On Sun, 20 Apr 2014 16:55:58 Rick Moen wrote:
I'm mildly surprised to find an 'Politics is inescapably toxic and must therefore be banned even on explicitly no-topic-required, anything-goes mailing lists' attitude expressed in Melbourne. No offence intended in making the comparison, but I most often find that view expressed by... well... Americans.
It seems that the meme that politics shouldn't be discussed is mainly advocated by people who have political beliefs that don't stand up to inspection. One of the recent discussions I saw involved a bunch of people talking about how horrible "Family First" (Australia's main anti-gay party) is. That got a few people saying that we shouldn't discuss politics even though no-one said anything when the relative merits of Liberal and Labor were discussed. On some mailing lists vaguely related to technology there is a meme that we shouldn't be unfair to conservatives. That's correlated with the "fair and balanced" media meme which claims that both sides should be consulted for news stories. Really there's usually a right side and a wrong side and the people who are wrong should be written about not interviewed. It doesn't help to have a Playboy model given equal balance to medical experts when vaccines are discussed, or geologists working for oil companies given equal balance to climate experts when discussing climate change. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/