Managing Politics in FQ

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FQ Moderator @Chronos has just posted this sticky reminder:

Let me say up front I do NOT dispute the intent behind this reminder. Let me also say up front that I have been guilty of doing the bad thing he mentions much more often than I’d care to admit. And have been treated gently for it. This thread is NOT about me disputing any Mod notes or admonitions I may have gotten either.

I’m going to make an observation, and I’d like discussion on that observation. To wit:

Any thread which posits a hypothetical involving US executive branch behavior then asks “What will happen”, or even “What are the laws / rules / precedents applicable to this situation?” is IMO an utterly poisoned well that cannot be dealt with within the confines of FQ.

Note I am not accusing any such OP of a bad-faith post. I am only asserting that any question of the form “What are the rules for this political situation?” is useless when discussing a game whose rules are literally being re-written day by day and headline by headline.

My bottom line is that attempting to keep this sort of “Tell me the rules of Calvinball” thread to within FQ boundaries is practically impossible. Both for posters and mods. Even an accurate recitation of current settled law is mostly useless in that it in effect offers a promise of a settled predictable outcome that is almost certainly not going to be born out by the facts if / when the hypothetical comes to pass.

I’d liken it to a FQ OP asking “Who will win the World series in 2025?”. There will be an FQ answer available after the fact. Beforehand the unpredictable factors swamp any factual data or rules knowledge that could be brought to bear.

IMO the correct Mod response to observing such an OP is to punt it immediately to IMHO or P&E. Folks can provide their recitations of supposedly settled law there just as well, but also with appropriate caveats about the non-factual aspects of the actual problem of predicting a wildly unpredictable future.

Comments?

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I agree. In this environment, a better question might be “what is supposed to happen?”

Supposedly, when Stalin was told that he had upset the pope, he asked “how many divisions does he have?” I feel like that’s where we are in talking about the courts and this administration.

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Speaking as a P&E mod, I’m sympathetic and largely in agreement, but want to dispute the section I quoted above in part. A number of posters seem to post political questions in FQ because they don’t want the dispute/argument that P&E involves. I can sympathize, but agree with @LSLGuy that it’s almost impossible to get to a merely factual answer in current American politics.

BUT.

Automatically dumping the threads in other categories can lead to extremely poor feelings in the OP, and some of the posters who try to respond in a FQ manner and want to be left out of a fight.

It may need to be done anyway, but like the complaints about rants being pre-emptively moved to the Pit generated bad feelings, this can happen here as well.

I think @Chronos’ sticky is a good reminder - if you’re creating a new thread, especially one that is political at it’s base, you should probably bite the bullet and put it in IMHO/P&E from the start. If it’s really a FQ question, then you probably want to make it extremely narrow in focus, or historical in nature.

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I agree with you on the first type of question – “what will happen” cannot be answered factually.

But I don’t agree on the second. The FQ answer to “what are the applicable laws/rules” is “here are the laws established by precedent. It is unknown if those are still applicable under the current administration/DoJ/SCOTUS.” It gets into IMHO or P&E territory if you add commentary about what the current administration is likely to do instead.

Either of those are valid topics of discussion, but we should let the OP determine what discussion they want to have.

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The challenge for the vast majority of these things is “There is some precedent, but legal opinion is all over the map on what precedents would rule and Congress (or the courts) would weigh in and …”

Heck, even on the supposedly simple questions of third terms or trump running as VP in 2028, the reality is that the ambiguity of the various untested amendments and untested laws say “there is no predictable factual answer to what would happen even if trump played by all the rules as they exist today. We’d have to run the experiment to see. And it’s probably not even a repeatable outcome.” That’s the factual-est answer possible. And is utterly unsatisfying by the standards of FQ.

Further, I question the very validity of wanting to ask “what is supposed to happen?” while expecting an FQ answer. Most of these hypotheticals are things that no other administration would ever have thought to do. And hence are things for which there is not a well-oiled routine procedure.

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Then an FQ answer can include the various precedents on each side of the question.

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I think these type of questions should start with “In the America that was…”

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Speaking as one of the FQ mods, we get a lot of questions that deal with political issues. They are usually posted to FQ because the OP wants to know the facts in whatever the political topic is.

The way that we traditionally deal with this in FQ is by fairly strictly enforcing the factual discussion, at least until the factual portion of the question has been answered.

After that, we have a couple of choices. If the non-factual aspects of the topic are being discussed elsewhere, we can continue to strictly enforce the factual bounds of FQ. If the topic isn’t being discussed elsewhere, we can move the thread to a more appropriate forum.

I strongly disagree with this. We have many threads where we deal with the factual aspects of a political issue, and for the most part they aren’t a problem. If it’s a bit of a hot-button topic we often need to drop a few mod notes reminding folks to keep to the facts, but that is usually expected given the nature of the topic.

