The Positive Gun News thread isn’t about a poster’s experience, tho. It’s a general thread. If someone started a thread a few years ago about how much they were looking forward to same-sex marriages occurring in the US, why wouldn’t someone be able to post that they were not looking forward to them?
If I start a thread about how much I’m looking forward to marijuana being legal for recreational use in all the US someday soon, would someone be threadshitting for saying they were not looking forward to it and here’s 15 reasons why?
I’m not seeing how its different. A thread about a same-sex marriage is about the “event” of the marriage in precisely the same way that a thread about someone using a gun to fend off a robber is about the “event” of protecting yourself with a gun. The politics around the legality of SSM or private gun ownership seem equally incidental in either case.
I have a lot of trouble imagining how a thread like that could work without violating board rules against either hate speech, or trolling.
Bringing pornography and white supremacy into it is just distracting from the conversation.
How about answering the question I posted above? Czarcasm created a “Positive Gun Control News” thread. Do you think that someone should be allowed to post about the defeat of gun control laws as a “positive” in that thread?
I dunno, how many teenagers can we expect to wind up dead during the wedding? If it’s greater than zero, such as we had in the very first post of the positive gun news thread, then perhaps tempering the happy news is in order.
That’s not how you framed your example of a poster sharing his wedding, though. He didn’t invite others to share their same sex marriage experiences.
Fair enough, though I think there’s a fair amount of whose ox is being gored in play there. Positive Gun News could just as easily be labelled as trolling, given the leaning of the board.
Then you’re basically saying, if the vast majority of Dopers support X, then for someone to start a thread praising Y is trolling. Pretty soon only pro-X views would be permitted.
That sounds like an average day on the Dope: You have something positive to say about President Trump / conservatives / Republicans? Then you must be trolling (in the minds of certain posters).
Meaning this policy is for Guns only, and don’t you dare try to apply it to other controversial topics. Got it.
If all things are equal, “Positive” is a relative term, not determined by the NRA. So, yes. It is up to each poster to determine what is “Positive”. I don’t think controversial topics should be protected from contrary comments, on either side of the debate.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to the comparison. I would think a “Tell me about your gay marraige” MPSIMS thread would be an equally inappropriate place to start a debate about the legality or morality of SSM.
There is absolutely a lot of selective ox-goring going on here, no doubt about that.
I think the board is big enough to support threads that aren’t debates, or that are interested in debating a subsection of an idea without having to relitigate the entire issue from first principles in every thread.
As **Miller **said, this then makes it impossible to focus on only one aspect of a particular issue. You would have people dragging in all kinds of unwanted “we’ve already hashed this over a thousand times before” stuff into a thread.
It’s like the threads about female circumcision/FGM where some people would insist on dragging in the issue of male circumcision - which is an entirely different matter - into the debate - and thus stalling everything up.
Again, where is your “open discussion” of how a store chain prohibiting open carry is positive gun news?
What would be the reaction in a “Positive Automobile News” thread (populated with discussions about features, horsepower, speed limit increases, etc.) if someone showed up and posted a link to an article about banning parking in some city? More accurately, a post containing a link with no explanation whatsoever of how this is positive news for car owners? How would you expect those who own cars, use cars, and/or had a strong attachment to cars react?
I think that the moderation has been consistent is what troubles some anti-gun folks. Back when folks would sometimes start a thread around someone using a firearm to protect themselves or others, or uses in sports, it was easy for some people to pile on and ridicule the whole thing basically closing any real discussion. Having a set thread allows the Mods to give a voice to those who do see a positive side to legal firearm ownership and that isn’t a bad thing at all.
And I have a CWP, do usually carry. And other than when it comes to guns and religion I’m pretty much the definition of liberal. Don’t know that it matters but I figured why not.
It’s in the same place as where one discusses any sort of “reasonable” gun control, like how felons aren’t allowed to buy guns. Would it be positive news or negative news for a court to uphold such a law?
I think this sort of argument (in the context of “Positive Gun News”) is in bad faith, like pro-lifers arguing about how hospital-ambulatory requirement laws for abortion clinics are “positive” for abortion because they’re going to make things safer for abortion patients.
The biggest problem with the thread, IMO, is the title and the way that it implies that “positive” is an absolute, not a personal judgement call. As it is a personal judgement call and not something objective, people who don’t agree with that judgement call are not allowed to express their opinion about this thing that is clearly an opinion; IMO that is the major reason why the thread is so frustrating to so many: the thread considers the matter closed and not open to interpretation or discussion. Moderator actions seem to reinforce this.