For visitors from abroad, over the course of his first two years in office, President Donald Trump has generated a tremendous amount of emotion among the citizens of the United States. His supporters are usually solidly supportive of his performance and his opponents are extremely antagonistic towards his person and his policies.
The heat of political dialogue in the United States far outweighs the light these days. It is almost impossible to avoid.
The Passive Voice is not a blog about politics. PG doesn’t know that it qualifies as an island of reason amid a storm of emotions, but it’s not about politics, American or otherwise.
TPV occasionally includes items that relate to copyright law and changes thereto in the US and other countries, but PG doesn’t remember any instance in which copyright law sent hundreds of protesters into the streets and drove online denizens mad with rage. If it ever does, he’ll deal with it at that time.
PG has encountered and removed a number of comments that have included political commentary relating to the current resident of the Oval Office and his policies. He requests that discussion on TPV not include the commenter’s views about President Trump either directly or via characterizations of his person or policies closely associated with him.
We can ignore politics, but politics will never ignore us, unfortunately.
Thank you. So tired of reading politically charged commentary.
THANK YOU!
I shall, Sir, abide by your wishes, but first I wish to make this one solitary comment about the people closely associated with President Trump:
Whoever does his hair should be impeached.
Would you believe he actually pays someone to make it look that bad? 😛
I remember hair.
In the US, copyright is enshrined in our founding political document.
Thank you, PG.
I hate that so many have lost the ability to comment and dissent civilly. Thank you for your efforts to help us gain some sense of courtesy at TPV.
Part of my morning routine while drinking my coffee is GoComics.com where I read the comics no longer carried by the local paper as well as a few others. There are frinkin’ political comments under “Peanuts.” Some people just can’t shut up or get perspective. Mental illness is alive and well on both sides of the issues.
Sadly they don’t/can’t see a reason/difference.
I still laugh when thinking of my aunt loading parental protection on their computer and then wondering why she could take her 5yo granddaughter to the Disney site. She had set the ‘no violence’ flag …
Hmm, where could you get to today on the web with the ‘no politics’ flag checked? 😉
Gun sites on youtube. 🙂
Thank you, PG. It’s wonderful to have a place where we can civilly discuss our common ground without worrying about being attacked due to unrelated political ideology.
To get that you may have to start avoiding politically loaded things like:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/amazon-and-other-companies-are-facing-a-postal-service-price-hike-after-months-of-criticism-from-trump/
And instead just find something that commented on the USPS price hike without mentioning “the current resident of the Oval Office and his policies.”
The price hike and who it will hit/hurt/help could then be discussed without the politics that ‘might’ be behind it.
Keep going, it’s seldom boring over here … 😉
Good point, A.
@ Jeff and the rest below
I was merely teasing PG because as the rest of you point out it’s hard not to find ADS/TDS/BDS/’X’DS in every little thing.
That being said, introducing the XDS means people will talk about it as well as the rest of the topic.
We can try to tone it down, but the XDS was placed there to push your buttons in the first place.
MYMV (May Your Mileage Vary 😛 )
You Will be hard pressed to find ANY news article that even remotely involves the president that isn’t slanted against him in some way. As TPV covers laws, perhaps its members could just show a little restraint and not comment about their views on the sitting president, good, bad, or otherwise. If you have TDS, perhaps withdrawing from all media may be in order for your own health.
Agreed. Just about everything is politicized these days, and I’ll freely admit that it is both sides doing it.
However, I would argue that we are actually moving back out of a rather unusual “gentleman’s club” period in American political history. If you look back, most of the time we Americans had bitter, wide-ranging, and sometimes violent political disputes among our citizens. If not national, then State; if not State, then local.
Sigh… Interesting times.
Interesting ties indeed.
The contentious tribalism isn’t limited to politics.
The attitude can be found in other areas of media; we all see it in the schism in publishing with the old school vested interests constant attempts to delegitimize digital or, ahem, the…overly critical, overly broad, negativity of…some…towards bookstores. 😉
Then there’s the disguised catfights like the puppy wars that underneath are really about commerce, not culture or politics, and the fanboy wars in the movie world where creators are starting to shy away from certain high profile franchises (*cough*STAR WARS*cough*STAR TREK*cough*) because of fractured hyper-critical fanbases that guarantee ugly explosions regardless of the creative choices they make.
Some of these tribal wars are old hat, like gaming console tribes and Computing OS wars, and some are new, like Lady Gaga fans trying to torpedo VENOM for daring to come out the same week as her movie.
Some people simply invest too much of their personal self image in the products they choose and insist in forcing their preference on others. Like the old Asimov joke about the college revolutionary:
“…come the revolution, everybody will eat strawberries and cream! And like it!!!”
Absolutist thinking. It’s everywhere.
Civility is the only counter and it gets harder every day.
Thank you, PG. It’s good to have a place where politics isn’t the main topic.
Thank you, PG. *solidarity*