Should political discussions be banned on these forums?

[mellowautomata]

Not at all, because if you have an obscenely retarded opinion, I tend to drop the discussion, or ignore you, specifically when it pertains to polotics or religion.

See, to me it sounds like you're saying that OP proposition is bad because hey, you can just drop the discussion and ignore it. That's kind of pointless reasoning given that OP didn't say that political discussions shouldn't be allowed because you can't personally avoid them. That's not the reasoning that was given by OP. Let me quote:

Given that the subject of politics more often than not leads to a discussion with neither end nor merit, it's much simpler for everyone involved to just blanket ban political discussions. There are many forums on the internet devoted to these discussions, and gaming forums aren't (or at least shouldn't be) one of them.

And I for one agree with this. I've read and participated on countless of debates in countless political topics. This is exactly my experience of them. No end nor merit.

[mellowautomata]

If we ban political discussions, then it's because we think it's doesn't need to be discussed (or at least, not here).  If we think we don't need to talk about it here, it's because we think it's unimportant.  If we think it's unimportant, it's because it has no impact on us personally.  And if it has no impact on us personally, it's because we're both privileged and disconnected from the non-privileged.  And I think that's unacceptable for any community of people.

Let me provide some reasoning, as a person who has wasted so much of my life into this stuff. This post is long as you can see and I hope that you can bear with it. There's multiple of points I'm going to make. The main argument is that there are other reasons to ban political discussions than to say that they are not important. But, as for actual points I'm trying to make, they will be about why political discussion in contemporary western world might not be all you hope it to be.

So, do these political debates actually do anything? According to my experiences, no. They're absolutely trash and useless. I know this sounds outlandish — I mean, most of us live in supposedly democratic countries and the leading principle of democracy is that people have more or less rational discussions with each other and, you know, mutually come to conclusions at the end of the discussions, be they friendly debates or whatever. But I can tell you right now that somewhere along the way, we got off from that path and never returned.

These political debates far more often than not are malicious in their nature, especially ones that touch actual lives of people that, you know, are unhappy about stuff. You see, it's not at all about understanding and relating to others, now it's all about imposing your worldview on others. A person who lived in poverty will probably be concerned about poverty in future, a person who didn't, is far less likely to be concerned about poverty in qualitative terms. They don't really understand whats it like and it never will get through them. Some petty political discussions about poverty will not change this, they still won't get it. They're going to give that good 'ol talk about how it's a matter of choices you make and, in the end, you need to be content with the outcomes they give.

Or lets say me. Am I really concerned about how tragic it is for a rich person to pay larger amounts of taxes even in relative terms? Not really, I don't care in the slightest, I can't even begin to imagine what on earth could be so horrible about that. If they say, for example, that they are going to move into another country unless the taxes get lower, I'll just regard that as their petty attempt to make threats to public so that they could remain in their overly privileged positions. I don't really care whenever there's any legitimate concerns about them being taxed more. Now to avoid offtopic: I don't care about debating this at all. My point is, it's about imposing your worldview on others, not about relating.

Okay, that aside, there is more to debates obviously. A lot of people, after all, agree that for example we should have less poverty no matter how terribly they understand poverty in the first place. And as luck would have it, we can always present facts to each other and convince each other. No, I'm just kidding. Actually, you can prove pretty much any position you want if you know how to navigate in google (or google scholar) with proper keywords. Because there will be plenty of facts that go either way really, especially when they are statistical. So how it actually works is either that one of us will post a statistical fact and then, the other one will either counter that by accessing the methodology used to conclude at that statistic or question the interpretation of that statistic, question the data of that statistic, question the assumptions required for the inference et cetera or... just effortlessly google to come up with a countering fact. Maybe question the authority? Maybe appeal to authority? Oh and let's not forget that I've encountered endless amounts of people who just seem to not understand that forming an opinion based on statistics always involves an interpretation of the statistics. So there are loads and loads of people who seem to think treat their venerable opinions as facts, because they base them on statistics.

Really, you can go endless, seriously endless amounts to this. There will always be something. I've literally argued with members of Ministry of Finance in my country, only to have them admit, that they really don't know "but what else can we do?" in regards to their research and methodology being terrible and in particular that they don't admit it to the policymakers because else wise they would hesitate far more if the researchers were honest in terms of how reliable their research is. As if some Mayans arguing that human sarcifices may be terrible, but it's the best we can do.

There's even one stellar example, Rogoff and Reinhart controversy. I'm not going to go through it, you can read about that here. However, I am going to say that despise that controversy going public and being a huge embarrassment to the duo, nothing happened. Nobody apologized for basing policymaking with completely biased research. They are still influential, despite the fact that their "mistakes" were rather too grave to be just accidental humane mistakes. And as that article states, their result was bit too convenient.

But just like the bosses in Dark Souls, this isn't all there is to it. There's two more modern trends that are going to make things even "better" for us. One is fakenews and one is clickbait news. I think most of us knows what fake news are. Certain news outlets that are all about promoting certain ideology with no slightest regard to journalistic integrity. They do not use any kind of legitimate sources for their claims. Debating with people who rely on these is the best thing ever. Ask for a source, you get a source that's bullshit. Point it out and tell them to try again. You get another source that is equally bad. And the endless cycle continues.

