TTAC Flames Suppressed-Politics as Usual?

Robert Farago
by Robert Farago

The Truth About Cars wasn’t founded for the discussion of partisan politics. Thanks to the Motown Meltdown bailout buffet, it just turned out that way. While the intersection of automobiles and ideology has become both inevitable and unavoidable, the discussions centering on political ideology have recently spun OOC. In certain threads, we’re seeing the same endless rounds of right/left blunderbuss action. Even worse, it’s become nasty. As I was away from my desk for 35 seconds yesterday, I missed the onset of the flame wars and, thus, failed to extinguish them. By the time a couple of our Best and Brightest sent a heads-up email, more than a couple of commentators were burning down the house. This morning, I’m in retroactive delete and warn mode. TTAC’s flaming rule is simple: no flaming the website, its authors or fellow commentators. The corollary is this: please keep it as car-related as possible. If you can’t work your way back to the words “and that’s why I’m a Porsche/Corvette/Nissan/Ferrari guy,” you’ve probably gone too far.

Robert Farago
Robert Farago

More by Robert Farago

Comments
Join the conversation
4 of 56 comments
  • JohnHowardOxley JohnHowardOxley on Jun 14, 2009

    @ Ronnie Schreiber: Your original post characterizing one of the participants was spot on! More generally, I have remarked to RF at least once that I would love to have the politics toned down, too. And that's why I am a BMW guy....

  • R H R H on Jun 15, 2009

    agenthex> The reason for the min/max word postings are: If you have 800 words, I'd rather read/skip it as an article posted to ttac. If you have less than say an-arbitrarly-low-number-f words, you are probably trolling. I think everyone should have "1 post" to make their point and/or beliefs known as opposed to going back & forth saying the same thing over & over again. I really think this would bring higher quality posting to ttac.

  • U mad scientist U mad scientist on Jun 15, 2009
    I think everyone should have “1 post” to make their point and/or beliefs known as opposed to going back & forth saying the same thing over & over again. I really think this would bring higher quality posting to ttac. I just noted that empirically speaking, this doesn't work well. The real problem isn't repetition within a thread, but across threads. - Quit bringing up politics in your posts, or accept the fact that your site will become a tug-of-war between adherents of the DailyKos and readers of the National Review. As much as people want a middle ground to exist, unfortunately, such a place does not exist. Really? Have people's imagination really been limited to that one axis of possibilities?
  • R H R H on Jun 16, 2009

    I suppose another suggestion might be adding the equivalent of a "killfile" (who remembers this from newsgroups?) that is on a per login basis.

Next