Please leave your politics at the door

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Please leave your politics at the door

Postby rdearman » Fri Feb 25, 2022 9:56 am

I just wanted to spend a moment to explain about the rule around "no politics" on this forum. The rule is:

Religion and politics: Some families have a rule that says, "No political or religious arguments during holiday dinner." This forum has a similar rule year-round, for much the same reasons. We have people here from all over the world, with incredibly diverse political and religious views, and we all get along much better if we avoid these subjects.

If the politics or religion is genuinely related to language learning, then you have a small amount of leeway—as long as people remain respectful and refrain from fighting. But if a moderator asks you to stop, please stop. You can fight about politics and religion on almost any other site on the Internet. This site is for language learning.


There are always political events happening in the world and people have strong feelings about them. We have forum members who are on different sides of wars, politics, and religious conflicts. The moderation team want this forum to be a safe place where people can come and discuss language learning and not need to worry about political arguments erupting.

There are a number of reasons this rule makes sense on an international forum such as this. The first and most obvious one is that political discussions are emotionally volatile. Politics has a much broader ability to press emotional buttons, because the stakes are usually higher, and more universal. Which means more potential for a discussion to blow up rapidly. It also creates a tribal “us vs. them” mentality, but here we want everyone to be an "us", and nobody to be a "them".

There are numerous places on the Internet where politics is discussed and in almost all of them any discussion rapidly deteriorates into swearing, name-calling and other behaviours which we don't want or condone here. The moderation team have enough problems trying to stop arguments about language related topics.

So in order to make this a safe place to talk about languages and language learning this "no-politics" rule will be enforced, so please leave the politics at the door.
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