So why do we need to have a 2nd forum for politics?
I don’t think we do need one.
Maybe open the forum up during a Presidential election cycle. But after that’s over, shut it down.
My take is the opposite. If it’s about politics it goes in the Politics forum. If you want to debate something else, put it in GD.
To be sure, it can get fuzzy. IMO:
“Is Anthropogenic Global Warming real?” is GD.
“Are the Right (or Left) engaging in fantasy over AGW?” is 95% Politics.
“Did you see the latest speech by <Politician XXX> on AGW?” is 100% Politics.
The fact that some people in the USA presently think that every possible area of human disagreement is food for straight-line party politics is part of the problem we have, not part of the solution. In the spirit of fighting ignorance and all that we ought to encourage people to recognize the huge sphere of human interaction and controversy that *isn’t * properly seen through the lens of tribal party politics.
One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is the belief that absolutely everything is political and there’s only one way, the Final Boss’es way, to answer those questions. Shrinking the sphere of organized politics is one of the ways to put the genie back in the bottle.
I’m curious what you mean by this. Can you give some examples of shrinking the sphere?
One of the hallmarks of democracy is the belief that absolutely everything is political.
I’ve heard a fair amount of democratic evangelism and I’ve never heard this described as a hallmark of democracy. The closest I can think of is the feminist phrase, “the personal is political.”
Excellent point. It would be interesting to see what sorts of debates in GD become more prominent, were politics removed from there. The line will always be fuzzy – so many subjects are both – but perhaps we could come up with a general rule that a debate could stay in GD as long as government policies, personalities, and legislation is avoided as the main focus. (This is hard, though – LAWS can be though of as manifestations of certain human debates, and who makes laws? Governments.)
My concern would be that this could create a lot of extra work for the mods, moving threads between the two fora. Maybe we could stipulate that “which thread goes where” would not be rigorously enforced (the way it is between, say, GQ and the Pit). In a sticky, we should all be reminded to not complain that some threads are inthe “wrong” forum, when referring to GD vs. Politics.
I don’t mean to speak for Bo, but perhaps he’s referring to the rather recent trend in social sciences some would call “critical theory” (encompassing Foucault, post-colonialism, neo-Marxist interpretations of World Systems Theory, and more – and giving fuel to movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter), which recognizes that just about any human interaction can be seen as “political.” It might sound like an unhelpfully broad extention of this word, but personally I’ve found it a helpful observation, at least when accompanied with specific examples.
I agree with your dissection there JKellyMap.
“Politics” broadly interpreted really means “damn near all forms of human interaction involving competing goals.” Some specifiers help us see the point. Consider these: office politics, academic politics, playground politics, boardroom politics, etc. Those are specific types of politics. Nobody expects the Tories or Labour or Republicans or Democrats to be important considerations in playground politics or these other specific arenas.
When most of us toss off the unadorned word “politics”, and certainly in the context of elections of broad enough scope to discuss on the Dope, what we really mean are “(inter)national governmental politics” or “(inter)national party politics”. We’ve got plenty of politics in my local city mayoral race and my condo’s board of directors’ elections, both of which are in progress right now. Neither of which are Dope fodder since AFAIK I’m the only Doper in either constituency.
Which is why my proposal for a forum title was “Government” or “Governance”. What I (we?) want to talk about, and want to segregate from the other forums for their own hygiene and sanity, are party politics and national / international governance.
And yes, it can get fuzzy at the boundary. Sexual politics or racial politics are areas that governments largely ignored from centuries ago until 100ish years ago. It was something that people both as individuals and as informal collectives did to one another while governments passively ignored or actively looked the other way.
Now in the democracies we have a mix of people pushing and prodding the government to expand (or continue expanding) into this area. We also have governments pushing and prodding on their citizens to alter their attitudes and behaviors in this area. And we have push-back from individuals and groups who don’t agree. Which is classically exactly what we mean by “politics” in the broad sense.
e.g. Pick-up artists (PUAs) are sexual politics that belong in IMHO or GD. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is sexual politics that belongs in Politics nee Elections.
I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that this is the first I’ve heard of “critical theory”. The Wikipedia page is pretty dense; I’ve skimmed thru it but wasn’t sufficiently interested or intrigued to read the whole thing. Still, thanks for bringing it up, JKelly; it seems that every day the SDMB teaches me about something.
My post was somewhat mocking LSLGuy’s post because it seems to me that, as Thomas Mann wrote in 1924, “Everything is politics”. And yeah, I remember Carol Hanisch’s essay The Personal Is Political (1969) and the same sentiment being embodied in the much of the SDS back in the 1960s.
And I think it’s true: everything is political. There is nothing that we do that does not support or signify political positions. Spending money is political speech, even when you’re just shopping at the grocery store. Watching the news is political. What kind of car you drive, what brand of clothing you wear, owning guns, your sex life, where you want to piss, etc. There is nothing in America that a person does or wants to do that does not have political ramifications. Like Chik-Fil-A? Congratulations, that sandwich you just ate is helping fund anti-abortion actions. Like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? You helped fund a campaign to prevent oil drilling in Alaska. And on and on. Look for the Union label, etc.
Like professional sports? Do you like it enough to use tax dollars to support the billionaire owners of the teams? Do you like it enough to force others to support the billionaire owners of the teams?
