I'm sure it would surprise nobody to hear that I'm disappointed by this action. I'm a deeply political person, and dearly love engaging in political discussion, debate, argument, and conflict. Because of the direction SB and SV staff have chosen to go when it comes to politics, I was reliever to discover the politics threads in the Rants section. I quite liked having a forum with some of the same personalities, but with a very different style of moderator action. These were good things... politics was pretty well confined to about five threads total, out of more than a thousand, as befit a forum that is fiction-centric.
For my part, it seems to me that the problem with those threads was not the content, but how a tiny handful of users chose to react to it, spamming mods with complaints and begging them to employ some measure of coercion against those they disagreed with. No doubt these creatures are overjoyed to see discussions that were not going their ways silenced. Expect them to act similarly in the future having been granted such a reward.