It may actually have been me that came up with the politics rule so many years ago, even though lately I've been pushing at the boundaries a little bit. Mostly I just fool around and post really wacky, grossly exaggurated things. (just in case someone actually thinks I advocate setting McDonald's on fire and killing all cops)
Thinking on it more, lifting the ban on political chat is still THE WORST IDEA EVER. First, because the political atmosphere in the US makes it really easy to immediately demonize people for their worldviews, and hell, it's practically encouraged. I don't know about people in other countries, but they don't really count anyway
.
Second of all, I know a lot of NWR posters have awful, reprehensible worldviews that look something like
and you really don't want to find that out about them.