Buying gas for your car? Do you buy gas from Exxon or Texaco or BP?
Everything we do and even the things we don’t do are entangled in politics because in a democracy, everything can be proposed for legislation and voted on. Everything. Every dollar we spend supports a political position; some we agree with and some we don’t. But there’s no pretending that everything we do doesn’t have influence on politics, at least not if we’re going to be honest.
And we (still, thankfully) live in a democracy. So while what LSLGuy wrote may not be wrong, it’s also not an exclusive trait of totalitarianism, IMO.
ETA: I see upon posting that LSLGuy posted while I was composing this. I think his suggestion to rename the forum “Government” has much merit and I think his arguments are very persuasive.
Cool. I agree that “Government” would least ambiguously express what we all mean by this proposed forum.
It started off kinda slow, but the “Yes”'s seem to be pulling ahead quite a bit…
I agree completely with this. And you’ve said it very well.
At the same time consider this. Substitute the word “ecology” for “politics” in those paragraphs. Everything you said is all still true, albeit they aren’t perhaps the best choice of examples.
Now substitute the word “economics” for “politics” in those paragraphs. Again everything you said is all still true, albeit they aren’t perhaps the best choice of examples.
The bottom line is that in our modern complex world-spanning societies, everybody is connected to everybody else and to everything by multiple strands of -ologies and -isms. The critical difference is that some of those connections are direct and strong and obvious. Others are indirect and weak and tenuous.
So while it’s 100% true that everything is politics, it becomes in effect fatuously true. When defined that broadly, the word “politics” loses its ability to be a useful category. Despite the fact there’s a big difference between the magnitude and specificity of the political implications of who I support for President versus e.g. whether I shop at Sav-Mor Cheap-ass grocery or Whole Foods.
Said another way …
The classic libertarian formula “my freedom to swing my fist stops at your nose” works fine in 1850s Wyoming. It works less well on the NYC subway at 5pm. As our whole world becomes more like the subway we need to be looking for subtler distinctions. The fist-swing becomes a political act not at the point of impact but at the point of triggering a flinch or even triggering apprehension that leads to people changing seats. A consequence is more acts are “political” defined broadly.
We just need to not throw the conceptual baby out with the bathwater.
I didn’t want to bastardize your entire quote (to take it out of context) so I just bolded the part I want to focus on.
I think what you said sounds good on paper, but is drastically overthinking the situation. I would be so bold as to say 95% of the things people do, they do for reasons that aren’t political in any way, shape or form. At the end of the day, people just don’t care that much.
To use your examples, people eat at Chick-fil-a because they’re craving chicken and they make damn good sammitches. People don’t go to the Speedway gas station because they support that particular company…they just do it because it’s either cheap or they have rewards there. Wal-mart is cheap, Ben & Jerry’s makes a good cherry-flavored ice cream and Chevy makes the cheapest car someone can afford.
Those decisions have precisely nothing to do with politics. They’re political only to those who make it political. I know there are people who don’t eat Chick-fil-a because of the owners’ religious standpoint, but to classify the people who DO eat there as making some kind of political statement of their beliefs is ludicrous.
And, again, the people who DO make everything political commenting about it to the people who DON’T make it political is what started this whole thing in the first place.
Exactly. I once had someone who’d spent too long in Academia try and tell me my choice of breakfast was political, when I said it was really more to do with whether I felt like Marmite or jam on my toast that morning.
And that’s the thing: Lots of folks, myself included, try to avoid making things political unnecessarily. What sort of car you drive or which beer you drink has far more to do with what you could afford at the time than how you vote.
Well, we’re talking about two different levels of analysis. Certainly for most purposes – including, creating and defining message board thematic categories – you’re right, the “academic” analysis is irrelevant.
More extreme examples, to illustrate the point: Why not call all the categories “Neurological,” since all* posters are using their brains as they type? Or how about “Linguistic,” since we are all communicating through language?
Bottom line (IMHO), “Government” would probably make for a useful and workable category, replacing “Elections” (and attracting some threads currently found in several other categories.)
*Well, not quite all of them… 
A lady who came through my lane at Target one time asked me to do something for her and I said “You betcha”. She made an “ugh” sound and said “don’t quote that insufferable woman”.
“Who?” I asked, not having any idea what she was talking about
“That Palin woman who says that.” I eventually figured out she meant Sarah Palin.
I’ve been saying “you bet” or “you betcha” before this bitch even knew who Sarah Palin was. Not even counting the fact that I didn’t know who she was talking about until she said the name, which eventually sparked the quote in my mind.
Why am I automatically quoting her when I’m just saying a turn of phrase?
Because the Zeitgeist says so.
I know what you mean-“Heil” just used to be German for “hail”, and “Hitler” was just another family name…but I get the ugliest reactions from people when I shout out greetings to my neighbor, Bob Hitler, because some asshole a few years ago ruined it for everyone else.
I say change the name to Politics and keep politics out of everything else! Even if there is a yes/no GQ type answer the OP could ask nicely to restrict answers to facts until the answer is established.
Don’t the rules suggest that breaking news should be in MPSIMS…maybe that needs to be addressed when it involves politics.
Also… a political post was recently moved into CS apparently because the OP heard about it on the radio. I don’t think it was ever established to be a simple mistake so maybe there are further issues to what constitutes political.