I would keep any politics out of this forum and strictly delete all and every post that’s political. It only helps.
The admins of Beechtalk handle it this way and the experience is very good.
The opposite can be watched in the unmanaged German PuF forum where many threads drift away into endless bullshit bingo sessions, currently one about the evils of modern big data analytics.
My two cents.
Politics and Society are a major part of our existence, and i do not see why a civilzed discussion about these topics should not be possible
I think that the opening of this thread was a success! We have managed to discuss political issues in a largely polite manner while keeping it out of other threads.
I agree with Alexis and Airborne_Again re this topic. I think the discussion has stayed civil despite strong disagreement on certain topics. Nobody has resorted to add hominem attacks yet. Also keeping the heated discussions to this topic helps keeping the rest of the forum aviation-only.
Alexis wrote:
was just going to say it … how do the libertian ideas of “freedom” and independence and “nobody telling me what to do” go together with “population control”?
Personal responsibility, which is the other side of the same coin.
@Silvaire
Btw. good point with the United States of Europe. What many detractors of the EU are often overlooking or willfully ignoring is that for it to work properly AND more democratically accountable it has to have sound institutions with a solid legal base, such as a constitution.
For example the best way to make the EU much more accountable would be to give the true power to the European Parliament rather than the Commission where it is now. Because we all vote on the Parliament every five years. Then have the parliament elect a President who can then appoint ministers. Currently there is way to much h behind-the-scenes dealings between nation states and political power blocks involved in the EU’s setup.
Also it needs to be made more clear that in a federal structure not everything has to be decided in Brussels or Straßburg. Regional and national matters are best discussed and solved in regional and national parliaments. A one size fits all approach won’t work for 27 countries.
I would keep any politics out of this forum and strictly delete all and every post that’s political. It only helps.
This thread is an experiment which seems to be working well so far. I have deleted only a few posts which crossed the “personally offensive” threshold. The other deletion candidate will be “virtue signalling” e.g. “everybody who voted for XYZ is a bigoted racist xenophobic idiot”, etc. Social media is flooded with this…
I would normally agree 100% about the politics and religion thing but this thread title makes it obvious to all that they don’t have to read it. And I am pretty sure that most of the ~1500 daily visitors don’t read it.
This thread also addresses the past problem with certain posters who just cannot help but chuck in large numbers of off topic posts and if mod action is taken against them, it always makes the mod look like a [a very descriptive English 4-letter word starting with a “c” and ending with a “t”] 
And there is normally a sh1tstorm of messages and emails afterwards to a list of people, slagging off me and EuroGA, probably also copied to some forums which I don’t read because I don’t have time and I am not going to pay $50+ to read COPA, etc, and I get sick of having to deal with that. This thread is a good solution, in what is a really very democratic forum like this one where everybody knows where to find the mod and everybody knows how to contact him…
The other thing with politics is that a lot of aviation stuff is political and unavoidably so. It is often hard to draw the line. For example the reason why GA infrastructure in Europe is relatively poor compared to the USA is because Europe has not supported sub-airline-level aviation as a part of a transport policy. Also practically everything to do with the provision of ATC services is pure politics. I will leave “relevant” politics in the threads and will move it to this thread only when it is no longer aviation related.
The admins of Beechtalk handle it this way and the experience is very good.
I have written about this before, 3 month ago. I will re-post the text here:
IOW, what happens on Beechtalk is not what you see – because they have 24/7 mods who chuck people out at the speed of light. They also have no-bashing policies to keep advertisers advertising, etc… When David and I set up EuroGA in 2012 we did it with a lot of knowledge of how forums work (and don’t work) and we made EuroGA a lot more democratic than any other one is.
The opposite can be watched in the unmanaged German PuF forum where many threads drift away into endless bullshit bingo sessions, currently one about the evils of modern big data analytics.
PUF is ostensibly unmoderated (because “free speech” is a huge cultural selling point there, due to recent historical events) but like every other internet site they also cannot afford to get sued for libel etc so they have several participating pilots who have covert mod privileges and who delete dodgy stuff.
IMHO covert moderation is a bad thing, because the mods are unaccountable and that leads to mods becoming drunk with power and going off the rails. Regulars on some UK sites will have seen this; probably 50% of people I know who were on one site have been banned from it, and all of them were excellent informative posters. I don’t have time to read non-English-language sites but I am certain the same goes on there too.
To my best knowledge, nothing has ever been deleted from the PuF forum. I have also never heard about covert moderation.
LeSving wrote:
Other, much more milder and less effective means have to be used. It’s obvious to any thinking human being. As I see it, no we won’t stop global warming. We are too late and our means are too inefficient. However, what we can do, is to stop the global warming from completely spiraling out of control, and render this place a hell to live on
The way I think this could actually work, at least to a degree, is to educate the third world population, individually, that population spirally exponentially upward is likely to destroy the lives of their children through loss of liberty and personal freedom. Working through foreign governments, or trying to set an example for foreign governments with your own governments, is I think childishly naive. What happens in those circumstances is the ‘UN syndrome’ (my term), in which third world dictators agree to things that bind you… but they will never do. Then with the freshly increased competitiveness of their countries in relation to yours, they extract money from their national economy for themselves either through corruption or tax revenue. There are of course exceptions, Costa Rica comes to mind, but most of the world’s governments are run by corrupt groups of individuals who are more than willing to make a deal and laugh all the way to the bank. Dealing directly with the population, as with charity, works a lot better than government to government.
I don’t actually think climate change is all that important specifically, but when bundled in with other issues and with population control as the most reasonable solution to all of them, I think it is a useful component in educating people to more responsible personal behavior. I don’t however like the quasi-religious over dramatized approach, especially when promoted by government.
Silvaire wrote:
The way I think this could actually work, at least to a degree, is to educate the third world population, individually, that population spirally exponentially upward is likely to destroy the lives of their children through loss of liberty and personal freedom.
That is not necessary. The nativity worldwide started dropping several years ago. The only reason the world’s population will continue to grow for a while is that people live longer in the third world.