The way fake news operate is simple: they allow practically anyone to write content in them and their content has no other standards than that it has to conform to certain ideology. They don't really care about truth, because they already know what the truth is and hence they're out there to spread the good word with disregard for anything else. And because anyone can write, there will be endless amount of content and hence, endless amount of sources for people who buy into it. These people won't even read whats in them, they just click on it, copy the link and that's all. And best part is? At worst, these sites don't even pay for their content creators, they just literally hire anyone who fits the bill to write whatever they want, because there's no shortage of young activists who want others to understand the truth.

There's also another kind of fakenews, let's say, a more liberal variant. This one is harder to explain shortly as it requires some more nuance. Lot of this actually is about that previous theme where you obfuscate facts with opinions because, hey, there are statistics out there.

Clickbait news? We all know about them too. But the thing is, it's not only normal news outlets. A lot of popular science is ridden with this and it makes searching for science related news at times way too difficult. Most often they operate by highly exaggerating finds of some study that found some correlation of almost insignificant magnitude between two things. Heck, sometimes the study doesn't even have to do anything with your clickbait. A study may say that positive attitude can benefit patients with chronic diseases. And common wisdom may say that men like seeing breasts. Bingo. (Exaggerated case, sure, but basically anything that doesn't resemble a peer-reviewed journal has a huge risk to contain this sort of journalism, no matter how "sciencey" it appears to be. To say that this sort of journalism doesn't care about what is true or not, is an understatement. It's also good to note that many news outlets actually practice both variants (fakenews and clickbaiting).

All in all, I'd say there are absolutely no prospects for political discussions or debates to be had. Saying that this kind of content is not the kind of content you want in a forum, for example, is not categorically equal to that of saying that political topics are not important. They might very well be, but we've already lost our ability to deal with them. I really don't know how people in ancient Greece managed to debate, but then again, empirical science and free will wooery wasn't what they were about anyway. They had the luxury of discussing through mythology and interpreting it and we can only envy the simple brilliance of that. The privilege aspect needs not to apply here if the actual reasoning isn't just a simple "we don't care". Ask yourself: how many times you have participated or witnessed a political discussion that was fruitful? Sure, maybe you feel like you've seen that at least a couple of times. But then ask yourself: how many times you've witnessed them overall? If that is significantly higher amount than the fruitful ones, then you know where the issue lies in.

Saddest thing is? I have merely merely scraped the surface here.

EDIT: Okay, obviously I am a pessimist. Maybe there are future prospects to be had, but this post is me casting huge doubts on that based on personal experience, personal observations and general accounts of how things are in realm of science that relates to policymaking which, in the western world, dominates public debates about policymaking, as values are seen meaningless; it's all about facts.

[mabor0shi]

I don't think anything should be discussed in a thread if it derails that thread from it's topic. Be it political, religious, philosophical, or geological, if it is on topic, then it is appropriate. Let's do our best to keep the official topic in mind when we post in a thread.
Nobody will see anything that upsets them if people stay on topic and everyone avoids threads with what they find to be potentially upsetting topics. 1) STAY ON TOPIC and 2)DON'T CLICK ON THE THREAD IF THE TOPIC MAY UPSET YOU. No need to ban any (law abiding) topics! Am I being too idealistic?
Although I do wish that the person who starts a thread could ban individuals from their thread. I don't need Kegereneku comin' around my threads with his fancy accent and his foreign ideas! Oops, I went a little off the topic there

[BetaSpectre]

Political isn't the problem, Partisan is really. When sides are so polarized that they cause a ruckus. Then start insulting one another personally.

Talking about news, policy, and government are all political subjects more often than not. And banning something because people got angry over how the world is or isn't doesn't really make much sense.

Some people are just looking to cause trouble anyway. If two kids were insulting one another on Dogs vs Cats. Does that mean we should ban all talk about animals and pets?

[RickyMartini]

Yes, to prevent more mumble mumble.

[Kegereneku]

Mumble-type people aren't a problems, you just need to apply basics rules against deliberate sophistry (you win an internet if you already know the meaning of the world) and propaganda that goes against the most basics. HUMAN'S RIGHT.

Don't roll eyes. It doesn't take any degree to see when someone is deceiving you. It's up to us to decide if this is one of those "bad thing".
There is grey areas, but we've been denying this as a problem so long we don't recognize when something is burning black.
That's why there's a sudden wake up from social network remembering that "free speech" can be turned into a tool to impose an idea.

For example, if we were to censor "political discussion" without acknowledging that EVERYTHING can be made political. Then we will all lose.
Why? Because being honest and recognizing a topic is "political/complex" will get it censored before any good come of it.
Meanwhile trolls, fascist, and just plain liars will simply keep spreading their bias & beliefs into any trivia, confident that anybody will avoid refuting their bullshit so as to not get a normal topic censored.

Another example, honest people will avoid exaggeration or playing the popularity card.
Dishonest people will create an army of bots to support and spread their messages. You may disagree with them, but you wouldn't go against the wish of the majority do you? (btw, if you are to believe website like TheGuardian, this method have been used to influence at least 2% of the vote for Brexit)

It's a shame, but one of the cost of anonymity on the internet is to allow multiple kind of social-engineering

Final note : Everything I've said definitely fit "political" stuff. And I'm definitely walking in the grey area between rhetoric and sophistry (phrasing this entire post as if a fact, rather than opinion). Would you censor this post? Do you think I'm deceiving people?

ps: I'm on fire right now.