Art has been and will be political, and I think to completely ignore the dehumanization and terror being spread is at best callous and at worst actively aiding in that agenda.

That said, I wholly agree that there does need to be a way for people to not see this as the constant bombardment of bad news negatively affects everyone’s mental health — and I think specific opt-in discussions and threads would be a good balance.

I do also think that what gets labeled “political” these days is…for lack of a better word, problematic. Human rights should not be lumped into the same category as like “how exactly are we getting our funding for accessible transportation.” The latter is something that we can agree to disagree on, the former like……if you don’t understand why we can’t be friends if we have fundamentally opposed views on human rights I don’t even know what to say.

There’s this idea called “the paradox of tolerance,” where, in order to be fair and actually tolerant, intolerance can’t be tolerated. In less like. “I’m repeating the same word a bunch” terms, there is a sort of social contract that intolerant people break when they try to push their intolerance on others that thus excludes them from the tolerance that same social contract promises. Can’t have your cake and eat it, too, type stuff.

I also think trying to fully keep “”political”” topics out of an art space is only going to isolate and marginalize people who need to use art as a way to handle all of the everything going on.

TL;DR: there does need to be a balance between keeping this a soft space and also not allowing for the normalization of hate, and opt-in discussion threads feels like a fair way to handle that.