of objectivity and intolerance for pluralism is a leftover from our COG days... Perhaps not. (Gawd, we can't overuse the COG boogeyman excuse!)
Perhaps it's all worth exploring... but maybe on a separate board.
From a post below:
"The coordinators of this site have decided to call a moratorium on political arguments. Discussions about Michael Moore's film and posts for and against George Bush have gone on long enough. While daily arguments may have helped inform us that there are two sides to any issue, this board has now become dominated by political arguments.
"The posts from both left and right represent people's passionate feelings and are legitimate expressions of who they now are, having come out from under the mind control of the cult. But to continue posting almost exclusively about politics transforms the mandate of this board. Consider new posters who have just come out of the Family or come across this site for the first time looking for cult-related discussions. If all they find are pro-con arguments that they could find on hundreds of other political boards then we are not meeting the needs of our target audience.
"This present topic has become polarized to the point that moderate posters who identify neither with the left nor the right can hardly post without getting hit by both sides. New posters who come here trying to sort out their cult experience end up being too overwhelmed by strong personalities to even post.
"We have therefore decided to put a lid on political arguments for now. We may open the board to such discussions again a week before the elections."