We do occasionally get factual questions along the lines of what are the laws with respect to X, and a completely factual, citable answer isn’t possible due to things like the laws being vague or legal precedent hasn’t been established. The FQ response in those cases is to say what the laws currently say and to cite whatever similar situations might apply. At this point we get into a bit of a murky area and there’s no easy bright line, but generally if we feel there is too much speculation and opinion for FQ, we’ll move it at that point.

This is how @Chronos and I have been moderating FQ for years, and I think it works quite well. Yes, there are threads where it’s pretty obvious the thread is going to take a left turn right out of FQ at some point. But the important thing is that the factual aspects of the topic be addressed before that happens. If the factual part of the question gets answered, then FQ has done its job. If the thread drifts after that, no biggie. We’ll move it or direct everyone to the more political thread or whatever we need to do at that point.

I think the current system works pretty well, and I would prefer that these types of threads remain in FQ at least until the factual parts of the topic have been addressed as well as they can be. I don’t think our current system is broken. I think it works fairly well, all things considered.

Personally, I think immediately moving such threads would be detrimental to getting the factual portion of the topic answered. Different forums have different rules, and those rules apply immediately, as soon as the thread is moved. IMHO, it’s better to keep the threads in FQ for as ;long as is practical.

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Yeah, but I dont mind a thread of mine being moved to MPSIMS or IMHO or P&E, but not the Pit- please.

I appreciate the mods work here, this is a very fine line.

Yeah, it does.

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The appropriate way for a forum to handle this is to have a specific sub-forum that is essentially a free speech zone. Those willing to contend with the ad-hominems and hash out thoughts and feelings can freely participate, or not.

Send those emotionally charged threads to the basement, and let people opt in if they wish.

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You mean that no government agency will monitor it?

Also, have you heard about the BBQ pit?

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So I think that sticky was prompted by a recent thread that you posted in:

The OP had a factual question and there’s (admittedly well-worn) room for discussion about constitutional rules and historical precedent. Your post was conjecture about what might happen in the future.

If anybody had followed your line of thought the thread would have been hijacked into calvinball territory, but it didn’t start there.

Questions like this aren’t poisoned wells, but there’s definitely a big juicy poisoned apple sitting near it. It’s up to posters to follow the rules and keep opinion and conjecture away from factual questions (at least for a while).

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I think you’re right that was the triggering thread and I agree w your diagnosis of that thread and about the poisoned apples. And about me swatting that apple with a bat and splashing poisoned sauce all over the thread.

But let’s look at the OP:

Those are two clearly articulated questions. To which the only practical answers are “anything” and “next to nothing”.

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Situations like that can lead to short FQ threads, where the factual answer is given right away and there’s nothing more to be said. It happens sometimes. Then again, simple, complete answers that answer the question completely and thus end the thread can happen with non-political questions, too.

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I also posted a response w/o appreciating that the thread was in FQ. I THINK the first paragraph of my response might have passed FQ muster:

I’m not as confident about my second paragraph. Tho it includes some language some might consider insulting to Trump, I could argue that it reasonably represents the facts we have experienced:

And I think I was in fair territory with my closing paragraph:

I think it was a pretty - uh - weak OP, which has been discussed many times before and which lacks a clear factual answer other than, “Who knows? It has never happened before. We’ve never (in recent history) had a president who appeared so willing to ignore a court order.” I also believe that, “Trump is an ignorant asshole” is a factual statement. :wink:

In any event, I appreciate the gentle mod reminder, and will do my best to be mindful of the forum in which a thread appears.

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The core issue with FQ threads focused on political (and other kinds of) hypotheticals is just that: the only definitive answer is a “should work like” response, but the question is usually embedded in circumstances which cast doubt on the “should”… in which case the answer becomes “who knows” or an unbounded continuum of responses and outcomes.

It’s not very satisfying from an ignorance-fighting perspective.

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Thank you @gnoitall for succinctly saying what I meant better than I did.

Unless exquisitely crafted, these questions are unsatisfying because they are unsatisfiable. And substantially none of the actual questions we get in the wild are so crafted.

To me they all smell like “Let’s close our eyes and pretend we’re in normal times. Then what’ll happen?”

Which smells to me exactly like “Let’s pretend 3 = 5. Then what is the answer to 17 + 24?”

IMO the whole thing is just an example of “Garbage in, garbage out”. Which is an insult to the style and tradition of FQ.

The (often unstated) assumptions behind the question render it unanswerable in any thorough fashion.

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I get what the OP is saying and complaining about, but someone who puts a political/constitutional question in FQ is doing so expressly because they want to keep it politics-free as much as possible. IMHO, that request should be honored to the maximum extent it can be.

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Perhaps the best solution is to put such threads in IMHO, where some constraints on the politics can be enforced without banning what is effectively speculation, for all the reasons given by others.

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My apologies. I am not a frequent reader on this site and didn’t realize it had been discussed over and over here. I also that there WAS a factual answer buried in the Constitution somewhere…