There are a couple of things I want to follow up based on what you said.
"Country bashing" is not allowed under forum rules for obvious reason because that would just inflame the conversation. I do have a narrower understanding of its meaning and is important to discuss it in order to address your view that it is an inevitable outcome. Politics is simply pursuance of policies relative to a certain preferred worldview. In other words, it should be a debate of ideas that underlined policies and worldview. Any criticism or defence should be restricted to policies and worldview and not attacking the country or its people. Sadly, if you refer to the comments in the locked threads they are rich in country bashing and rarity regarding policies difference discussion.
Under current rules, country bashing is of course not allowed.
However, in other forums, country bashing of certain nations or groups are normal and contained in political subsections. There are other military forums for other nations I visit now and then with the understanding that there's going to be country bashing of country A or country X in certain threads or subsections, but that's fine, I just don't visit those political threads and stick to the ones that are useful to my interests.
I would be happy to hear your definition of minimum standard. The forum already has a set of "do not" rules. The problem is posters can't even respect the basic "do not". I am reproducing for you below , the second paragraph of a new thread that was started when the regular one was locked. Highlighted in bold are examples of basic "do not".
The comments are nothing but political rhetoric with emotions hardly contained. Do you think this forum is ready for political discussions when this type of language and emotions are present?
I suppose I would have two minimum standards.
1 would be no use of swear words, to keep a minimum standard of civility.
2 would be to keep certain specific political topics off limits. This will probably be more contentious for certain users here, but I believe this is a forum frequented and contributed to most usefully by members of Chinese background and who are partial to the PRC worldview and I expect the off limit topics to reflect that.
For the record, I certainly would not make those kind of posts like the one you quoted. I don't think it's particularly useful or particularly constructive, and unimaginative country bashing is... unimaginative. Furthermore, based on my two minimum standards, a warning would be issued with regards to that user's use of the f word.
However I also think that those sort of emotional comments are inevitable given the caliber of topics that the contemporary political and geopolitical environment is now at, and if there is any topics that are mildly political in nature we are likely to see elevated emotions.
I think it is better to have a specific subsection of the forum where those topics can be vigorously argued and gracelessly thrown about rather than to deny it a presence at all.
I expect the end result will be that a hypothetical forum's political subsection will be populated by heavily pro-China narratives where users making arguments against China and/or pro-US or pro-China-adversary arguments will be shouted out of the room.
But seeing as the primary purpose of this forum is for tracking Chinese military developments anyway, people who do not wish to discuss politics will be free to ignore the politics subsection of the forum and contribute primarily to the pure military threads instead.
Of course, the alternative is to not have any political subsection and to avoid political discussions/threads altogether in the forum, which is not completely crazy, but I do think there are two longer term consequences to that:
1. the scope of geopolitical competition and the relationship with military development is now very very thin, if it is there at all. Discussion about one cannot be quite isolated from the rest.
2. perhaps more importantly, is user retention. I believe that the most useful contributors to this forum are the individuals of the "pro-China" background. This is
Sinodefence forum whose goal is to talk track Chinese military developments. I think the years has more than shown that the users who are the MVPs of providing new information, pictures and rumours about PLA developments are the ones of the "pro-China" background. I think creating an environment that is able to retain those users to allow open discussion about the heated political topics of our time will be beneficial to the purpose of actually tracking Chinese military developments. That said, I might put in some rules such that users are only able to access the "politics subsection" of the forum after a certain number of posts and/or receiving likes in the military forums.
And to follow up on this specific part:
The comments are nothing but political rhetoric with emotions hardly contained. Do you think this forum is ready for political discussions when this type of language and emotions are present?
If the swear words are removed, and if the relevant threads are all contained to a specific part of the forum -- yes I think this forum is ready for it.
That post certainly has country bashing, but if the above criteria are met I think it can be tolerated.
