I had a gratifying experience last month, a late night conversation on twitter about the left and the NZ election and what the Greens are up to. There were maybe half a dozen people in the conversation, and all of them were left wing. The conversation ranged over a number of areas and sub-threads and lasted several hours. At the end I came away feeling buoyed by the debate, that it was not only productive, and gave us food for thought, but that it fed us too. One thing I noticed was that none of us slagged each other off, nor was there a slagging off of our political allies.
We certainly weren’t all in agreement, and the conversation started with us disagreeing on a number of points around Green Party strategy – this was just after the first GP election campaign launch and Metiria Turei had just called Peters out on his racist rhetoric. But it was a conversation free of antagonism and instead explored political issues in depth and offered a chance for people to talk with their allies.
I’ve seen conversations like this on TS. We have a range of views here amongst the left wing commenters, and recently there have been spontaneous outbreaks of troll-free conversation and debate that were also abuse-free and full of considered and in depth comments.
So I’d like to try an experiment. I’d like us to try and have this kind of conversation here, intentionally.
The rules are:
– To comment you have to be left wing.
– No personal attacks at all (not even if they are hidden in comments with good political points)
– Be kind. If you can’t be kind at least don’t be mean.
– Bear in mind the part of the Policy about not using language or tone that excludes others.
Don’t worry, this isn’t some big change to the culture of TS. I just want to see what is possible. It’s one post, it might be repeated, but the usual Policy rules around robust debate still apply to everything else. If you’re not sure if you fit the criteria, there is always Open Mike.
We can talk about anything that’s relevant to the left or progressives, but I’m going to suggest if we want a starting point we consider how Labour and Green members, supporters and voters can work together to change the government over the next 7 weeks. Otherwise, grab whatever is of interest to you today and bring it to the conversation.
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