Takra jenai wrote:That means no politics, no religion, no jokes, no nothing, even in your own personal language log.
I
think I've read this entire thread, and I don't recall anybody proposing "no jokes" in personal logs. That would be a bit silly?
As for politics, you asked earlier if you could occasionally post foreign language political videos in your log, and I wrote a
long, detailed post explaining that (a) the rules have been historically slightly flexible, as long as people use common sense, and that (b) if you were in doubt about a specific situation, I would be happy to take a look. Unfortunately, I had to go shopping for lunch, and I haven't looked at the two videos you posted yet.
If you enjoy discussing politics and religion, one good strategy is to listen carefully to what other people say, and to respond to the arguments they actually make. This is way more fun.
Φιλόσοφος wrote:I just received a publication from Dunwoody Press, Arabic Religious Rhetoric: The Radical Saudi Sheikhs: A Reader, which though my Arabic is nowhere near the level that would allow me to tackle it right away, I found utterly fascinating and look forward to reading, hopefully not too far off. Will I not be able to discuss it here when I do?
Well, if you look at my old log, I think I've briefly discussed a few political things over the years: A famous political poem from the Révolution tranquille, a weird book about union and construction corruption in Québec, and a particularly cynical protest song by Renaud. I think there may have been a discussion about what language learners might like to know about bilingualism when travelling in Québec. And, oh yeah, I've mentioned the political questions from B2 practice exams. And finally—although it scarcely qualifies as "politics" after all these millennia—I've also mentioned
The Eloquent Peasant, which is extremely subversive by the standards of ancient Egypt. And I've seen many similar things in other people's logs over the years, none of which ever caused any problems.
But unfortunately, for now, all I can say is that this stuff is a judgement call by the moderators. :-/ I know some people really like a bright-line rule, but we don't have one right now.
If you really feel strongly that we've been drawing the line really badly (and not just slightly off), there's at least one other language-learning forum that
might allow more politics and a more personal style of debate. I don't want to share the name publicly without checking with the admin first, but if you PM me, I'll give you the URL, and you can contact him about his current rules.
SladeWilson wrote:I wouldn't bring this up had you not expressed concern for your own sanity (and the other mods), but I have all the time in the world to referee discussion of this nature.
Thank you very much for being willing to put your money where your mouth is!
I won't take you up on that offer quite yet, but I appreciate it, and I'll suggest a possible compromise we could discuss.
Let me propose an idea: Many CEFR B2 exams actually require some amount of (easy) political debate. For example, when I took the DELF B2 exam, I was required to decide whether Paris should have London-style congestion changes, to make a 10 minute presentation defending my opinion, and to spend 10 minutes responding to questions from the examiners. The B2 criteria are very much about being able to state and defend opinions, and many countries test for those skills by debating "easy" political questions. (Not ultra-controversial stuff—one notoriously favorite topic is the environment, and another is school.)
If some folks here really want to debate politics in one of their target languages, I'd be willing to volunteer to moderate a one-shot experiment in French. (But I would need to get approval from rdearman and the other moderators first!) We could pick a topic—probably one of the ones CEFR examiners love—and we could decide on the ground rules for the debate. Then we could run the debate for a limited period and see how it went. If it blew up, rdearman and the other moderators could yell at me.
If everyone agreed that it was awesome, we could try to find a way to do it again in other languages occasionally.
This would have the advantage of channeling people's political impulses into an actual language-learning task. Remember: your personal weaknesses and temptations can often be used to help improve your L2.
Anyway—no blame to you, SladeWilson—this thread is starting to get repetitive. I think I'm going to temporarily call a "time out" for people to cool down. If people want to come back tomorrow, and make (1) concrete, specific proposals about forum rules, or (2) discuss the possibility of a one-off, structured debate of a popular CEFR exam issue, I'll unlock this thread in about 24 hours or so once we've all had a breather.
2pm Sunday: Unlocked temporarily. While this thread was closed, I made it through a couple extra chapters of an French audiobook and read some trashy French pulp fiction from the 50s.
In the interest of allowing
everyone to spend more time learning languages, this thread will be heavily moderated. Here's what's on topic:
- Concrete, specific examples of things you think should be considered polite behavior. If you disagree with somebody else's proposal, please make a concrete proposal of your own, rather than making a political argument.
The "CEFR-style target language political debates" proposal is
off-topic in this thread. But we'll have another thread about that soon.
Off-topic posts will be deleted, and this thread will be closed again later today, because I need to get caught up on work stuff. But I wanted to keep my promise to let anybody formulate any final thoughts.
Sunday evening: Re-locked. But I'm going to speak to the other moderators and rdearman about whether it's OK try an experimental, CEFR-style political debate, and we can talk about that more later.
