A recent Cafe Society thread about pineapple brought this to mind. Because, as most of you knew the moment you saw the word, it only took a few posts before somebody tried to start a pizza debate. Stunningly, in this case it didn’t work, and the thread continued to be about pineapple.
There are certain topics which simply cannot be discussed here, because they will immediately devolve into another debate.
Anything to do with aggressive dogs (There’s no such thing as a PIT BULL !!!11!11)
Any recipe involving cilantro (It’s genetic! No it isn’t! I hate that stuff!)
What other topics are impossible to discuss on the Dope?
Anything about modern religious practices is going to turn into “Well, it’s all Bronze Age mythology spaghetti monster Og pink flying unicorns blah blah blah”
I think stuff like declawing or circumcision results in the same circular nonsense* but they at least stay on topic. But mentioning “My neighbor has angry dogs” will turn into pit bull stuff whether the OP is about pit bulls or not. Likewise, I half considered posting a Lent related topic but immediately grew tired just knowing 80% of the responses would be garbage about the validity of religion or “I gave up Lent for Lent hurr hurr!” rather than stuff about my query.
*Edit: well, assuming the topic was “Do you agree?”. I guess posting “Should my girlfriend split the bill for declawing the cat she got me?” would result in a debate about declawing whether you want one or not.
The interesting experiment will be to see if this topic turns out to be an impossible one.
Can it avoid turning getting sidetracked into a ranting match about one of the topics that gets mentioned?
I always thought cat declawing and pit bulls were two of the classics for people getting really worked up. The toilet roll one I think is more along the lines of a template for parody rants.
Some of the arcane science & math ones are interesting.
“Does 0.9999… equal 1” comes to mind.