Seems to me that the Pit has completely shifted over to political talk; nearly every thread there is dedicated to bashing conservative figure X. It’s not that I care about these poor politicians and am rushing in to defend them or something; it’s just, what happened to the rants about other stuff? I mean, I thought GD was the place to talk about politics - has the Pit just turned into an extension of GD except with dirty words? Mostly, I’m curious about whether it’s always been like this, and it just seems like there’s more politics talk than usual, or whether it’s not just my imagination and it actually has been turning more and more into a political pile-on?
The BBQ Pit will contain what threads people start. If you want the content to change, start a thread.
The popularity of Pit topics waxes and wanes both with the news and due to other threads posted in the Pit. There are a lot of political threads at the moment both because of the intensity of the health care debate and the Massachusetts Senate election. These have prompted statements by political figures and commentators that some people object to strongly. Such threads feed off each other, reminding people of other things they are pissed off about, causing even more threads on the subject to be started.
The same thing happens in GD. Eventually the political threads will subside a bit. They will pick up again as we approach the mid-term elections.
I don’t think any of us need to be told that the users generate the content, and that, if we don’t like it, we could generate our own content.
I think this is more a question on WHY it is that way, and if it is going to stay. I agree with Colibri: it’s not. But he’s missing one important part:
Stupid states think it’s better to have their elections not in election season. This pretty much guarantees that more vocal proponents are going to come out and ruin the relative truce between the parties when there’s not much we can do about anything. People get really worked up over elections. even when they can’t participate.
(By “more vocal,” I mean those people that, for some reason, take politics personally. There’s nothing wrong with differences of opinion. There is in the “us vs them” mentality where anyone who doesn’t agree with you is a horrible person. You’d think we intellectuals would try to be above such tribalism, but it seems like we’re often the worst.)
Well, yes and no. A significant number of non-political threads get moved out of the Pit, and what remains is primarily (but certainly not exclusively) political.
Well, to me, it looks like we have the late unlamented Carol Stream (and now, her heir apparent) to thank for a lot of that. Like with alopecia; it’s not that all your hairs turn white overnight, it’s that all the ones that aren’t white fall out at the same time. In the same way, some Pit Patrollers have been (with some success, apparently) lobbying for certain non-political threads to get weeded out.
Not that they haven’t also lobbied for many of the political ones to go; but ISTM that their efforts have been less successful to date.
Wait until the Congressional elections start to ramp up - it will be worse. And if the Republicans take over either or both houses of Congress, much worse than that.
And 2012 is going to be a loooooong year, unless Obama runs unopposed.
Regards,
Shodan
Fortunately, the world is going to end that year.
Hopefully, before the primaries.
Nah, the arrival of al-Mahdiwas in 2008. 
Regards,
Shodan
Sadly I think that the end date is in December after the elections.
True, but this one was unusual for a bunch of reasons: it happened because Ted Kennedy died, and happened in January because of past wrangling on the part of Democratic politicians. (You can see how well that worked out for them.)
It’s not that way during every election. New Jersey and Virginia elected new governors in November. The only Pit thread about it was related to robocalls. And there was only one GD thread, too, although it was a long one. The health care debate isn’t going anywhere but maybe we can try to keep the Pittings and debates more consolidated.
The problem, as I see it, is not that there are political arguments in the pit. The problem is the audience for these threads.
Most of them are about what a pundit or candidate said or did, etc. The problem is that most of the time there is no point to the thread other than to bitch about some political issue to a bunch of people who are of like mind. There is no reason those threads can’t be in GD or whatever - there isn’t a language restriction, or a moratorium on insulting non-posters. The pit, at least in the past, was intended more for calling out other posters or groups of posters and their opinions.
Rush Limbaugh and others like him don’t participate in the pit, and there are very few posters inclined to defend them there. As such, most of the threads are nothing more than “I hate that guy” and “I agree”. It’s the difference between “I pit rhubarb for being red!” and “I pit Poster X for supporting the rhubarb industry!”.
It’s not against the rules, obviously, but, at least to me, these rant threads shouldn’t be in the pit because we already have a place for them.
We don’t want them. 
Then the solution is to create a forum for Politics and Religion and other Great Debates.
Other than Great Debates.
The last time we had that discussion I said I was in favor of it. At the moment I think the dividing line between the Pit and GD is ‘is this a discussion of an issue or is it just venting?’ If it’s venting I think it goes in the Pit,
I know that some controversial figures have gotten omnibus threads that just got added to whenever they said some new objectionable thing (Michelle Bachmann comes to mind), and there was an umbrella “stupid Republican idea of the day” thread recently. Would more consolidation of this sort help?
We were assured by Tuba that this was not needed because the political threads would drop off after the election.
Just saying…
To be fair, Sen Brown was only elected a few days ago.
Most of them seem as mild as the other stuff that is going to MPSIMS all the time now
I’m all for a political forum. It hasn’t stopped and doesn’t look like it ever will. Can we ban the word Palin too. Please!