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Political Content

 
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My political posts were immediately purged from
JavaRanch. Yet others are allowed to post content that makes the U.S's
president George seem inept. The following post is the proof. It
mentions George's name to a great extent.

https://coderanch.com/t/41333/md/Bush-Talk

I posted the following comment on the Thread:

Amazingly unfair!!! I posted a joke that mentioned the
president's name ONCE, and it was immediately deleted. Yet this joke,
which mentions George's name many times, has yet to be deleted.


To which Sheriff Marilyn de Queiroz responded:

Take it to the JavaRanch forum, Jesse.

I personally found the thread insulting since it makes our president
appear inept. Yet this thread has been allowed to remain intact. Why
is that the case?

I then posted a message that contained the "George" name ONCE. To my disbelief, this post was purged within seconds. Yet the original thread has been allowed to remain active. Why is this the case?

Sorry for the bother,

Jesse Torres
 
Sheriff
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The first post in the thread was an obvious play on the classic "Who's On First" comedy routine, and not really making any political statements. The moderators discussed it and let it stay. Your posts did not pass moderator scrutiny, so they were removed.

The general rule is that overt political statements are removed. That includes jokes that contain overt political statements. How this is interpreted is left up to each moderator.

While I hope we can get back to the point where MD contains interesting discussion again, which included some controversial and political content, it's not my call but I personally don't see it happening until people learn to address the subjects dispassionately and without causing offense. Overt political statements ridiculing people or their beliefs certainly are likely to cause offense. With that said, the barometer is whether or not the moderators feel something is likely to cause offense, not necessarily whether or not any particular user feels this may be the case. We simply can't please all the people all of the time.
[ February 18, 2005: Message edited by: Jason Menard ]
 
Jesse Torres
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Originally posted by Jason Menard:
The first post in the thread was an obvious play on the classic "Who's On First" comedy routine, and not really making any political statements. The moderators discussed it and let it stay. Your posts did not pass moderator scrutiny, so they were removed.

The general rule is that overt political statements are removed. That includes jokes that contain overt political statements. How this is interpreted is left up to each moderator.

While I hope we can get back to the point where Paul allows MD to contain interesting discussion again, which included some controversial and political content, from where I'm sitting from that seems unlikely until people learn to address the subjects dispassionately and without causing offense. Overt political statements ridiculing people certainly are likely to cause offense. With that said, the barometer is whether or not the moderators feel something is likely to cause offense, not necessarily whether or not any particular user feels this may be the case. We simply can't please all the people all of the time.




Thanks Jason for your acknowledgement to my issue. It means a whole lot to me that you took the time to explain and reiterate JavaRanch�s stance towards political content.

Thanks again,
 
Sheriff
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I think that religious threads fall into the same catagory. Overt religious statements ridiculing people or their beliefs certainly are likely to cause offense.

We are trying to allow some discussion of subjects which are not totally banal, but the best measure is: "Is it drivel?". Anything that is not drivel is subject to possible deletion.

As Jason mentioned, after some discussion the moderators decided that the joke in question was drivel. Of course, comments following the original post may turn it into something more serious, in which case the thread would stand a good chance of being deleted.
 
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religion is politics. Instead of "my candidate is better than yours", it's "my god is better than yours".
 
Jesse Torres
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Originally posted by Marilyn de Queiroz:
I think that religious threads fall into the same catagory. Overt religious statements ridiculing people or their beliefs certainly are likely to cause offense.

We are trying to allow some discussion of subjects which are not totally banal, but the best measure is: "Is it drivel?". Anything that is not drivel is subject to possible deletion.

As Jason mentioned, after some discussion the moderators decided that the joke in question was drivel. Of course, comments following the original post may turn it into something more serious, in which case the thread would stand a good chance of being deleted.




Thanks for taking your time to clarify the situation.

Thanks,
 
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Originally posted by Jesse Torres:
I personally found the thread insulting since it makes our president
appear inept. Yet this thread has been allowed to remain intact. Why
is that the case?



Actually the thread *was* moved to Thrash by a sheriff first. It was then discussed by the moderators wether we found it was political or not. After it looked like noone had a problem with it, I moved it back to MD, with the intent to watch it closely and remove it again should trouble arise.


I then posted a message that contained the "George" name ONCE. To my disbelief, this post was purged within seconds. Yet the original thread has been allowed to remain active. Why is this the case?



It's certainly not about how often "George" is mentioned, but about the context in which he is mentioned.

The original joke in that thread looked more like clever woard play to us than a political statement. It's certainly a thin line, but that's what we have to live with.
 
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I personally found it quite funny. I have the audio to the original 'Who's on First' skit, one of my favorite.

I wish people would just relax and stop getting so bent around the axle over stupid stuff. It seems some people are just looking for ways to be offended.

Can't we all just get along?
 
town drunk
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Maybe the best way to accomplish that, from an individual prespective, is to do our personal best not be give offense.
 
ranger
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Jesse, thanks for understanding our approach. You cool headedness when receiving these replies shows what we really would like to see in any kind of discussion.

Mark
 
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One other thing to be aware of here is that policies in MD do change somewhat over time depending on how well-behaved everyone is being - which in turn may be influenced by world events. During the year or so leading up to the last US election, for example, people were increasingly prone to argue heatedly about political topics. So we moderators took a more aggressive approach toward deleting political and potentially controversial threads sooner rather than later. Jesse, I believe it was during this period that you previously had posts deleted. As did a lot of other people. Since the election, people have generally been less argumentative, and so we've been able to lighten up a bit and allow more potentially controversial posts to exist in MD - as long as people are being nice. We still will delete things if they start to get too ugly, but we're willing to wait a bit longer now to give people a chance to show how they'll respond.

In the future, I imagine we'll go back and forth on this a few more times. Whenever things happen in the world which anger many of our members, we'll probably become more strict again; when people are relatively calm, we may be be less strict. The more our members help by trying to avoid giving offense instead of testing limits, the more we'll all be able to enjoy MD.
 
slicker
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Oh man. I was waiting so long for the smoke to clear, so I could finally tell all the people that were hoping the U.S. would fail miserably, that they were wrong. I don't recall taking part in too many flame throwing contests during the election, so I thought I was cool. Can't the devil get his due?

--------------

It's too bad we don't have a way to track the last deleted post. So a poster could put out a ~spicy~ reply if they've been on the wagon for a while...
 
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