Seriously, guys, this board is over-run with political threads at the moment, and I for one am thoroughly sick of it. I know, you’ve got an election coming up, and that’s great- but every other thread in GD doesn’t need to be on what Hilary said about Obama or why McCain isn’t going to do this that or the other thing.
I’m increasingly re-thinking my opposition to a “Politics” forum, especially after re-upping after a week off and discovering far more political threads throughout the boards that I’d really like to see.
At any rate, I for one have had enough of US political threads. It’s all well and good to say “Don’t read them”, but when I look through an entire forum and see what appears to be that most of the topics are political, it annoys me. It’s kind of like discovering that the only DVDs left at the video library are National Geographic documentaries on the Ecosystem of the Amazon- very interesting to a number of people, but not what I’m really interested in.
No, there’s no real point to this- I just wish there weren’t as many threads on US politics here.
I live in the US and I’m tired of all the political threads too. Although at least lately there’s been a decline in the number of “Bush is responsible for all the evil in the world” threads.
I live here too and am interested in the election but I would give up the Game Room for a Politics forum. I rarely open any election threads up any more but they overrun the Pit and GD to the point that I hardly ever even go to GD because I’m tired of having to read 2 pages of thread titles to find 2 or 3 that are not US politics. For some reason all it takes is a single sentence someone read on some obscure blog or website for them to think they need to start an all new GD thread on Bush/Clinton/Obama etc…
Also extremely frustrating to me in GD: threads which are ostensibly not about the current Presidential race are hijacked into a Presidential debate. Give it a rest, people!
Personally, I like the political threads. But I can see where they’d be too much – I’ve taken to skipping about half of them recently as being redundant or too obscure for me. However, two things:
(1) The topics often place them squarely in GD territory (e.g., the current Obama/gun rights thread). Not only that, but it’s often the current events influence that drives discussion. I mean, for example, one can only participate in so many debates on the fundamental morality of abortion before it gets really old.
(2) A similar thing happened before the 2004 election. To a lesser degree, before the 2006 elections. A funny thing that I think is the case – I’m not going to attempt to search the history and put together a statistical analysis – is that the periodic wails/whines/predictions of the SDMB’s collapse happen between these times.
So, rather than seeing it as a hindrance, ISTM that political threads add substantially to the diversity and overall traffic of the forums. Which is good.
I would consider it a favor, in the spirit of fighting ignorance etc., if the Dopers Abroad would post more about your *own * politics. Even if it’s just at the “Howard is a poopypants” level; that still gives us insular Merkins some flavor of what gets you worked up.
Complaining about us caring too much doesn’t help anything, though.
John Howard isn’t our PM anymore- We had an election about 6 months ago and voted Kevin Rudd in as PM instead.
Here’s the thing though: Our politics are boring, and- more importantly- nobody really cares about it. Sure, it keeps a few analysts in the ABC busy and provides work for talking heads on the news shows, but most of us really don’t give a shit about politics because A) It’s boring and B) The politicians here don’t care what we think for the most part, except in the period leading up to an election.
There’s also not that many Aussie members here (about a dozen, by my count) with maybe twice that number of UK posters (and about six Kiwis ;)). We could try and get some political threads going, but they’d invariably get filled with American posters saying “That’s dumb! Your politicans should (blank), just like they do here! Your system is stupid!”
Canadians represent the largest Non-US posting group here AFAICT, and my limited reading of Canadian Politics seems to be much the same as here: For the most part, people don’t care that much, and a lot of people are still mad at the Canadian Government for cancelling the development of a fighter jet back in the 50s.
Sure it does; it should encourage TPTB to create a “politics” forum; or perhaps encourage some of the armchair pundits here to STOP POSTING THE SAME CRAP OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
Y’know, since April of 1999, I have never seen any similar statement made by a Yank against a foreigh political system–and we had a period where there were several extremely chauvinistic America-firster twits who really believed that the U.S. had more freedom than any other nation. We have had a number of Yank posters who expressed the sentiment that the U.S. was “better” in one fanciful way or another, but your specific claim is without merit. (I think you’re just jealous because your current politics are boring, although I agree that I’d like to see fewer threads that were more thoughtful on the current U.S. election.)
