Where exactly do we put Political stuff?
Does Great Debates REALLY suit Political stuff?
I kinda saw Great Debates as more Philosophy and ideas that arent nailed down to a term in office.
There’s not a rigid dividing line between philosophical questions (“How do you distinguish good and evil?”) and political questions (“Is abortion good or evil?”).
It’s been discussed a bunch of times and always dies in committee.
Sure there is. Politics is when some party tries to enforce their view on a philosophical or other issue via legislative fiat, i.e. “Abortion is/is not evil, therefore we shall make it illegal/ensconce it as a right.”
This obtuse objection to making a distinct forum for strictly political discussion is peculiar and annoying. Supposesd “Great Debates” on whether President Obama can be considered a native born American citizen or whether John McCain has been replaced by a pod person from Epsilon Eridanus don’t belong in any forum but Let’s Talk Bullshit About Politics or Here Be Idiot Wonks, and certainly not any forum that attests to hosting the “long-running discussions of the great questions of our time.”
Stranger
Since the forum’s description is merely suggestive of what is in it, what difference does it make? Why bother with a seperate forum? We know where political threads go, people put them there, and it works. This annoying insistence on drawing attention to one particular category of question with its own forum, taken to its logical conclusion, would undoubtedly result in us having at least 50 fora and I, for one, am not particularly interested in hunting down the threads I want to read in the “It’s time to bash the Yankees” forum. 
Well, one difference is that there are people who don’t like to argue (so don’t go into Great Debates), but do find some discussions of current events of interest (so would like to read a thread on, say, the implications of Specter’s recent conversion). Such a person – oh, hell, why pretend?, it is I – misses a lot of interesting conversations because, though coming up on her seventh anniversary here, she hasn’t really processed that they’re going on in Great Debates, even though they’re not actually, yanno, debates.
Why isn’t a discussion about whether Senator Specter’s change of allegiance is good or bad for the Dems or for the Repubs a debate? You could even put the topic formally, e.g., “Resolved: That the GOP is better off without Arlen Specter.”
I find it amusing that a website forum as erudite as ours tends to be, would have a significant number of posters/participants who cannot go into the Great Debates forum and figure out from the thread titles (especially in light of the mouseovers) which threads are political as opposed to, oh, say, religious, or social, or etc. :dubious:
It’s not that the thread titles are confusing, it’s that I never go in there – and there is nothing at all intuitively obvious about the fact that general political discussions, and not just partisan wrangling, are going on in “great debates.”
You can debate it for sure, but the question is whether it’s one of those momentous arguments like the ones the forum description talks about, which tend to be more philosophical. A lot of the GD politics threads aren’t debate as much as commentary on current events, or just interminable partisanship, so I can see why people think they are another category. I’ve been on both sides of this argument. The concern on the other hand is that it’s more work for the GD mods, or whoever ends up handling that forum, and that it might kill GD.
And yes, DSYoung, different forums do have different styles: some people won’t go into GD because they find the style too harsh, or won’t go to the Pit because they find it too virtiolic, or MPSIMS because they find it too frivolous.
Quibble–it’s never died in committee, it’s always killed by imperial veto. It’s been brought up since at least 2001 and each time an admin comes in and says “Nope. Not gonna do it regardless of what the posters want. Besides there’s no need or demand for it.”
Dying in committee implies that anyone actually allows debate before killing the issue.
The mods and admins discussed it before and after the election. Nobody’s killed it by veto, it just doesn’t have enough support to get done. It’s true that we don’t take it up again every time somebody opens at thread to suggest the idea, but that shouldn’t be confused with squashing it. I’m in favor of the idea and even I don’t have the patience to argue it every couple of weeks. And I don’t think the other mods would appreciate it if I did. 
See here for the most recent iteration.
I’d still love to understand why it’s such a big deal to push three (or six or nine) buttons on the VB control panel, create a sub-forum of GD called Politics or “Current Events”, have the same mods (it’s the same number of threads after all at least at first) modding, and if the forum dies aborning merge the two back together. If it takes off and means more mods, then you get some–it’s not like there’s a shortage of people who’ve applied from what I understood. What’s the harm in trying it?
I repeat:
What can I say? Last time we discussed it, there wasn’t enough support to get it done. I don’t think things have changed much. But nobody’s killed the idea without discussion.
Well, in addition to GD and the Pit, there are also currently political threads in Cafe Society, IMHO, and MPSIMS, and a closed thread on the second page of GQ.
Thanks, Marley23, I appreciate your bearing the torch for this, even if it doesn’t ever go anywhere.
Stranger
My OP came from the recent events with Arlen Specter. (What it would mean if Franken is seated.)
I wanted just the facts Ma’am.
My post was merged into a GD thread that was RELATED to the issue at hand.
I just felt that my Factual based question had no place in a “Debate” section.
To answer your original question, threads about politics can go in almost any forum depending on what the original post is like and what it’s about. A factual question goes in GQ, jokes and minutiae can go in MPSIMS, most general discussion goes in GD. Your thread didn’t get locked because it was wrong for GQ, I think, so much as it got locked because the question was already being answered. Like Colibri said, details of Specter’s decision were already being widely reported at the time you made your post.
By the same Logic, we don’t need the SDMB at all. We Could hit up Wikipedia or CNN.
Further, We don’t need the Internet, we could just tune in our tv.
Fuirther, we dont need TV, we could just use print media.
Further, we can just rely on our brain.
…
There is synergy in talking about things on boards, over just looking them up. I have the same problem with people telling me to go google something.
Looking something up denies a chance at synergy.
I think the problem is that, once you get past a simple “yea” or “nay” to the simple question, “Has Arlen Specter changed parties?”, you are getting into political debate. That’s because it’s a current political issue, and the implications are debatable.
However, there are similar questions that could stay in GQ, and generate a lively discussion, such as, “How many senators have changed parties in the history of the U.S. Senate?” That’s the sort of question that a Google search might not answer, that might not have an obvious Wikipedia article covering it, and that probably won’t generate partisan political debate. What’s more, you might have historical instances where it’s debatable whether a particular senator changed parties. So you can still have “political” questions in GQ.