BladeForums has a ZERO TOLERANCE policy towards threats of violence & extremism. Be warned.

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I’m glad we have a place to do BOTH talk politics AND knives! One stop shop! This place is awesome!
Really awesome knowing people with personal grudges with those in PA can’t swindle the boss into caving to their ridiculous demands.
 
SnackPack said:
Utterly absurd. Attacking the person bringing attention to the issue rather than the issue itself. Shameful.
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It was a polite warning looking out for me, rather than an official warning with points. I should have made that more clear, sorry.
 
I don’t think anyone in here would want this community to become infected with that QAnon / conspiracy garbage that will absolutely bring the hammer down from web service hosting and negative perceptions of this place - as it should.
 
Murphjd25 said:
You guys are fighting a battle that cannot be won, just move along. That place is silent once you put every regular in their on ignore.
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While I agree about silencing that place by putting them on ignore, I think the real worry, and the worry that even Spark has expressed concern over with this thread, is that the PA will get all of bladeofums "canceled" by the companies that control the bandwidth and what not. It is a very real worry as you can see the same views expressed in the PA right now that have gotten other places shut down.
 
And let me make this clear, Q-Anon is some of the dumbest hope porn bullshit I've read, because "Trust the Plan" hasn't come true once, hasn't had an iota of actual verified proof, but you know what they mean about suckers & their frequency of birth. Q is the Russian Collusion delusion of the Right.

Past that, this is not a thread for you guys to have a political discussion. I've made my position abundantly clear.
 
Murphjd25 said:
You guys are fighting a battle that cannot be won, just move along. That place is silent once you put every regular in their on ignore.
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I've already done that, but the point isn't about my enhanced forum viewing experience.

It's about how this site is perceived by a wider audience. People who never venture into the PA can get a pretty good idea of the lay of the land just by viewing the New Posts page.

I hope this new policy will help cool down the rhetoric and keep the lights on so we can continue with the knife and knife related discussion.
 
Gotta remember it takes very little to offend some people. I don't understand why someone would go into PA if they're here solely for the knives, it's definitely a choice.

Also gotta remember some people would rather 'report' a comment that hurts their feelings than move on or confront it.

In light of that I believe some may even seek out things that hurt they're feelings so they can be reported.

Being reported has a lot of connotations, these days more than in the past .........
 
SnackPack said:
Utterly absurd. Attacking the person bringing attention to the issue rather than the issue itself. Shameful.
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Not at all.
This is about the message, and not the messenger and before you call something shameful you'd better learn some logic, for starters.

The issue as he defined it was that he loves the knife content here but it ruins his enjoyment to see some of the stuff posted in the PA, and he referred to content he thought was terrible. The issue accordingly that he delimited was whether the PA content should be permitted to ruin his enjoyment.
But that was a false statement of the issue by him since his enjoyment couldn't possibly be ruined by exposure to PA content unless he deliberately went there to see it. There's no other way he could see the content to be offended by it, is there?
That's not blaming the messenger, it's refuting or at least defining the message. The message isn't his seeing the content, it's other people saying and seeing the content. It's the existence of the content, unless we put him in a chair and force him like Clockwork Orange or Robot Chicken

The real message, given that he doesn't have to see PA cntent so the actual content can't disturb him unless he looks, is that he doesn't want the content to be there at all. He doesn't want anyone else to look at it either. The very fact other people see it and other people look at it is what offends him, since he doesn't have to see it. That necessarily follows from the simple fact nobody is forcing him to look and that is a very deliberate choice on his part. If he doesnt want to be offended, don't look. But he's offended it exists.

Saying you are offended by stuff you don't see, unless you choose to, is not logically coherent unless what you mean is you are offended by the very existence of that stuff and don't want anyone else to say it or see it. So that logically is his issue.

That's a different issue. I'm sympathetic to people being offended by what they see, but not to people being offended by what others choose to see. See how that works?

And BTW, on many occasions I have moderated comments that could be offensive to members that might choose to look in, including comments about leftists, gay people, muslims, catholics, anybody supporting abortion/the right to choose. Even in PA we have some segregated threads to keep potential offence down to others, like the Hellfire Thread and the Abortion thread. We are very conscious of people looking in. We want members to look in and participate. But it ain't for everyone, and we don't deny it.

With all due respect, while many criticisms of PA are quite valid, quite a few bear little relationship to the actual PA and are themselves highly selective and biased.

