EmpressCaitlin said: That’s a tad political, don’t you think? How about you take it to chat? Click to expand...

Hold on a second. I don't agree with @Bookmark1995 one bit on this of course, as I usually disagree with all of his meta remarks...amazing how he can have such an inverted view of the UASR OOC and yet write such sensitive and "with it" fanfic pieces, eh, it is like they are two different people!But your comment really really worries me. The general ban on politics is onpolitics, on the grounds that people are partisan about the political arguments that are of this particular moment, and the candidates running today--people get hyperbolic saying "if your guy wins, rocks will fall, everyone dies, the gates of hell open and Ponyville-scorpion hybrids will pour out and poison everyone with Peep guts (OOc--never mind I already said we are all dead already, this is an endless hell nightmare rant here...)" etc etc and so on. Then my sister explains to me gravely how we have to vote for the candidates Jesus favors. It goes round like that and the Administration here presumably for reasons of sad precedent seeks to protect the site from it.But--where do you draw the line between "current" politics and "politics in general?" Because I ask you, what could be more fatal to an Alternate History site than to have a ban on? I'd argue that that's fatal to any sort of storytelling narrative whatsoever, that people are made of politics and everything we do is infused with it. Certainly if one conceives of everyday life as being divorced from it, or somehow defines a different category of political interaction for face to face, family and workplace stuff, and refuses to call it politics, and hives off "Real Politics" as having to do with nations...well anyway at least a city council or union board...still, is not this restricted set (restricted say I) still not the very lifeblood of history? (Indeed if you factor in the family friends workplace stuff you can understand history better, as in what goes through the minds of voters and stuff like that). Put a gag order on politics in general and we might as well shut down the site.Couple of very very relevant points to your request:1) Do you think the sort of right wing whining about PC and so forth is some kind of new thing? In loosely defined form it goes back to the 50s if not earlier, attacking progressive liberals as "eggheads" and "ivory tower" was a way of saying they were "snowflakes." The modern turbocharged "PC is destroying America!" in those exact words goes back to the 1980s. Now I'm becoming quite an old guy, immature as I remain in so many ways, and to me 1986 feels like yesterday, as in "when I went to bed last night." But there are people on this site, legally if I understand the age restriction correctly (14, isn't it?) who have lived less than half the span between then and now. Would you really want to live with a general rule that says "any issue that has a lot of buzz today and is currently deemed political is off the table for any discussion in any frame on AH Board topics, only allowable in Political Chat subforum?" "PC" as an accusation might seem like a new thing to you but how can I have a TL with a POD of say 1991 without at least having leeway to mention the fight as an aside? It could be done, but it would be editing reality for a G rating, and when you add up everything that either of the two consensus-acknowledged main "sides" (not identical to the two parties, just overlapping the party divide a lot) fight about today, you pretty much are going to find yourself restricted to pre-Civil War topics. And lo and behold, if you look at the fights going on then, darn if they don't wind up displaying the same pattern and same spectrum of sensibilities and same sorts of tactics as we are familiar with today! Before you know it someone is getting kicked for using Harriet Beecher Stowe as an expy for some modern feminist investigative journalist--only it turns out everything the poster alleged Stowe was saying and doing is ripped straight out of her own biography, writings, and general recorded history; the fictional linkages being clearly continuous with all the evidence. Because that's the kind of writer HBS. (I am still in awe and a glow about how brisk and readable Uncle Tom's Cabin proved to be when I was forced to read it in a college history class--how I dreaded the idea of reading something "Victorian!" Then I found it was like Barbara Ehrenreich and Ursula Le Guin teamed up to novelize the hell out of the incidents they were literally ripping out of the headlines of the news of the 1850s).Personally I think it is unfortunate that we have any bans on politics at any level or time frame in AH story lines. For one thing it is very very unclear to me where the lines between "contemporary" and "allowably far back in the past" is drawn; I suspect it is flexible based on a moderator's judgement on just how controversial current issues are and to what degree they reach back. Supposing for instance that some former Bush Jr official were to come forth with hard proof of election tampering in the 2004 election, and the current political landscape became consumed with this--presumably all of a sudden the entire 8 years of the GW Bush admin would become "contemporary politics and a bunch of perfectly OK TLs (as of the day before this scandal breaks) would get locked just for proceeding on the exact same lines they were on before. Now it's contemporary-controversial you see.Well, it is always controversial, it does not matter whether the story is set in Sumeria in 6000 BCE and is about the invention of writing. To the suitably sensitive, anything has political overtones, even