The rules for #political are:

1. No name calling, ad hominems, personal attacks, verbal harassment or overly aggressive behavior against other channel participants. Such behavior is disruptive, and makes it difficult to maintain the proper atmosphere for debate on #Political.

2. No threats of violence against other channel users. Also, excessively and/or gratuitously violent rhetoric is prohibited.

3. The use of epithets or excessively pejorative language targeting a race, nationality, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc. is prohibited; in our opinion, this only brings down the level of debate.

4. Excessive and/or gratuitous crudeness and profanity are not allowed; strong emotions and heated discussions happen and are part of discussing things people care strongly about - but that is no excuse for abusive language, harassing other users, or using obscene language just for shock value.

5. Pasting text to the channel - for example, from a webpage - should be limited to 3 posts in a ten-minute period. Any pasting in excess of this limit is considered flooding.

6.  Excessive sloganeering is prohibited. The purpose of the channel is political debate, not cheerleading or chanting of slogans.

7. Excessive trolling -- making inflammatory remarks for the primary purpose of eliciting angry responses from other channel users -- is prohibited.

8. No pasting of participants' WHOIS info to the channel.

9. Do not announce to the channel that you are placing another participant on ignore.

10. No discussion of channel policy or channel operations on channel, particularly kicks and bans. This rule does not apply to the ops, who must issues warnings, etc ...

11.  No flooding, hacking, or takeovers. Flooding is the scrolling of meaningless text in a channel in an attempt to disrupt.

12. While the the need for emphasis might be expressed with the use of caps, color, boldface and underline - moderate use is acceptable, and overuse is not. Caps is considered "shouting" in the irc lexicon, and strongly discouraged.

13.  People who cannot follow our simple rules will be warned and then kicked or kicked and banned. Again, this is up to the discretion of our ops. Do not question or argue with ops' decisions or you will be given a "time-out" from our channel.

14.  This channel is dedicated to intelligent, mature and civil discussions of political and politically related issues throughout the world. Behavior, whether specified in the rules or not, that runs counter to this purpose is unwelcome and will be subject to disciplinary action.