Mmm. Mixed bag, isn’t it. On one hand, it’s in nobody’s interest to develop the kind of “hate on everything and everyone”-discussion culture here that’s prevalent in so many other places on and about the internet, and I know for sure that there are a good lot of people who’d prefer that controversial and “personal” themes like politics or religion not be discussed at all.
On the other, people should know that their ideas and concerns are valid and may be voiced and considered by all, and if we cut particular topics of discourse out, we leave one another stuck in our own heads by ourselves with the thoughts we’ve already got on those topics. Kinda like with the scripting/programming/crafting topics - sharing knowledge and insights leaves everyone who witnesses it a little bit better off for it. It gets us insights that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own, broadening everyone’s horizons. It’s really one of the biggest advantages of being part of a community of any type at all.
I’d generally like to vote for permitting controversial and personal topics, for the sake of everyone’s mental health maintenance and personal growth. Same as with when people squabble, actually - when people have shitty conflict resolution skills, we ought to try to teach them better ones, if we’re able (which helps us get better conflict resolution skills, too, to boot). It’s not something people are just born with; that particular skill needs practice, which requires opportunity to practice - which, yeah, means squabbling. It means people getting upset, and it means not punting eachother into corners for it, but helping one another back up and showing eachother that it’s fine to get mad sometimes (as a subset of “it’s fine to not be a robot; you’re still valued and welcome here even when you fuck up”). Really stable relationships aren’t ones where people never argue, they’re ones where people argue respectfully and constructively when they do, still showing appreciation and consideration for one another even when they passionately disagree.
On topic of Steam, I thought there was a noteworthy excerpt in that one recent statement on censorship/which games get into the store:
“In addition, Valve is not a small company - we’re not a homogeneous group. The online debates around these topics play out inside Valve as well. We don’t all agree on what deserves to be on the Store. So when we say there’s no way to avoid making a bunch of people mad when making decisions in this space, we’re including our own employees, their families and their communities in that.”
^- Political and personal differences of opinion and preference won’t go away and stop causing friction if we try to bury them, they’ll just resurface whenever decisions stand to be made. I think it’d be much less trouble in the long run if we stick to standards of respect and seeking mutual understanding and appreciation than if we try to suppress that stuff.
It’s just much more time-and-effort intensive on everyone’s parts, since it means taking the time to show respect and consideration for contrary ideas, and being courteous when people who don’t know how to do this stuff yet make “discussion culture missteps”. If there’s anyplace that can manage to pull that off, though, it’d have to be this one. We know how to do this already; we practice it each and every day in all the various crafting threads. It’s the exact same methodology, just applied to a different topic.
Stayin’ at least a little bit ontopic:
I don’t think you need to worry much about the continued availability of free resource sharing sites, DrA.
The EU has bigger concerns than deliberately going after screwing over the little guys economically and taking away people’s fun, like harrassing the noncommercial open-source folks. If there’s a secret shadowy intent for increasing means for internet censorship in there, it’s more likely to be about combating voter influence by politically hostile parties.
I’m fairly passionately pro-European, personally. But I agree that pretty much anything will be used and abused for the benefit of some unscrupulous person or other. 
I think that’s actually the situation we’ve already got, as part of “how reality works (mechanically)”; people do what they want to do (or think should be done), providing they’re able to do it. So people with more ability to do things tend to wind up getting their interests realized more than people with less ability to do things, and people who are willing to do the kinds of things it takes to get the ability to do what they want done have a massive natural advantage over people who aren’t willing to do unscrupulous things to get themselves positioned to be able to do things.
Dunning-Kruger plays into that, too, big time. A lot of politicians aren’t evil so much as just… very convinced that they really understand the impact their decisions will have, maybe because they just don’t possess enough data to see the extents of their own blind spots. Party-versus-party systems have a bit of that “associate with like-minded people only, and consider people with different ideals enemies whose needs don’t matter”-thing going on again, don’t they.
I like to think that politics, correctly utilized, keep power-and-status-hungry people busy squabbling with one another so the rest of everybody else is free to do the important stuff.
Time to promote an adorable game with an adorable message:
::mumbling something decidedly partisan::