The Separation of Church and State thread did elicit some snarky comments. However, the general trend of the thread was to continue to provide a factual response to the question.
Thr Grenadan thread was almost apolitical. There was no claim that we “had to beat the commies” and there were no condemnations of the administration (despite my single snide remark which I offset by pointing out that other previous left wing claims were in error). The question was asked and answered with facts and information.
There is nothing at all political about the Nepal question.
It may have been easy to tell which economic theory any given respondent favored, but there was no claim that “we should follow this model” or that “we should not follow this model.” Again, I do not see any political discussion in this thread–and nothing that led to debate.
The prostitution/reservations thread has a lot more observations than citations for facts, but it, too, is pretty much free of “politics.”
Let’s look at my earlier statements:
The reason for avoiding politics in GQ is to avoid debate, rather than to avoid political information.
Something will probably (and, admittedly subjectively) be viewed as “politics” if it is
- Politically motivated
Or
- It would be construed by a neutral observer, even if perhaps erroneously, to have been probably politically motivated
Or
- It may not have been politically motivated but is so similar to other politically motivated statements that a political response would generally be expected.
No statement in the last four threads to which you linked prompted anyone to begin ranting against American hegemony, Communist world domination, Right wing or Left wing arrogance in telling other people how to run their lives, claims that one party or another had brought glory or ruin to a country (or a period in that country’s history), or similar politically motivated comments. The politically motivated comments in the first thread to which you linked had the potential to derail the discussion, but, in fact, they were couched in terms of perspective in evaluating the OP and the thread did, ultimately, pretty much answer the OP.
Now, in the thread which initially prompted this whole discussion, how do we view your comment? Unlike the threads you have now listed that dealt with (potentially) political topics, but which could be answered without politically motivated sparring, that thread simply asked whether children died at the WTC.
However else one might view your post, it was pretty clear to Bibliophage that your post * may not have been politically motivated but is so similar to other politically motivated statements that a political response would generally be expected*. What generally happens when a thread is discussing deaths (of any sort) in the WTC and someone posts “How about the deaths in Afghanistan?” I will not pretend to understand your motivation in posting. I will, indeed, assume a simple desire for information. However, it is pretty clear to me, (as it was to Bibliophage), that regardless of your motivation, that question was going to hijack that thread.
On the other hand–and this is a judgement call, but I tend to agree with Bibliophage–the posts that compared the absence of Jews being killed (a known lie) to the absence of children being killed and used that comparison to mock conspiracy theories did not take the thread in an entirely different direction and led to no debate. Similarly, the posts that simply identified that Jews had died in the attack did not lead to debate. (Had some Aryan Nation zealot stormed into the thread declaring that no Jews had really died, they would have received an admonition to cool it or, had several posters responded before a Mod arrived, the thread would have been moved or closed. The odds that such a person would show up in that thread on the SDMB, however, are small. We do not have a large number of such people and they rarely interrupt such threads (or even stay long on the SDMB). So while there might be a hypothetical case of the posts regarding Jewish deaths leading to a debate, the reality is that such an event would have a very low probability. Much, much lower than the response to a question of how many deaths in Afghanistan were the result of the WTC attacks.
