Just be glad MPSIMS isn’t simply one very long thread.
I can see your perspective, and I thought about that, too. But it would certainly be regarded as political by the perps who did it, most definitions of terrorism define it as “political violence” or have the word “political” in them, and perhaps most importantly, note how both discussions we have going on it (and the three spinoff discussions) have all gone political and argumentative – why did it happen, what can we do about – those are all political issues.
Conversely, if a current event isn’t political, then it’s a news item like a weather event, or somebody wins a record lottery jackpot, or somebody might be posting about a news item in which they have a personal involvement. Whatever discussion those may or may not engender seem to me to have been well served within the existing scope of MPSIMS.
So FWIW, that was my reasoning.
Perhaps a valid point. But then, you might if it was clear that “Politics” was also for discussions about events with political ramifications that were likely to become political. Otherwise for an event like this you end up having to avoid the political ramifications which are sitting there like an elephant in the room.
Nonsense. Those who wish to discuss the elephant in the room are perfectly free to go and start a thread in the forums which are appropriate for discussing elephants. The thread in MPSIMS would be for discussing events.
It is perfectly possible to discuss an ongoing current event without opening a political debate. Really, it is. If some find it impossible to do so, well, that’s why we’ve got moderators.
MPSIMS currently has 42 active threads over the past 2 days. The sorts of discussions covered in the OP are contemporaneous. I say we revisit this issue if the MPSIMS active thread list starts getting close to 150.
Another approach would involve tags, but that would be in the far future when/if the software gets updated.
That would be MPSIMS. Personally, I don’t want to discuss current events without engaging in well disciplined debate. So I don’t participate in MPSIMS very much. But if there was a Current Event discussion forum, I would either make contentious but substantiated claims or I would withdraw with a little contempt if moderator policy so mandated. Which I trust it would not.
This isn’t something I feel strongly about and I could well be misguided here, but I would ask the question: if it’s possible to discuss this particular (Paris attacks) topic without going political, why isn’t anyone doing it? From what I can see, one thread in MPSIMS was a rant that was dispatched to the Pit, the other got political and was moved to GD, and GD itself originated another main thread and three different threads on spinoff subjects, all political. Not trying to start an argument here, really, but from that perspective, having a “Politics” forum for such discussions doesn’t seem all that crazy!
This is very much where I’m coming from, exactly. Sometimes there are very obvious exceptions like the Oregon shooting thread in MPSIMS where the poster was concerned that personal friends were affected, and it was obvious to everyone except I think two zealous posters that this was no place and time to intrude politics.
Do we need a new venue in which to discuss “current events” like hurricanes, tornadoes, record lottery windfalls, and the birth of a two-headed calf? I don’t think so. MPSIMS handles it just fine. But maybe we do need one in which we can raise and discuss, say, terrorist actions, mass shootings, Supreme Court rulings, new legislation, and other news of our times in which diverse opinions can be argued. It just seems a little odd to me that the subject of “elections” deserves its own forum but the whole world of political discourse is caught in some kind of twilight zone between “elections” and GD. As already said, “elections” is already much of the way to being a general political forum.
Actually, you do care about the forum title, as you made clear in your OP:
If you don’t care about the forum title, what is your objection to current events being in the MPSIMS forum?
Odd? Sure.
The Elections forum was started because election threads took over GD every 4 years. So what you say? Well I agree: just don’t click the link. But a lot of people didn’t like all that wrangling in their face. At any rate once Ed et al found the proper moderators, the forum did fairly well. So no harm, no foul. But I don’t think it’s necessarily a good template moving forwards.
GD is pretty much the public policy forum: well over half the threads have that emphasis. I suppose we could relabel “Elections” as “Elections and partisanship”, but I see that as fairly implicit. At any rate moving threads isn’t a big deal.
I’d vote “no” for a Current Events forum.
When I first logged onto the Dope, back years ago, one of the things I liked was that, unlike other online forums, this one only had five forums: GQ, GD, IMHO, MPSIMS, and the Pit. Every subject had to be squished into one of the above. I saw topics I might never have otherwise, had there been more forums, and I commented on them, as appropriate.
Compare that to another online forum I belong to where there are hundreds of forums/sub-forums/sub-sub-forums. Nobody knows each other, and because of anonymity, fights get vicious. Reasonable discourse, such as we have here, is impossible; mods (such as they are), do nothing more than shut down discussion when things get argumentative. It’s the best approach, given hundreds of fora, and the resulting little time for explanation. But it is definitely not the SDMB, with limited threads, with consequently sober moderation that is willing to explain itself.
I do agree with turning the “Elections” forum into “Politics,” but I do not think we need a “Current Events” forum. Just like before, I think we can squeeze current events into an existing forum.
I agree with Spoons.