For some reason people think Trump’s legal issues are a political subject.
This is clearly untrue. There are some political ramifications but in general the lawsuits around Trump are mostly not political. Therefore allowing 79 theads in the politics and elections forums about Trump’s legal woes is a strange political statement.
We need to clear out the quarantine zone for Trump’s persecution or get him and Smith a room.
This message board needs a forum where we can discuss the Ohio referendum or other political stuff without that getting drowned out by inane bullshit about the color of Trump’s prison garb*
read those threads and tell me with a straight face there is relevant discussion in recent posts about anything else.
This is the result of moving away from forums based on type of dialog (General Questions, Great Debates, MPSIMS, BBQ Pit) and instead basing them on subject matter (Cafe Society, Game Room, Politics). There’s a never-ending impetus to split subjects more and more narrowly, until we’ve reached the Dewey Decimal limit of fractional forums.
Is there a way for a regular user to hide an individual thread so that they no longer see it?
Either suspect Trump is a valid target for a DoJ prosecution, or it is a political witch-hunt.
You cannot have both.
Give the views represented in those threads people here clearly think it is not a witch-hunt— therefore it is not political, and none of it belongs in the politics forum.
(I think we need to clear out/create a temporary forum for this topic. This is now making any discussion about traditional politics invisible)
And I mean that calling discussing Trump’s legal shit “political” you are making a political statement.
But that is not my point:
My point is that there are real political topics being snowed under by “discussion” of the color of his prison garb. This is my issue. Find a new forum, put it somewhere else, give us back a forum to discuss politics.
So, since he’s a politician/public figure, and actively running as a candidate, it’s explicitly the correct forum. And as an additional counterpoint, many, many threads about Trump are in the Pit, as they turn into (IMHO justified) hate fests and rants.
The moderation on the P&E threads on the Trials have been in general, pretty darn good when it starts veering into excess speculation, and rants on how Trump should be punished.
Now, whether the P&E rules should be changed, or a different forum set up for Trump, that’s a different discussion, which you’re free to pursue. But this:
misses the plain reading of the forum that I linked above.
Also, the legal issues are directly related to actions he took as president. That makes it politics. If it was a lawsuit about The Apprentice, then you could say it’s doesn’t belong in P&E.
I didn’t want to bring up that sub-sect of his (many) criminal investigations, as some are in both categories, such as investigations into Trump Org and his real estate efforts arguably being supported in order to win political favor (emoluments investigations). The Civil trial thread (E. Jean Carroll) is arguably just as / more non-political BUT since he keeps bringing up all these cases as part of his campaign (and he defamed her DURING his political period as well) to the point where very little about any current and ongoing legal issues shouldn’t be in P&E.
But yes, narrow threads, especially for the period prior to his being outrageous in the political arena to get more attention (His Birtherism against Obama as a key example) could probably stay out of P&E. Although since he brought people from his Apprentice days into the government, who knows how such things may worm their way back to P&E.
Sine Trump is not merely a former president accused of crimes rising from his presidency and running for president again, but someone who is using his indictments both as political fodder to raise campaign funds and rally his supporters and excuses not to be tried while running and hoping to be elected to give himself a pardon, no threads in the history of the Dope have ever been more political.
I agree that the long threads about Trump have a couple of meaningful posts and then meander off into watercooler blather until the next major news appears. But that’s the internet.
Maybe in some ideal world the mods who are so hysterically obsessed with hijacks would shut down the blather and wishful thinking speculation and keep the threads locked onto legal issues. The commentary on legal matters is interesting. Speculation about prison garb is not. But it’s all Political with a capital P.
Then we should have one (1) thread discussing the political aspects of his legal troubles. The rest of the threads really belong elsewhere.
(Most of them in “thread games”)
I feel this is robbing Peter to pay Paul. You want to reduce clutter in P&E, but considering the scale of Trump’s accused crimes, would result in an unworkably cluttered Trump Omnibus thread. You’d never be able to keep track or find information specific to whichever case was important to you without it being drowned out by all the other talk.
Sure, we could have a Trump specific forum, but that’s pretty USA-centric. And we’re pretty reluctant to add categories - I mean it took a world wide pandemic (note the world-wide as opposed to USA-centric) and multinational efforts to control, contain, and cure to create it’s own forum. Not to mention, the additional need for specific rules in order to combat mis-information as well as out and out disinformation.
Not that I don’t think if Trump secures re-election it doesn’t have international consequences, but damn, I’d vote for a Ukraine War Forum long before I’d raise Trump to the level of an emergency needing this level of commitment.
One other thing I’d mention, is that I haven’t seen anyone else come in to support your POV. Don’t get me wrong, I fully acknowledge a lot of people read but don’t want to put their opinions out there, but so far it doesn’t seem popular. So this is of course non-binding, but should be interesting:
A new, temporary (or not) Trump forum should be created
All P&E Trump threads should be combined
Only directly political, extremely narrow threads for Trump should be in P&E
Status Quo (multiple P&E threads, some extremely narrow, some more general)
We should beg, on bended knee, for our overworked mods to spend even more time trying to moderate Trump threads
We can’t be responsible for the volume of Trump’s crimin’ and lyin’!
Not the point of this thread but is there some metric to use for when QZ is worth retiring? Independent of starting some other dedicated forum for anything else.
My point is that I came in P&E today to find out about the Ohio thing and I couldn’t find it between all the gushing Trump threads.
A court case may be very interesting, it might be politically relevant, but 6 to 8 threads about different court cases cannot all be politically relevant.
Surely most of them belong in mpsims.
I think rather than a board-wide change, that you could easily use the Discourse tools to mute the excess threads that you describe as largely inane bullshit, resulting in far less work for everyone else, including the mods.
