Which, in that case, was already taking place in Great Debates: without looking anything up, the factual confirmation and the details were already there. GQ is for questions with factual answers, and if the question was “Is Specter switching parties?” it was already clear the answer is yes. Arguments related to that question were covered by the GD thread.
What are the exact reasons for the lack of support? Is it because there aren’t enough political thread? That it would be too difficult to identify the political threads? That it would lead to a slippery slope of opening up new forums for specific categories?
I keep hearing that TPTB don’t want to create new forums for specific topics (like Cafe Society and The Game Room), but I never understand why they want it this way.
And this is relevant how? The “Political” Forum can be expected to be much the same as the political threads in GD are now. So if you don’t like the tone of the political threads in GD, you won’t like the tone of the political threads in a “Political” forum, most likely.
On the other hand, if you enjoy politics, and stay out of GD because of its tone, perhaps you should simply open the forum up and search out only the political threads, and see if you can enjoy hanging with them.
The one thing I can see doing is changing the description of GD to indicate that it is where political discussions get placed. 
And hence, it would go in a Politics forum. Other than the practical problem of providing for additional moderation and overcoming resistance by TPTB, why the density over distinguishing between political discussion, debate, and yammerheading versus actual “Great Questions of Our Time”?
Stranger
I really can’t understand the objections to a Politics Forum.
I can only suspect that it’s because the armchair pundits want to force their views and rants on everyone else and they know that if there’s a Politics Forum then most regular board members won’t go anywhere near the place, and it will be the same five people reposting stuff they’ve read on various obscure blogs whilst disagreeing ever-more vehemently with each other over issues of little to no real importance for anyone outside Lickspittle County, Kansas.
Put the Political stuff in its own forum, let the pundits have at each other, and let the rest of us have a Great Debates forum that isn’t staggeringly centred around US Politics.
Sort of like The McLaughin Group but with (even) lower production values and pointless argumentation. Heh.
Stranger
And again–the question I’ve never gotten an answer for: why not TRY it–give it six months. If it doesn’t work, merge the threads back. It’s not that hard.
Arguably, Politics and Religion may well merit their own fora, given the intense nature of dialog when either is in play.
What Fenris said. It’s not like Ed didn’t already try a bunch of Chicago based forums. When he decided that he had too many, he got rid of a bunch of them and merged a bunch of them together.
Would GD wither without politics?
Or, whither GD without politics?
Well, it’s not clear to me what the advantages of such a change would be.
You want a factual answer to a political question? Try GQ.
Ok, say you want to discuss politics, but you don’t want to get into an argument. Is that it? If so, you are proposing a “Polite Politics” forum. That’s something else entirely. I don’t think it would work here and (IMHO) is not worth trying. But if this is the idea, advocates should say so.
What about those who want to discuss politics without having to shield their eyes from the religious or philosophical threads? I’d say they should toughen up a little. (Hm. Maybe we really want is a tagging system along with an expanded ignore function, although I recognize that the software won’t support that currently. )
twickster’s point could be handled by updating the forum descriptions, or perhaps assembling an improved Introduction to the Board sticky in ATMB.
I can think of one off the top of my head: Keeping the pundits in one place so people who give a shit know where to go for their punditry and the rest of us can have a forum to discuss Important Things That Are Not Politics.
It seems to be a US-exclusive thing to really care about politics. People in other countries care about politics to an extent, but they don’t seem to get worked up over it or obsess about the minutiae of it the way you guys in the US seem to.
The rest of the points you’ve made are, it appears to me, made from the assumption that everyone on the boards wants to discuss US politics and that simply isn’t true.
As has been said a couple of times already, there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to keep objecting to a Politics forum, and frankly I think someone in charge needs to just say “Fuck it, we’ll try it, give it six months, and see what happens.”
Can anyone come up with a decent reason not to have a politics forum that doesn’t involve “But we’ve managed without one for this long”, or “There will be too many forums”, or “It’s too hard to work out what constitutes a political thread”?
Because, honestly, those reasons are bullshit and everyone knows it. The pundits are just too afraid to admit that they won’t have much of an audience to foist their views and punditry on if there’s an easy way for board members to avoid seeing the political threads.
The reason to say no to a Politics forum is the same reason to say no to EVERY suggested expansion of the forums. It’s simply ridiculuous to contemplate having a forum for every kind of category of question postulated here. We’d end up with so many fora that they’d end up overwhelming even the most large-screen monitor around. Politics. Ok, so then why not sports distinct from games? Why not television distinct from literature? Why not religion distinct from Great Debates? And good God, think what GQ could be split up into!!!
There has never yet been articulated a decent reason why any forum has to be split off from other fora. It’s merely a matter of preference, and for a large number of us, that preference is for a nice, clean, simple front page to the message board. I participate in other MBs where you end up navigating some annoying sequence of layered forums to get to where the things you want to discuss are found; I much prefer the way this MB used to be, before forum proliferation threatened to overwhelm the front page.
Well, the difference is that politics threads nearly always devolve into the same argument, no matter which forum they start in. That’s why some people want a topical forum, to sweep those threads out of GQ, IMHO, and MPSIMS.
Why not indeed? I’d be in favour of it, actually.
