No political arguments = Happier Talossa?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith

I'll dance with you all night, if you'd like. Just know that I sorta have two left feet.

Uh.  Okay.  If you're done with the weird meta-derailing, can we return to the topic?  Maybe the marching orders on Facebook say differently, but this doesn't seem productive.

There should not be a place to segregate unpopular opinions.  It's bad for the body politic.  And in any other setting, the power to decide what is permitted to be said in a conversation would be called censorship, even if that makes us all uncomfortable to admit.  There needs to be a public square that is only regulated to the extent that it is required for a minimum of public order -- things for which board moderators can reasonably set fairly objective standards, like spamming.

[Sir Txec dal Nordselvă, UrB]

I've lost the trail in this thread...

I'm not entirely comfortable with a return of The Thunderdome. I also want to remind those who've forgotten (if anyone has) that we do have Wittiquette rules: https://wittenberg.talossa.com/index.php?topic=125.0.

Can we move on perhaps?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

I'm not entirely comfortable with a return of The Thunderdome.  ...

Can we move on perhaps?

Happily.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN]

The really crappy thing is that I have to keep replying to AD, because someone not in the know would probably take him at his word that "unpopular opinions" are the problem - rather than trolling, bad faith, disinformation, personal abuse, slander, etc. I will be in continuous discussion with the SoS on how we can impose strong disincentives to "defecating in the pool of discourse" on Wittenberg.

Funny how a "progressive" should be repeating the very arguments that have allowed entities like the Murdoch press/TV networks, websites like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit, and more recently Russian chaos trolls, to poison US discourse to near the point of a fascist takeover. But then, Talossa is a place for doing things you can't do in real life.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

I wouldn't argue for a government censor to decide which opinions were allowed on television, either. Giving the government the power to the side what is acceptable discourse usually does not turn out well for democracy.

Just as an example, the most recent occasion in which the Seneschal has called for censorship was the exact moment when a member of her party began spilling embarrassing information about their preoccupations. As soon as that happened, she said that that was the sort of posts that should be removed from the conversation by a government official. No one has to rely on my word about that... It happened just a couple of days ago in this very thread. Go back a page and everyone can see for themselves.

I want to make it clear I am not saying that this is corrupt or anything like that. I am sure that she genuinely believed that the general public didn't need to see these comments and that they were disruptive and not helpful. But from an outside perspective, the exact moment when the head of government began calling for someone to intervene and stop the conversation is when it started getting embarrassing, and that's just human nature at work. I'm sure I would become equally alert to how distracting a conversation has become in her same position! I could not ask for a more perfect illustration of the dangers here.

Again, just to reiterate: I am not alleging corruption or impropriety, just the inevitable consequences of human nature and excessive power. Absolutely anyone in the same position would be reliable to scrutinize inconvenient speech as potentially problematic.