I still don't understand the motivation for rule 8

(Before anyone accuses me of reopening a closed thread - this is a different topic than Beetlegeuse was getting at, and I don't see any way this could be deemed political.)

The old description of Rants was "No civility required. All other rules are still in effect. Have thick skin or stay out."

Given this, why was there a problem with politics causing flamewars?

I mean, sure, politics inevitably causes flamewars, but the flamewars were contained in the forum where flamewars were explicitly okay and people were told to stay out of that forum if they didn't want flamewars.

"But Rants generated more reports than the rest of the forum combined!", certain people have said.

Well, uh, what were those reports for? If they were for flaming, they were frivolous and the mods could easily have just hit people for that (and/or posted stickies saying "don't report people for flaming in Rants") until they stopped. It would surely have been a lesser task than the endless brushfire war they've been fighting since rule 8 went into effect. Moderating a giant ball of flames is only difficult if you're trying to stop it being a giant ball of flames; if you just let it burn it's trivially easy.

(I do kinda understand in a psychological sense why things went the way they did; once a couple of mods started trying to herd the cats and were foiled it started the dreaded kneejerk of "people aren't doing what we told them to; apply boot to face" and because that didn't work it just escalated from there until the nuclear option was used. The problem is that that's an instinctive reaction, not an actual rational basis; sometimes you need to step back, take a breath, and think about whether that path is really a good idea.)

Basically, what I'm saying is that rule 8 wasn't actually necessary, and just letting Rants be Rants would have solved the vast majority of the problems it was intended to address without pissing off a decent chunk of the userbase. And, well, if you're not willing to let Rants be Rants (for... some reason?), why even have it? Putting it in limbo like this is a terrible solution which just fucks people around and gives the mods endless work.

(I've said all this before, in its various parts and over the course of various arguments with various people, but here it is as a cohesive whole. Also, I know someone's going to say "rule 1 was never completely gone in Rants". That is not true, as can easily be seen from the description of the subforum I quoted above. It was changed about the same time as rule 8 was introduced.)