Unlikely, IMHO. There’s still an acknowledgement that GQ is the Ask People Questions About Anything And See What The Answer Might Be forum, regardless of subject. Also, there’s not usually an overwhelming number of GQ threads devoted to the same (minority interest) topic.
There have been entire threads articulating decent reasons why fora should be split off from other fora. In this case, it’s that Politics is a minority interest that rapidly gets out of control and needs to be contained to a single forum where those who are interested can discuss it at length and the rest of us can have GD back for the meaningful stuff.
One man’s “Nice, clean, simple front page” is another’s “There’s not a lot here, is there?”
I honestly don’t think creating a Politics forum will result in an opening of floodgates resulting in threads for every minority interest on the boards. There have been calls for a Politics thread as long as I’ve been posting here and the Official Response ranges from “LOLNO” to “You wouldn’t appreciate it enough to make it worth our while setting one up” to “Well, people will stop talking about it eventually and then we’d have an empty forum.”
The only reason that TPTB think there’s not enough support for a Politics Forum is because they ignore everyone who does support such a forum. “Well, most of the members we’ve spoken to want a Politics Forum, but they didn’t guess the magic number we were thinking of so they don’t count, which means that most people don’t want a Politics Forum, so we don’t have to set one up. And Yes, we have always been at war with Eastasia… why do you ask?”
Look at it this way: A Politics Forum is guaranteed to get more traffic than at least three other forums on the boards that I can think of. That alone makes it a worthwhile endeavour, I think.
We tend to be resistant of new forum designations because we feel at heart that less is more. We went a long time with just two forum areas – Comments on Cecil’s Columns and General Questions – the consensus was that the whole world could be divided up this way so why not?
Most of us are not as single minded as Cecil but we do feel that to have too many forums is worse than not enough.
We’re also naturally resistant of people who want us to put certain threads in an area simply so they can avoid them. “I don’t like reading political threads so put them where I don’t have to look at them.” “I detest sports threads so move them away from my direct view.” That is not a good reason to start another forum area.
For those of you hesitant to go to GD for what you consider lesser items or topics that you think will be disrespected, I would suggest a bit of dialogue in the forum itself and some discussion with the moderators. If they know what your intent is perhaps they can help foster that intent and make the area more navigable for you. While we don’t want to make GD (or any forum area) a free-for-all you should feel comfortable starting your threads in appropriate places. Don’t let those that might hijack your views push you around.
I never gush over moderator/administrator actions/comments, but this statement is wonderful.
I’ve seen other boards disintegrate into fractionalized factions because of the mistaken belief that too many forums is never enough.
I sez no to a Politics forum.
Do you really understand the absurdity of this statement??? 
What in the world compels you to read a political thread just because you are in a particular forum?? If you are scrolling through threads in GD, you can tell political topics just from the thread titles. When it’s obvious they are political, don’t go into them. Voila, no more worry about having “GD back for the meaningful stuff.”
I mean, please, give me a break. The only reason to split off a forum is to consolidate threads for those who are interested in that type of thing only, so they don’t have to go trolling through other places to find them. That’s it. And on this Board, that’s simply silly. If we stuck to the relatively limited number of fora initially contemplated, you wouldn’t have to be looking hither and yon for things. And it’s not like splitting things off means that you don’t still have to go trolling around; a GQ is often likely to remain in GQ even if it turns out to be related to something cafeish, or gamish. I already am annoyed at having to go to four forums now to read what I used to be able to read in just two (since the Cafe and the Game Society split off). So it comes down to a contest of whos convenience you wish to cater to. I hope they continue to cater to the idea of simplicity.
So you want to discuss religion or Freud without having to skim past political thread titles? That seems to be a pretty weak reason. Furthermore, if this plan was put into effect, I can guarantee that there would be calls to contain witnessing and the like in its own special forum.
OT, but my sense in Britain was that people were a lot more interested in politics than your typical USAin. As evidence, consider the fact that public demonstrations tend to be way larger in Europe than in the US.
Perhaps this explains the intensity of the online discussion here: a politicized minority has insufficient outlets. Or then again, maybe it has to do with the singular ideology of the modern Republican Party: after all, most conservative parties in the OECD could safely ensconce themselves within the Democratic Party’s spectrum.
By this logic, there should only be two forums: Great Mindless Questions About Your Mundane Humble Opinions on Cecil’s Columns, and Shit Ed Wants To Write About. (We’ll roll The BBQ Pit into the latter but restrict foul language to “The Seven Words You Can’t Say On Sesame Street”.) The fact that we do have several different fora, and particular the recent split of The Game Room from Cafe Society indicates that TPTB do believe that there is some merit to dividing different topics in to separate fora, but have arbitrarily elected to leave politically discussion, championing, pillowfighting, and obtuse rants in Great Debates despite the fact that most threads don’t qualify as any kind of debate and certainly not great ones. During the last American presidential election cycle we endured pointless and repetitive threads that often seemed better suited to The Pit that were as much as 80% of the content of GD and cycled so fast that they pushed legitimate topics to the second and third page.
Okay, seriously? You know, you can easily set up a search (and keep the parameters in a link to easily repeat) to search any combination of forums together. This is not brain surgery. That you can’t or won’t go to this minimum of effort is no good argument for consolidating diverse topics into few fora.
Stranger