Lilith,

While I will, no doubt, be criticized for the length of this post, I believe your request to be sincere, and so will provide you with my view.

There will be a lot of overhead in creating a Political Section. Will guidelines be established, published and adhered to? Whose opinions will be used to decide what a political statement is; the owners’, yours, or some cross section of opinions from members who have posted in political threads before? Should a joke with political overtones go into the Political section or into the Jokes thread?

How political must a post be before it is moved to the Political section? Will the thread be moved with the post into the Political section, or will only the post be moved? If the thread is to remain in the original section, will the post simply be deleted? Will the deletion be noted? It might upset the originator of a thread, and possibly even the other participants to discover that the nth post was deleted by the Political Mod while the preceding posts were considered to be politically correct. gekkogecko’s post in re the visionaries from Missouri seems to raise similar questions.

Assuming that the thread will be moved to the Political Section; doesn’t that place the power of where the thread ends up into the hands of the poster rather than the originator or mod? I’m sure we all remember threads disappearing because of coarse profanities and vicious statements being posted. I’d guess that if a Political Section was created, whenever a thread disappeared from the section it had occupied, the first thing a member would do would be to look in the Political Section to see if it was moved there due to a violation of the political orientation policy.

Will posts be reviewed for political content after the member has pressed Alt+S but before being displayed for other members to read? If so, will the political review be 24*7 or will posts be queued for review? If posts are to be queued, which sections will be reviewed first (or last); the sections with the largest backlog of posts, or the sections with the longest posts? If posts are not to be reviewed before display, don’t you agree that removing posts after the fact– particularly those with passionately expressed opinions – change the nature of the thread? How long must a post be in place before it is “politically safe”? Is either path where you wish to take Pixies?

Will someone who is too far from the Pixie Mainstream be prohibited from posting? If not, will that member’s posts pop to the top of the Political Mod’s “to do” list?

As Catch22 points out, “bad feelings” can and do occur in sections which are not apparently political. As Teddy Bear points out we should all be able to control ourselves.

As to the notion that politics has no place here, I share Grumble’s doubts that it would be right to stop people airing their views and thoughts.

Loulabels’s comment about functionally creating an American only sub section have merit. Should there be another section for the political discussions of non-Americans?

I doubt that adopting some apartheid policy of segregation will be of any more value to Pixies than it has been anywhere else. Creating a Political Section is not in our best interests.

Permit me to close by quoting from old posts here:

“Pixies will never be a waste of time so long as we keep having new members join and participate. I for one think that when we start making threads judging the quality of posts and pointing the finger we discourage everyone from posting freely and that is a huge mistake.”

“I wander through, and stay in touch with, particular threads. I ignore the others in self preservation unless something catches my eye.
That's just how I deal with it.”

“They are all Pixies because the people who post here decide what Pixies is.”

__________________
Eudaimonia