A Political Chat Forum

[mhendo]

@Oakminster

[bolding added]

Look at what you wrote. “I still want it discussed.”. Not “I have anything interesting to say on the topic.” Not even “I want to participate in a discussion about it”. One of the things you’ve been doing is starting a thread on a hot button topic and rarely returning to the shitstorm you created. That’s kinda like saying “Hey, let’s you and him fight”. There are other terms that may be applicable to such conduct as well. They aren’t flattering.

Exactly.

The other members of this boards are not wind-up toys, to be deployed in debate or discussion for your amusement. If all you want to do is watch other people debate, then read the threads that have already been created. If you think a topic is a good one for discussion, then start a thread about it, but you should be prepared to participate in a meaningful way.

[Colibri]

@Curtis LeMay

I think if you say have a news story that’s like “Neo-Nazis vandalize local synagouge” or “Fourteen people killed in bombing in Iraq.” it’s not Great Debate worthy but I still want it discussed.

While they may not start out as a debate, those topics can easily end up as one. There are plenty of GQ questions with political aspects that end up getting sent to GD, no matter if the original question was simple. Political threads have a very good chance of devolving into GD anyway. So how do you propose to prevent the discussion from becoming a debate?

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

It might be a debate but I still don’t think it’s GD worthy as Great Debate threads are usually 100-200 post affairs where it basically devolves to two or three people going back and forth.

[TubaDiva]

Then I guess it’s up to you to bring something worth discussing and making some salient points your own self. All these discussions are what you make of them. It starts with you.

[Colibri]

@Curtis LeMay

It might be a debate but I still don’t think it’s GD worthy as Great Debate threads are usually 100-200 post affairs where it basically devolves to two or three people going back and forth.

No they aren’t. There are currently 59 threads on the front page of GD that haven’t been posted to since yesterday and so can be assumed to be mostly over. (The oldest of these was last posted to on Oct 24.) Of these only 9 are over 100 posts. The average number of posts is 67, and the range is 0-290. The longer threads have a substantial number of posters participating.

In any case, around here whether a topic is “debate-worthy” often has little to do with whether or not it becomes a debate. You haven’t explained how you are going to prevent debates from breaking out in this new forum.

[Giles]

My feeling is that Great Debates is pretty close to a “discuss politics” forum, since most of the threads there are about politics, and most political threads go there rather than other forums. In spite of its name, the debates there don’t have to be about the “Great” topics, but can be about relatively minor, but still interesting political subjects that just happen to be in today’s headlines.