contemporary ones.Vice versa it should be possible to discuss even yesterday's political news without ad hominem accusations including general denunciations of anyone who disagrees with someone as being agents of the Devil. The historically minded ought, better than anyone, to be able to disentangle from a polarized mindset of devils versus angels and recognize that people are ambiguous and multi-dimensioned beings caught in a spiderweb of interests and material compulsions and ideological specters haunt us all, and politely agree to disagree even as each of us expounds how the other must surely be leading us to the utter collapse of life on Earth and perhaps undermining the very material integrity of the Cosmos to its uttermost reaches, nay, threatening to collapse the great Multiverse itself into meaningless chaos because of our insane position on some primary election for the city council of Milwaukee. It shouldn't matter in principle if this controversial election in the city of Milwaukee was scheduled to happen in August of this year or actually happened in 1897. Normal people can roll their eyes and point out the latter is a bit of a done deal, but not us...we are fans of Alternate History and the election of Charlemagne is just as much a hot issue with us as that of who will be the next Republican House delegation leader and which of Majority or Minority that might be. I'd be a bit surprised if no one ever got banned for having too strong an opinion on the Gracchi to stay civil about it.So I think it is most unfortunate we have this arbitrary rule here and I can name one TL that I stopped following solely because a moderator came in and warned against mentioning current politics there, when it seemed to me that contemporary political attitudes and divisions would surely carry right over into the innate logic of the TL--and therefore it was doomed to either get locked and its author banned, or else it would degenerate into a confused mass of Wonderland logic as its author and participants strive to make their expies tear loose arbitrarily and illogically from reasonable extrapolations of what people would really say and think. So, I turned sadly away from it. It has been rolling along just fine for a long time now, is now much too big for me to catch up, I missed the crucial formative pages and bitterly regret it.If anyone wonders I am talking about Crunch Buttsteak's California ISOT by the way. I loved that concept! A mod killed it for me, and I really ought to go back and read through it to see how it stayed off the third rail. But I suspect it is 50/50 that it actually didn't, that people necessarily crossed any reasonable line between "contemporary" politics and OK to discuss "old" politics frequently out of necessity but fortunately no flame wars were reported and it exists because the Administration is not forced to take a hard look at it. Which is fine I think.2)You like this TL, don't you? Look around us at the glass house we are in. We have a site owner on record who claims it is little more than sentiment and kind-heartedness that stops him from banning vast categories of self-named leftists as morally equivalent to Nazis and many of us have suffered to some extent in related flame wars. There are two routes to take here for us. We can internalize courtesy and adopt a broad, inclusive intellectual attitude and be slow to take offense, quick to credit good intentions, and be kind to one another and tolerant of diverse views. Doing so we maintain our freedom to talk seriously about some pretty deep human issues that those of us who think the TL has some structure of plausibility to stand on recognize as pretty far outside the political box. Or, we can, instead of asking ourselves to be paragons of open mindedness and courtesy, insist on all sorts of restrictive rules as to subject or example, and turn the TL itself into a Candyland.It behooves us to be aware of and avoid violating site norms indeed. But I don't think building a fence around moderator demonstrated law is the way to go here. @Bookmark1995 did not cross a line into contemporary politics in any meaningful sense, he did not mention candidates or platforms. He is talking about public popular culture, and while I am the last person to deny that has a political dimension, if we took politics in the broadest sense to be our guide as far as site rules go we would find our hands tightly bound and our mouths gagged against saying anything meaningful about anything. I trust the administrators understand that too and will interpret "contemporary politics of OTL" pretty narrowly. Otherwise, I can hardly imagine how a story like the one I was panicked away from could persist. Hopefully by now it has gotten into safe territory but in the nature of things, if we ISOT a community from modern times of course they are going to carry over some version of OTL contemporary politics and it is a hell of a gun to the author's head to have to arbitrarily manipulate the story to provide a quick sharp break from the logic of real world partisanship carrying over on sheer inertia.In a somewhat different way, this TL's entire raison d'etre is to hold up a mirror to our world. Otherwise we would not have the author choice to make characters so parallel to OTL ones.Perhaps then it is wiser to put a limit on this Fanfic thread and create a forbidden zone of say 20 years prior to the present day and 10 years after it, in which stories cannot be set, lest they trespass in too pointed commentary to OTL's present day. That ought to protect us, but I think you can see that would require deleting a lot of good stuff that stands up well and is not crying out for censorship. Let's not go down that road.