It's bad here

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HeyMikey

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I posted that it is getting political because some folks started posting statistics and placing blame without siting a qualified source. To me that is opinion and not fact.

If you say something is 100% true then provide a source to back it up. If you are blaming people for something, then site the source proving that claim, which others can choose to accept or debate with alternative sources. I am fine with that though I don’t think this is the forum for that kind of debate.

I read a lot, including scientific studies not just media headlines. I have read very good arguments for both vaccination and non-vaccination, and virology theories of why the mutations are occurring and the vaccines don’t work as originally claimed. I welcome learning about different theories based on scientific study. Which studies one chooses to believe has unfortunately become too political and divisive.

And yes, I got the vaxx…
 

cupric

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I guess not much is happening in Guild/guitar land. So "Let's Talk Covid".
IMHO totally unrelated, and off topic, to forum. And I am not insensitive to the fact that this topic is unrelenting and everywhere. But it is nice to have a escape somewhere.....
 

geoguy

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I would like to think that members of this community can discuss a variety of topics, whether music-related or not.

Recent off-topic posts have run the gamut from personal successes (or losses), to recipes. And how would I have known about the deranged sense of humor exhibited by Finns, if Nuuska hadn't begun that wildly off-topic thread?

Covid has affected all of us one way or another, and if some folks wish to discuss it in tones that are respectful, I hope that can continue.

I'd like to offer one additional data point re: the thread topic. Here in Massachusetts we were down to about 60 new cases of Covid per day, back in June. Today's count is 5,170 new confirmed cases (an increase of 86x, most of which has come in the past month). Our hospital systems are successfully handling this situation, but it means that a lot more of our friends, neighbors, co-workers and family members have become ill.

Stay safe, y'all.
 

MacGuild

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I guess not much is happening in Guild/guitar land. So "Let's Talk Covid".
IMHO totally unrelated, and off topic, to forum. And I am not insensitive to the fact that this topic is unrelenting and everywhere. But it is nice to have a escape somewhere.....

Yeah, I also come here to get away from reading about Covid and/or politics. Or try to. It ain't easy.

Aside: Obviously we are all adults and can ignore any particular discussion on the internet we encounter. However, consider the mods. Threads like this are a "no win" situation for any forum administrator or moderator, who cannot simply opt to ignore them. These threads put the mods in an unenviable awkward position and they end up watching these threads like time bombs. One of two things will inevitably happen: the mods let the discussion go unfettered and the thread devolves into a senseless argument that will accomplish nothing but a few people infuriating each other and giving the forum a black eye that makes it less pleasant to visit for everyone, or the mods will permit one opinion but not the other and then we have a free speech argument, and arguments spawning more arguments. One way or another, it will be divisive, and the discussion will end up as either chaos or an echo chamber.
It sucks but Covid and vaccinations are far more polarizing than music hobbyists debating maple versus rosewood, and when lives are directly and severely affected by an issue over which people are dramatically divided, civility typically gives way to raw emotion. Moderating a forum is often stressful, almost always thankless, and is time-consuming on a grand scale. Polarizing topics, and there are none more polarizing than Covid, don't do our moderators any favors as these topics force the mods to make decisions that users may consider unfair or adversarial, when they're really just trying to diffuse a potentially volatile situation. Nobody wins.
 

GAD

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^ This times a million.

Here's the deal, and this is not about covid, not about free speech, and not about politics. It's about our sanity. The reason that certain topics are disallowed is because they lead to ugly arguments and vitriol. Then we have to step in and no matter what, someone ends up unhappy. That's often why we just lock threads. Sometimes we lock them then talk about them behind the scenes to see if we should unlock them. 99.9% of the time we keep them locked because it doesn't do any good to keep them going.

No matter what we as moderators do, we lose. This thread, like all the Covid threads before it, has degraded into discussions about how we handle them. Therefore I'm locking it because I'm tired of dealing with arguments about how we should deal with arguments about a topic that should not have been posted in the first place because everyone knows it's divisive.
 
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