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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (250463)	12/4/2007 1:36:37 AM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Maybe not exclusively. It has had some extended periods of civil discourse however. I have certainly been known to venture off on tangental topics, myself ... and I'm more than happy to pick up on most. I see some benefit in that. Your comment, for example, is a challenge so I'll give it a shot. If people insist on inserting their character, biases, or affiliations into topics, I see nothing wrong with remarking on it within reason. Some of the attacks on this thread are not based reasonably on the posters positions or character and seem more directed at stifling opposing view points than encouraging discussion or getting lively debate going. Stifling tactics are a bumber for discussion threads if you ask me. Extremely mean spirited and often out of the blue smack down comments seem intended to do that stifling thing. Or how about dozens of these posts per day, often one after another that neither invite nor accommodate discussion. That puts a damper on not just one poster trying to promote a topic but the lot of us. A few years ago I drove by a large facility of cattle feed lots. The owners had an observation tower for visitors to watch the cattle, who were all in their pens feeding at the troffs while waiting to be slaughtered. There were hundreds of pens with 20 to 50 head of beef in each one. At the center of each pen a mound of crap formed into a hill. They would clean it out once a year to fertilize farms for miles around. It wasn't my most interesting experience. One odd thing I noticed was that there was a single cow in almost every pen at the center and on top of the mound of dung. There didn't seem to be battles going on to be the cow at the top of the pooh. The other cows didn't seem to take much notice at all. But in almost every pen there was a cow on the hill. It seemed silly to me but it must have been important enough to the cow on the hill. Every once in a while this thread seems to attract someone who seems so into shit, they can't wait to beat everyone to the top of a huge pile of it, never noticing that most of the others are more interested in discussing the topics being presented than playing king of the poop hill. The one on the hill never seems to catch on, no matter how many others point out what a silly spectacle they are making of themselves.