| I have to constructively disagree, not least because I've been thinking for a while about this vague semi-ban on talking politics here. |
I appreciate the constructive nature of your post, if all replies in these types of threads were similar to yours, I’d have far less objection to these topics. The problem is that most replies are nowhere as reasoned or as reasonable as yours.
Besides the tendency to end in flames, I see a couple of other problems with these types of topics (religion would also fit in this category). The first is that real world politics, as opposed to game politics, is a very complex issue. To give it the full consideration it deserves requires far more than the two sentences that are pretty much the limit of the average poster’s attention span. Plus even if a full gamut of political discussion would be understood and appreciated, do you honestly think that any of the underlying issues could be solved here in the GalCiv2 Off Topic Forum?
People also tend to have very polarized political opinions and not all of them have any basis in fact. In fact, a strong argument could be made for the case that people’s adherence to any one set of political tenet’s is more a matter of faith that of reason. The point of this is that if we have a different set of political beliefs, then you are extremely unlikely to be able to sway my opinion, nor will I be able to sway yours. If this is the case, as I maintain it is, what benefit can come of the discussion? There is no real possibility that either of us could come to a more enlightened level of understanding, the most likely outcome is that we just end up pissed off at each other because this one called that one an ahole.
But specifically to your points, I would consider such things as general science fiction or unrelated PC games to be in line with what I thought was a legitimate Off Topic thread. I would consider politics and religion to have no real place here. If you look at the forum statistics, you often see ten to thirty members and two thousand guests. If I were a guest, looking at the Everything link, which includes the Off Topic thread, and I saw some of the recent flame wars spawned by topics such as this, I would be far less likely to buy the game and have any desire to participate here.
In my opinion, it’s ludicrous to equate the social modeling aspect of GC2 (I didn’t even realize that there was one) with a post whose title combines the words America, Freedom and Fascism (and of course, per usual, Fascism was misspelled).
Anyway, in the time it’s taken me to write this response I see that the usual suspects that are interested in this type of thread are starting to flock towards it like flies to you know what. I usually try to make pretty much these same arguments in the attempt at avoiding the inevitable results of these threads, but they haven’t worked so far, why would now be the exception. Since I’m now far beyond the two sentence attention span limit, I’m sure only the reasonable and intelligent are still reading this post. The proof of my argument will lie with the posts to follow. This will be the last I have to say on the subject, at least on this thread.
@Evil S. I didn’t want to respond because I don’t care to encourage these threads, but I haven’t completed my game yet, I probably have two weeks before I finish, but like I said, the next game I start will be on v1.4 (or later).
