Well, like I said, I understand your point, but I disagree that it's a disingenuous or meritless argument.

Well that's because you're a stoopidhead.

Nuh uh, you are.

Am not.

Are so.

::ahem::

Right. Political thread....

Okay now that the stoopidhead resolution has been passed...

(We did a backchannel bullshit consensus. You both won!)

Eh. In the Political thread they'd be pulling hair and scratching by now.

I don't want a Politics thread, in addition to the reasons already stated, because I don't like the direction it takes us. We really need to think about where we are headed.

I think that a Politics thread is potentially a big change for this board. We've always been about pop culture. I just looked through the list of threads and was able to classify every one as either (pop) cultural, social [Natter & Bitches] or practical [F2F, technology and the right-hand threads]. Natter and Bitches have been primarily a place to discuss serious personal affairs and the wackiness of everyday life. Politics enters it, but (as others have said) it's tempered by posts about corsets.

I think it's because of this that we've managed to stay relatively civil over the years. It's not just that we're a relatively intelligent bunch of folks with a distaste for flaming. It's what we have been discussing. In my mind, which is having trouble articulating it's thoughts, a Politics thread has a totally different head. It will inevitably lead to more acrimonious posts that will spread silently to the other threads and forever change the vibe here. There could also be an apocolypse.

I want us to stay focused on pop culture.

I like the scattered talk. Of course, I'm guilty of it, but hey. I like the fact that threads of conversation pop up wherever we are. It adds to the feel of community, for me, where I'm feeling more and more that the thread spread has, in concert with increased numbers of people and speed of posting, lead to the everyone's alone in a crowd feel. Plus, seems people do more picking and sticking with threads, so that they become not so much subcultures, but completely independent cultures.

This to me is a very convincing argument.

What Jon Said.

What Jon Said. We're a pop culture board, which happens to love to talk about other interests we have in common. We're not TT reborn. We're the TT-TV Buffy Thread, extended and expanded. I don't think we can or should expand into areas too far afield of that.

Plus, a dose of What Shawn Said. Politics happens, because we're all people with strongly-held opinions about a lot of things (and I wouldn't be here if we weren't); things can get tense when it does, because, well, it's politics. But for the sake of the overall civility of the board, we're better off keeping those discussions in a place where there's both social pressure to keep things civil and something else to talk about so that conflict isn't the only focus of the conversation.

Think of it as the difference between the political crank in your family (who drives you nuts when he gets going, but on the other hand has some great stories on other subjects and has always been there for you) and the political crank on FOX news (who drives you nuts, period). Segregating the controversial stuff from the rest of the family dinner means that you get all the acrimony with none of the laughs.