hairy_hen said:
I don’t really want to wade into this mess, because usually I’m content to either ignore the stupidity that goes on, or just sit back and occasionally throw spitballs at it, but I feel compelled to say that the administrative “contributions” to the political thread before its removal were utterly infuriating.
When terrible things are happening in the world, and people try to express their frustration with said terrible things, for someone to come along and tell them their concerns are meaningless, and that they are just overreacting, is a remarkable display of tone-deafness. This is the message I heard over and over, and not only was it ill-advised, it was extremely condescending and insulting. I couldn’t even begin to guess the number of times I had an angry response to these absurd posts on the tip of my tongue, only to end up restraining myself because it simply would have fallen on deaf ears and accomplished nothing.
I won’t get any more specific than that, but suffice to say I was very disappointed to learn the latest round of disagreements had been settled in such an arbitrary fashion. When there’s as much bad feeling going on in this forum as there is, it’s helpful to be able to recognize that people have genuine reason to be as upset as they are, rather than just dismissing their concerns and calling them “childish”. That seems to be an ongoing theme with the administration of this place, though.
Truth be told, I’ve hardly posted here very much for the past few years, because I quickly tire of petty bickering and simply have better things to do than engage with it. I like to think I’ve made meaningful contributions to the cause of Star Wars preservation, if the positive comments on my work are anything to go by, but this is no longer the only place where that can happen. In spite of the stupidity, I often looked to the silliness of the off-topic section for a laugh when I needed one, but it looks like there’s going to be a lot less fun and a lot more bad feeling around here from now on.
Still, maybe it is better to just get rid of the whole topic. After all, I know plenty of people in real life who are perfectly nice in many other ways, but bring up anything political and they immediately turn into horrible monsters, and the only way to avoid strangling each other is to avoid the subject completely. If generations of human society can’t solve this dilemma, there’s no reason to think one forum should be able to do it, either.
So you disagreed with my politics and that made you angry, which of course makes me wrong (possibly a “horrible monster”, like the people you know who disagree with you) because your feelings dictate reality. You might consider that there was plenty of hyperbole and dismissive behavior on both sides of the debate. You might also consider the Politics threads weren’t places for people to get therapy to help them deal with world events, but to discuss those events and debate the surrounding politics.
For what it’s worth, I don’t consider people I disagree with to be horrible monsters, and I don’t think you’re one, and we probably agree on more than you realize. But as everyone who participated in the Politics threads knows, I’m a far-right sympathizer 😕
