What The Digger’s All About: Purpose and Standards

There’s been some confusion about what The Digger is all about. Many think this is “my” (ie Elizabeth Hayes, or EH’s) site. This is understandable but inaccurate. The site owner made me the moderator before disappearing and I kept it limping along for a while until more people would contribute. Actually, my intention, as well as that of the site owner, has always been for this to be a community effort, with many people contributing. I am most happy to see this becoming more and more the reality.

Also, the site was created around the time the Yellow Vests began their uprising, and the site’s intention is to take their policies to heart. The enemy is not located along ideological or party lines, but class lines; and the common enemy can be found in those with the wealth and power to actually control policies, not among the peons of whatever ideological stripe. Thus we seek commonality among what has come to be defined as left and right, although both sides have shifted priorities markedly in the past decades and so the terms have become virtually meaningless.  Certain people have come to the conclusion that the site is actually right-wing masquerading as left. No, the site strives to be politically neutral.  I may consider myself a leftist, but again, I am not the site.

The site welcomes articles from a spectrum of political perspectives; we value free speech and civil debate. However, by “free speech” we do not mean people can be as abusive as they like and we will enact no moderation. We have no intention of moderating people whose purpose in posting here is to be abusive, spread lies, or make personal attacks, and personally attacking a moderator is just plain stupid and will definitely get you banned. We moderators don’t get paid and wouldn’t allow ourselves to be abused for any amount of money. Also, posters don’t want to read threads that devolve into little more than feces flinging. So yes, we do ban people here who can’t keep it to ideas. Disagree on those all you want, but make an attempt to be civil about it, and make an attempt to argue in good faith.

To hopefully avoid confusion, we will be posting the following message along with topic articles from now on: 

“The Digger’s Purpose and Standards”

This site does not have a particular political position. We welcome articles from various points of view, and civil debate when differences arise.

Contributions of articles from posters are always welcome. Unless a contribution is really beyond the pale, we do not edit what goes up as topics for discussion. If you would like to contribute an article, let one of the moderators know. Likewise if you would like to become an official contributor so you can put up articles yourself, but for that we need to exchange email addresses and we need a Google email address from you.

Contributions can be anything, including fiction, poems, cartoons, or songs. They can be your own writing or someone else’s writing which has yet to be published. 

We understand that tempers flare during heated conversations, and we're willing to overlook the occasional name-calling in that situation, although we do not encourage it.  We also understand that some people enjoy pushing buttons and that cussing them out may be an understandable response, although we do not encourage that either.  What we will not tolerate is a pattern of harassment and/or lies about other posters. 

The URL for the site via Disqus is https://disqus.com/home/forum/the-digger/

The URL for the blogspot is http://newlevellers.blogspot.com/