I think its more people confused about the right to free speech doesn't supercede the rights of the person's home/business you are speaking in.  It's their forum and their rules they owe you no explanations and if they give them its a courtesy, not an obligation. 

Fuzzy is spot on. You can post to your heart's content in the Politics section or other appropriate categories which appear exclusively on JU and Political Machine. As I said, nobody is limiting what you can post politics-wise over there. "Over there" on JU is not "here" in the network-wide OTF, where political flamebaiting is and has been prohibited for years.

You can take it over there and be happy, or find another site to troll. But you won't be posting on the games sites any more, as you clearly can't read the rules, warnings, and repeated explanations of both that you've been given.

Not really. It would just focus the ambiguity on competing ideas of what it means for something to be "political." After all, subjects like DRM are very important to many gamers (and maybe even to the skinning crowd at WC), and DRM is most certainly entangled with politics. There's also a great deal of 'inherently political' subject matter relevant to discussing GalCiv and Elemental, although I admit many folks might not think that they're expressing their political values when they argue about something like gender mechanics for Elemental's dynasty system or how the Empires and Kingdoms should be different.

I still believe the policy would be stronger if it focused on behavior rather than slippery content categories. Flamebait after a warning or three, and you deserve some form of 'ban stick' spanking. It shouldn't matter whether you were flamebaiting about an election, a personal religious experience, Joss Whedon's future in television production, or how you feel about RTS and TBS games.

There is no ambiguity. This forum is a right-wing gangbang.

Make a thread that's too liberal for the owners and they'll invent some reason to shut you up. Not that they'd really need a reason - but they want to appear foxy fair-and-balanced. After all, what decent person would want to buy software from fascists?

The threads are only locked if those involved continue to create a non-friendly environment.  These forums are for games for the most part, not to drag the worlds crap into.  Political, religious, whatever threads are looked down upon because they almost always go badly due to people's lack of an ability to remain civil(Or willingness in most cases)  These threads do however get a chance.  I've never seen a civil thread locked because of its topic, it gets locked because the people involved refuse to play nicely.

-Twilight Storm

The policy is clearly stated in this sticky and discussed on prior pages of replies. The bottom line is that flaming or disparaging of groups or other users is not acceptable. If you made a thread and it was locked, then in most cases either the replies took it too far into that territory, or you posted an inflammatory thread to begin with.

Not only can companies not be members of political parties, but Stardock is composed of people with a wide variety of political views (including liberals, libertarians, vegetarians, you name it).

Making claims about political conspiracies and agendas only reflects poorly on the claimant, as it's pretty clear to anyone who's taken the time to look at what threads *don't* get locked (or at least read and considered the rules) that it's about civility.

Some users have demonstrated that they can keep their discussions under control, and those ones have earned a little more slack. On the other hand, those who are too blinded by an "I'm right about everything and any opposed are evil or idiots" mentality to start or participate in a civil discussion should expect to be disappointed if they try that tack on network-wide forums.

The definitely can. It's more that to be overt in their support of a party would approximately halve their customer base.  Also, vegetarians.

That's quite a broad statement. Surely there are some real conspiracies, like Watergate, for instance. The term "conspiracy theory" has basically been given a social stigma because some of the eccentricity and implausibility of  more popularized theories.

Bullshit. Companies can even vote - they do it with money, manipulation and in this case censorship. And yeah, you may have vegetarians but your facists control the media.

© 1995-2010 Stardock Teabagger Corporation. All rights reserved.

Speakingthrough Corruption, yes, the can vote.  They cannot actually be a part of a political party though.  Just the people at the top, bribing those votes can.  There's a big difference between the two.

I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say that those of yo arguing this policy have either had one of your threads, or one you were posting on locked.(If not more than one). 

These forums are here to be a friendly place for gamers to get together and share tips/strategys, or whatever else.  For the most part, I believe the off-topic section was put in to cover all the stuff that didn't have a category.  Yeah, i's being abused as it is, bout most of what goes there isn't malicious in nature(At least when it starts...)

What it comes down to as far as I've seen, if you play nicely, there isn't a topic that gets locked.  I highly doubt  a moderator or whoever would lock a thread just because they don't like it.  Kinda suspicious, and most likely if this did happen, chances are it could be undone with the proper methods.  (Flaming not one of those methods, hint.)  Don't blame the whole mod staff because you think a few are forcing their own agenda on us. 

Besides that, every thread that gets lock here can go up on the JU forums with almost no interference whatsoever.  (Unless, I think, If it goes into the harrassment stage of things, but those kinds of topics don't belong anywhere.)  If they were forcing their beliefs/agendas/whatever, JU wouldn't even exist, they'd just not tolerate the existence of those topics on their servers period.

-Twilight Storm

I officially hate mah english teachers...

Anyway, I think that people shouldn't even have to start Political, Religious and blah blah lah threads online, ANYWHERE, in the first place. Most people only do this because they either A: Don't wanna fight w/ ppl they actually know, B: only want reassurance in their own opinion, or C: just wanna take it out on some random stranger. 

Xer0 \^/

It is possible to have a calm rational debate about controversial subjects, but only if you don't assume your debate opponent is less of a person for not having your same views. However, people tend to assume things like, "only a fool would disagree with me about [insert random topic where you have made up your mind]" and then treat their opponent in the manner they think is fitting.

And lets not forget the people who treat all slightly opposing views as personal insults...