Brown Pundits has always been a forum for the kind of thinking that most outlets are too timid or too tribal to publish. We intend to keep it that way. But that standard cuts both ways, and we are raising it.
Effective immediately, the moderation policy is zero tolerance.
This is not a crackdown on opinion. We welcome disagreement; sharp, even uncomfortable disagreement. What we will no longer tolerate is noise dressed up as insight.
What does noise look like? You know it when you read it. It is the rattling of nuclear talking points that have not been updated since 1998. It is the reduction of a civilisation of 220 million people, or of a billion-and-a-half, to a single variable: the Crescent, or the Saffron. It is venom without weight, and venting without argument.
Pakistan is complex. India is complex. Every human society is, at its foundation, irreducibly complex.
Any comment that treats either as otherwise will be moderated; sometimes publicly, sometimes silently. We apply the sniff test: does it smell right, given the context? Given how tight our Editorship and Commentariat is, we will be judicious, as we have always been; for instance the Precedent post on the controversial Dhuruandar sequel remains Gaurav Lele’s.
This applies to both sides of every line we cover; geographical, civilisational, sectarian, or political.