I guess one has to question whether it's worth it, especially me.
 
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Spark said:
Is that a threat?
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Please. You know it’s not. The mods of this site are tasked with moderating- which means enforcing uniform rules and ensuring the integrity of the forums. The topics I raised would absolutely put the forum in jeopardy, and a member bringing up a concern being viewed as a ‘threat’ is both ludicrous and insulting.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
The political subform has become a little bit of an alt-right echo chamber. Level-headed rational folks are branded "lefties" there and derided as "libtards", whatever that is. It's not a very moderate sub and I think it stinks up the place. While I wouldn't suggest removing it, I do think that it should be hidden from our front page in much the same manner as whine and cheese. And it might benefit from a little bit more even moderation.

I recently lost a customer because I do almost all of my business on Bladeforums and he told me he did not want to support the site because of that sub. I don't agree with that mindset, but that did just happen and it does affect me. In my opinion that sub is a little bit embarrassing and should be hidden.
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I'm with Nathan on this.

Spark Spark , with due respect and not to get in the middle of your interaction, Nathan is talking about the lack of diversity as being the problem. Maybe if Bladeforums' Lefties Lounge showed up alongside Righties Ranch, it would be a different story, but we all know how absurd it would be for Bladeforums to start expanding its offerings by catering to all the different political ideologies out there. That would be absurd because Bladeforums is about knives, not politics.

Just think about the incredible growth in knives over the past, let's say 15 years because that's how long I've been on this forum. Does anyone think that the greatly growing number of people picking up an interest in knives all share a political ideology? Of course not. So, why then risk turning people off this great website just because amateur political opinions pop up out of nowhere when someone logs on? If there's gotta be this problematic forum here, then why not at the least make it really hard to find?

Btw, being a level headed person does not imply a general political philosophy. I have friends with all sorts of different ideas about politics and religion and whatever. What they have in common is level headedness, because that's what I like in a person.

Bladeforums is a commercial enterprise with no implications here for Free Speech. The banning that arises from people saying things others don't want to hear is the result of people deciding to ban that person. Moderators are not elected, they volunteer to serve because they want to preserve the high quality of social interaction that this forum provides to so many people. They are held to a higher standard and usually meet or exceed that standard.

The idea that creating a special place within this forum for that kind of political echo chamber- as opposed to the other area which discusses important political topics like actual legislation- as being a place to focus the venom makes no sense to me.

Why do you need any place for venom?

If you have moderators that stamp out political discussion and uphold the rules, then the problem is solved.

Again, this is a commercial venture. Yes, it's also a public good. This is not a zero sum proposition- it can be many things all at the same time, of benefit to multiple people simultaneously.

To Nathan's point, if customers of Bladeforums, like him, are willing to stick their neck out and say that they are losing customers due to unwarranted political signalling coming out of this site- well, those are the customers you want. Right? People who have been here for a long time, using this platform to help grow their own business, willing to speak their mind respectfully in order to help improve the situation? That, to me is a great customer, worthy of the highest respect, and what higher good is there than creating that reciprocal relationship in the first place?

I don't have a dog in this fight, really. But, it always struck me as odd that there's any need to talk about politics here- who cares what I think? I certainly don't care what you, whoever is reading this, thinks about politics. Sure, I'd wanna know about legislation and lobby efforts on the part of the cutlery industry, and although that's not super entertaining, it's real and there are often positive actions that can be taken to actually represent my interests. Ok, I'm done. Soory about the screed.

I don't mean to get all up in anyone's business. Bladeforums is my home away from home and I would truly mourn losing access to this forum because a few extremists draw the wrong kind of attention here. That's my fear, that Bladeforums would get wiped out for reasons that could, and probably should, be addressed in light of all that is currently going on.
 
Lorien said:
I would truly mourn losing access to this forum because a few extremists draw the wrong kind of attention here. That's my fear, that Bladeforums would get wiped out for reasons that could, and probably should, be addressed in light of all that is currently going on.
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This whole post is excellent, but this quote especially is exactly where I’m coming from.
 
Fixall said:
Because there is a side bar on the main page listing all of the new threads, and some of the thread titles coming out of PA can be hard to ignore?
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^This, along with them being in New Posts searches...choosing to allow political discussion on the site is one choice, actively pushing it in every paid members face is an altogether different choice. It could be easily hidden like the other "offensive" forum.
 
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