Madcap79 said:
I personally vote for no more political talk. It will just turn the thread into hate.
Then again I'm a dirty hippie.
I like political discussions... have them with my friends too sometimes, since half of my friends are rightwing and the other half leftwing, sometimes we jokingly call eachother names for it(for example 'kakker' for the rightwing, kakker is a deragotory term for rich people, but litterally it means 'person who poos/shits', and my rightwing friends like to talk woth a rich accent to eachother and make moneyjokes, abd I think for the leftwing half of my friends it's mostly 'sloeber'or so, wich is a term for poor person, and most often used deragotory)
and I've had a lot of political discussions with friends and strangers and hate is seldom, the only case I can remember was on another stonerforum mostly visited by americans, and talking about politics was already(and still is) prohibted there(there was some rightwingextremist who posted pics with american flags etc under every post and who wasn't well informed about the situation over here, grouping all nof europe together and using socialist like it's a curseword, and he couldn't handle it when I reacted to hm with my opinion and som info on what socialism actually is and the actual political situation here, and he was banned)
maybe it's culture tough, I've often noticed that on forums I know that are visoted by a lot of americans often politics are avoided and if political discussion appears it's often negative and quickly results in mudslinging, while on dutch forums I know political talk is pretty common, and almost never results on negatibe situations
now I think of it, it could very well be due to political culture
here in the netherlands we have more parties as in america, and here one party never gets enough seats to rule alone, so parties always have to work together to form a coalition(at this moment we have a minoritygovernment with support of a third party wich isn't offixcially in the coalition, and this third party differs in opinion woth the coalition on some subjects so on these subjects the coaliton has to do even more effort to talk to other parties to reach compromises as usually)
so during elections, parties can never atack eachother to hard or they risk being isolated in the coalitionforming after the elections, votes are nice but without some goodwill from the pther parties you'll still wind up in the opposition
parties here are expected to compromise(the sp, socialist party, suddenly ganed a lot of seats in the national elections before last elections, but they couldn't reach an agreement with other parties to form a coalition and afterwards they got a lot of critique that they should have compromised more)
while in america you only have 2 parties so always one is in charge, and I think that means mudslining is more common in the elections(at least that's the image we get over here, a lot of mudslinging and playing on the person, playing dirty etc)
so that would mean that mudslining could rub off on the supporters of those parties
just a theory tough...
and unfortunatly we are moving in that direction too, it used to be common that both centerparties, the centerright and centerleft, were both in the coalition, but now with the rise of geert wilders(a populist with a big mouth wich he likes to use, and he gets a lot of attention for calling names during politic debates, bashing on muslims etc), mudslinging and cxalling names also becomes more frequent here, and our present coalition is the centerright and right party with support from wilders' farright-party(and this time the right party is the biggest instead of the centerright one, before the centerright and centerleft were always the 2 biggest parties, one time one bigger other time the other, and the 3rd party was often the right party but not always)
...but I'm keeping a kind of long story about politics that are probably not relevant to most of you since you don't live in the netherlands(altough I wouldn't mind learning more about US politics, since I'm most familliar woth dutch politics so I always like learning how it is somewhere else, that some things I always saw as 'vanzelfsprekend' (speaking for itself), aren't that commmon afterall)
Belongs to my Uncle.
