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i assume that there is a backstory to all this that somehow i know nothing about, yes?
i have noticed recurrent slides into simple namecalling, etc.--but it seems that during the 10 days or so that i was knocked out of commission with computer ennuis that something else had transpired. no matter really (i dont really care what the backstory is--i am just voicing my confusion over this turn of events).
what i am posting is a defense of the politics board.
1.
for what it's worth, i havent seen particular political questions arising from the actions of any mod as mod--sometimes things get strange when a mod switches from being a participant in a particular thread to acting as moderator in the same thread---the solution to this image-switch seems to me unnecessary (that another person operate as mod once a mod decides to participate)...goofy even...mostly because (for example) lebell is a consistently interesting fellow to talk/argue with--even though we rarely agree---and it would be a shame to hamstring his ability to participate in the forum because he is a moderator. same would apply, in differing ways, to most of the other folk with whom i have interacted in this space.
2.
it would be a shame indeed were the implied threat to shut down the politics board were to transpire. whether everyone likes the tone or not at every point, it often (often enough to keep me coming back to it--and there is no reason that i have to keep coming back--like everyone i have plenty of other things i can and probably should be doing in the morning) has fairly serious discussions---within the limitations imposed by the nature of messageboards--you get close to how someone might really think, but there is nonetheless always compression and the strange distancing that writing across little white squares engenders. and within the limits imposed on debate more generally by the sorry cultural environment within which we operate these days.
politics seems to me in the main more consistent than, say, the philosophy forum in this regard--maybe because folk do not understand the category politics to be as--o i dont know--formal or "serious" as philosophy. in my opinion, this is a real shame--most of what i think politics is would fit better under philosophy--but the division of intellectual labor within which we work is different than that. so there we are.
it seems to me that debate is fundamental to any democratic process. if the debate here is often degraded, it is more often than not an indication of the distance that seperates debate as a superficial index of or substitute for democracy from what the latter would be like were there anything real at stake. in which case, the problem is not this board, but the non-democracy that enframes debate more generally. the forum would be a symptom, in this case.
if you want to create a community that operates within a particular context but is somehow seperate from it, then fine--but dont be surprised if features of the context leak into the community--it would be naieve to imagine that things could go otherwise. well they could--and the community would soon die--as hundreds of previous communities have that thought they could seperate themselves entirely from their environments.
in the end, i am not sure what is going on here: whether the series of particular moves that engendered hal's opening statement are in themselves a result of some accumulation of pm-level sniping/exchanges of self-justifications that i (mercifully i think) am not privy to, or if the problem is the politics board in and of itself. either way, it would be a shame if this place were to be shut down in the interest of some conception of harmony that is in all probability self-defeating for the continued functioning of the community itself. say you did shut it down--the community would be open to the world around it across the level of what pop songs do you like, what tv shows or film have you seen, whats up with my computer, my leisure life, what is strange in the news. if this was the extent of it, then you might well have a harmonious community--my theory is that it would be harmonious like the shakers were---fewer and fewer people across time. if what this is really about is an attempt to remind/enforce a requirement of civility, then the opening is a pretty strange way to go about it----but whatever----people get angry--i get angry from time to time too.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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