I’ve come across a couple of threads lately which have titles that are, IMHO, slightly misleading in that they have a fairly mundane title but are actually about the current political situation in the US.
This sort of thing irritates me no end, especially as I’m trying not to read Political Threads and I know I’m not the only one here sick to death of them.
So; a two-fold request here.
A Politics Forum
A requirement that all thread titles that are not clearly and obviously political have a (Political) tag added to them to help people identify the subject matter and avoid if they so choose.
Who picks what’s political?
Who picks what’s not “clearly and obviously” political?
Mods have been loathe to create new forums based on subject matter (as opposed to type of discussion), Cafe Society and the Game Room notwithstanding.
It’s bad now, it’ll get worse the closer we get to November, then it’ll start to get better until January, then it’ll be fine for about three years. Then it’ll all start again.
I, for one, agree with the OP’s request as long as “political thread” is changed to something like, say, “thread relating to a specific election campaign”. That’s pretty clear-cut about 98% of the time, and I don’t think ambiguous cases like “Damnit, I stubbed my toe [while campaigning for whoever]” really count anyway, since they’re general-interest.
That one I spotted easily as a US-political thread, without reading a word except the title. This brings up a problem with your suggestion–it is not obvious to everyone what is and is not obvious to everyone else.
The real point is, why bother? So you click on a few threads now and again that aren’t what you expected. So what? Happens all the time around here. Chuckle and move on.
Even though the OP may intend the question to be a general purpose question, a thread can be steered (as in a minor hijack) by the other participants trying to use current events to illustrate their points or opinions.
The “Why can’t we disagree without hating?” thread could have been unpolitical, but instead turned into the usual candidate bashing (and a mod noted this).
There is not much an OP can do if the other posters in the community are more interested in talking about some nearly related aspect of the topic…
By far the most common context in which I hear the word “elitism” is that of political punditry. In fact, I’m tempted to think that’s the only context in which I ever hear that term.
Are you from the States? If not then there may be a geographic explanation for our differing intuitions.
-FrL-
ETA: I just did a google check. The first page of hits for “elitism” only contains one political reference. However, after the first page, the rest of the hits appear to be almost all political references.
First, is it only US politics that you want confined? I grant you, since a majority of our posters are US-based, and since the US is in month #8 of 15 in the current election, most political threads will tend to be US-centric. However, we do have posters elsewhere and other countries do have politics, too.
Second, I’m not sure how we’d distinguish. A discussion about “What is elitism” could be an interesting discussion, devoid of politics. In this case, the OP made clear in sentence one that recent statements by US candidates was the provocation, but that doesn’t necessarily make the discussion political, does it? The Queen’s speech to Parliament could certainly trigger a discussion about elitism, as well. The discussion need not be limited to the provoking incident, althought it could be.
Basically, I think that US politics is something we’ll have to live with for the next several months.
It is fair to ask that people be clear up front, in either the title or in the OP, if they want (or don’t want) a political discussion. And we can request that, but I don’t think we can make it a rule – for starters, the OP doesn’t always have control over the direction the discussion takes. I think that the extra few seconds it takes to read an OP and then decide that you don’t like the discussion topic is probably not a big deal, and certainly not worth a separate forum.
If I might direct your attention to my “Location” field for a moment, you’ll see that I’m most definitely not in the US.
I’ve only ever heard “Elitism” used in the Academic sense; I’ve never come across it in a political sense, hence my surprise and annoyance at discovering a topic I was interested in discussing, yet finding out it was another bloody election thread.
Have you read that last sentence back to yourself? Does it make you realise that you are perhaps over-reacting slightly? Just a suggestion, I’m not trying to start a fight here.
For me, half the fun of this place is occasionally opening a thread that turns out to be completely different from what I thought it was going to be. Often, ignorance is fought - indeed, in this case, you have discovered “elitism” is a word often used in American political discussions.
Honestly, Dead Cat, it does get really very tedious working through ‘surprise’ political threads.
It didn’t bother me as much in the past, but with work taking up so much of my free time now I just don’t have the patience and goodwill for this kind of thing that I used to, and some days I feel like I’ve been subjected to a ‘bait and switch’ where I thought I was getting one thing and lo! it was just another political.
Sure, it happens with all kinds of threads, but you’d have to admit that political ones are very thick on the ground these days and only likely to get more so in the coming months.
I’d love to see (Political) added as an informal addendum to the thread titles just so I know what to skim past in my extremely limited viewing time!
I understand your viewpoint, I just think the time wasted by the “problem” (probably 30 seconds at most - you open the thread, see from the first few lines of the OP that it is political, press back - maybe once or twice a day) does not justify the time required to implement your solution.
