Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Goes Political: Announcing politics.slashdot.org
With the US Presidential Election coming up, we've had a lot of story submissions that we would like to post, but they don't fit very well on the Slashdot main page. To address this, we'll be running special political coverage between now and the election in our new Politics subsection of Slashdot. Please submit stories directly to the section for consideration.
As with all sections on Slashdot,
there will be stories available within that section that don't get posted to the main page, so please visit the section if you are interested in more coverage.
We'll do our best to be fair with story selection. We think we can do a good job since the Slashdot editors represent a diverse spectrum of political ideologies. The discussions are up to you guys. Here's hoping the experiment works!
Every discussion has some sort of political slant to it. You are somehow labeled as "right" or "left" depending on the whim of the moderators or random members of the community. People routinely claim you are some sort of radical communist just because you don't support the paying-off of public servants to create laws that benefit only the corporations. Obviously this is just one small example but it certainly reflects a good bit of what I experience here... We might really want to think about how the normal Slashdot moderation system is handled on this side of the site.
;-)
If anything Karma changes should be eliminated due to politically motivated moderation in this section. Some serious damage could occur to someone's account that is diametrically opposed to the rest of the Slashdot mentality.
I have been scouring books, articles, and random conversation for some intelligent and fair discussion about the state of politics today. I doubt that I will find too much "intelligent discussion" and I know we won't find any fairness here on Slashdot but we can always have hope
Can we please ban the editorials from /. editors to any political stories?
We think we can do a good job since the Slashdot editors represent a diverse spectrum of political ideologies.
Perhaps some examples are in order.
At least they did a better job with the colors/logo than the nasty IT section... ;)
Why didn't the "IT" section get the "Politics" nicer colors?
I'm surprised that the bar in this section aren't:
Red-FadingTo-White-FadingTo-Blue
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
... that as long as people are writing posts that inform and explain their viewpoint, they won't be modded down, even by people who disagree. A one sentence-post espousing an unpopular viewpoint, yes, is basically a troll or flamebait. A paragraph or so explaining why the author has that viewpoint and some of the facts/reasoning behind it shouldn't be. These are the kinds of posts that make for stimulating discussion that enriches us all, even if you don't agree.
It's possible I'm just a rosy-glassed optimist, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope.
My guess is that there will be many otherwise-unremarkable posts which will be moderated up simply because they express a popular point of view forcefully, and, as always, meta-moderators are encouraged to mark lame upmods as Unfair. If a post isn't any more Insightful than average, but gets moderated that way, then rigorous meta-moderation will help the system, next time around, give mod points to someone else who deserves them more.
I think the +5 funny was due to the fact that you think that having a "diverse spectrum of political ideologies" means you will "do a good job".
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Because politics does MATTER, you twit. How do you think things like the PATRIOT act got through? I believe that had more "geeks" to use the term liberally, gotten out and voiced their opinions that things like the PATRIOT act or new wire-tapping laws were BAD (or at least had some negative and poorly thought out sections), things may have ended up for the better.
Just because politics can be boring doesn't mean they don't matter. Get off your swivel-chair and go register then excersize your right to VOTE. Maybe if all of the US slashdot readers did the same, we wouldn't have HALF the legal problems we do now and our country wouldn't be so bass-ackwards.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
It boggles my mind that there are people that base so much of their self-worth on a hidden int on a faraway server.
Why only politics based on the US elections? Isn't it better to have permanent world/global politics section? /. through this many years.
I'm thinking here of many political themes which are quite represented on
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
I think what's sad is politically active people who need robotic partisan uniformity. America's huge, diverse population has worked together for hundreds of years by finding compromise acceptable to the majority, even when that majority spanned many ideologies and parties.
--
make install -not war
I have no doubt you have a diverse political spectrum - for an American. I doubt you have a very diverse spectrum in general, though.
There are more commonalities between a republican and a democrat than there are differences.
-Adam
No...we think you have a diverse spectrum of left wing political ideologies.
I think the normal moderation system should not apply for the politics section. We don't need to make it all too easy for someone with strong political views and mod points to go through marking Troll on every opinion they disagree with. We get enough of that on the stories that are only semi-political.
People on the internet, and Slashdot in particular, tend to lean more towards the European mainstream than the American mainstream.
Except, of course, on civil liberties issues, where Europe's left-fascism makes the police-state folk in the US Justice Department envious: the UK's got CCTVs everywhere, issues "antisocial behavior orders" prohibiting people from (in one instance) making sarcastic comments to their neighbors; France bans movies that criticize its bloody colonial wars, and so on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"with us or against us" evil politics, characterized as best by the guys who don't vote the way I do. :-)
This is my sig.
See the South Park episode on this.
Cartman: I learned somethin' today. This country was founded by some of the smartest thinkers the world has ever seen. And they knew one thing: that a truely great country can go to war, and at the same time, act like it doesn't want to. [a shot of the crowd] You people who are for the war, you need the protesters. Because they make the country look like it's made of sane, caring individuals. And you people who are anti-war, you need these flag-wavers, because, if our whole country was made up of nothing but soft pussy protesters, we'd get taken down in a second. That's why the founding fathers decided we should have both. It's called "having your cake and eating it too."
Randy: He's right. The strength of this country is the ability to do one thing and say another.
It makes otherwise intelligent people complete closed minded idiots.
It's a well established fact that people seek out information which confirms their current opinion and actively screen out information which challenges it. Look at a programmer struggling with a bug or a user with a user interface and you can see it. Politics takes this natural human cognitive strategy and infuses it with emotion, value judgements and ego identification. This means that while in most situations people will eventually begin to take new information into account, in politics this practically never happens. The more we are confronted with truths that challenge our political positions, the more strongly we warp our sense of reality to suit our predjudices.
Any reasonable person from another planet would immediately come to some obvious conclusions:
On the economy, Bush got smacked down by an overdue correction in the business cycle and 9/11. His tax cuts probably gave the economy a short term stimulus. However, the long term effects of his policies are debatable.
Kerry has a realtively normal legislative career. He sometimes votes for one version of a bill and against another one, or for a particular thing by itself but against it when it's lumped with a bunch of other things he doesn't like. However, his career as a legislator is rather undistinguished.
Mr. Impartial Observer would also label Michael Moore a propagandist, and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth a bunch of vile political hatchetmen.
External validation feels good, but it is not intellectually honest. If the moderation system could be tweaked to encourage people to reevaluate their positions and look at the truth, it would be a great acccomplishment.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.