Wow - this is really upsetting to me. I don't mind censorship of profanity or nudity etc. I don't particularly agree
with it and I've had long debates about it with other parents, and friends, but that's a cultural thing and people get
offended by it, and it isn't a big deal. To be sure, I find it worse than absurd that people think it's necessary to
censor breasts and f words, meanwhile watching people get shot in the head on primetime is ok for kids, but
again censoring the photos is no big problem to me.
But it is so utterly deppressing that one can't talk about real life on toy forums. Why is health care off limits?
Because it isn't toy related? What about all the people on ebay who sell off their whole toy collections because
someone in their family gets sick? How many times have we seen that?
I can understand that you guys don't want to have people be offended or insulting eachother, but there should be
some room for reality in here, these are really important issues that most people live with and care about.
This suddenly went from a place that I love to visit constantly and feel like I can talk to fun like minded people, to a place
that's only for happy time. It's not like I can hang out with Bryan, hypno, Guy, bigr cricket or anyone one else in real life.
We live hundreds of miles apart and have busy lives. We do email eachother privately sometimes, but we aren't
going to email privately mass emails to eachother
every time we want to discuss something all of us might be interested, and that other board members might care about..
This is the place where we hang out. And now it feels like we're just "renting" it - we can't paint the walls or
have pets - it isn't really our place. I'd start my own forum, but who has the time, and more importantly there already is this one.
Are we allowed to talk about the sweatshops in China that make microman or the palisades micronauts?
Is the discussion not allowed to spill into the hippocracy of politicians and corporations who 10 years ago used to complain
about how evil communism was in China when CHina wasn't giving them a piece of the pie,
while today when China is just as repressive and violent as ever, they help china's communist dictatorship censor the internet and catch dissidents, like yahoo recently did by handing over private
emails to the government?
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4221538.stmThat's directly related to toys - all the toys we love are made by people in horrible conditions, and I can guarantee
that most of us feel crappy about that, but now we'll never discuss it because we'll feel like it isn't "appropriate" .
That issue came up on the micropolis embassy web board and we started talking about it, and someone got offended somehow,
but we just talked it out, and it worked out. The moderator said it was an acceptable thing to talk about so long as no one was directly insulting
eachother, and it was in some way related to the forum.
It's *SO* ironic because just yesterday bryan posted how nice it was that we can talk about his, vs other toy boards where they
automatically erase anything that gets serious in any way.
And what does "political neutrality" mean? If the subject was adolph hitler, do we have to have a pro adolph
voice every time someone says something against him, to balance things out? Or rather is it ok to talk about his
nice clothes and mustache as long as we don't pick sides either way? This is health care. Everyone suffers if they
can't afford health care. If we were talking about how we all hate minorities or CHristians or soemthing like
that, fine, but this was health care. And it was spurred by the politics on this toy. THis toy happens
to be an overtly political toy. One out of hundreds of orinary ones. It's bound to start a discussion. If someone was offended because they love private health care, well by all means let
them say so, and if the arguing becamomes insulting then stop the thread, or erase the insults.
What this does is tell everybody that all we can do here is focus on our toys, and we have to pretend the rest
of the world doesn't exist. .
This is about the only place on the net to talk about henshin cyborgs, and one of the only ones to talk about microman.
I've made some firnds here, and we have interests outside just toys. We can talk privately about other topics, and
sometimes we do about personal things, but this is a public issues that affects anyone who breathes, including toy
collectors.
There's way more to life than toys, and as fun as they are they are mostly meaningless and trivial in the face of
all the real things that we face in life every day. This kind of censorship and compartmentalizing of things is what
keeps people focused on fantasy while the world is falling apart around us. When you separate real life from hobbies
what you get is political forums full of people who are dry and boring, or else competely obsessed and aggressive,
and then hobby forums where everyone is completely oblivious to reality, and never questions where the toys come
from, or anything else. I've always loved this particular forum because we do talk about reality every once in a while.
It's like enforced happy time from Orwell's 1984. Then we can go over to the " I hate everyone who doesn't think like
me" political forum and have out 2 minutes of hate session, and then come back here and forget there's a world outside.
Again, it's so ironic: people in this thread were talking about why people don't change things, why people in the
US have such unaffordable
health care, and why can't they get together to have a better system - well this kind of compartmentalization is
exactly why: if you're not a ranting political maniac, then there is no place for you to talk about anything political, and
as a result everyone sits at their job and talks about anything but politics, or sits at home on the computer and
talks about anything but politics, and you can have 50 million people all wanting the same things and having the same
complaints and goals, but no one will do anything about it because there's no place to just relax and speak to like
minded people casually.
?
