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.

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.

Let me counter it by noting, that while I acknowledge the value of scattered talk - the shows I would be interested in discussing, don't have a focused thread. Folks can drop into the Smallville/due South/Farscape and chat about the most recent Stargate and there will be seven or eight people to pick up on that conversation over a course of days. If I wanted to talk about Adult Swim, it can really only happen in Natter, and really only if I'm there and Shawn and Teppy are there at the same time, which is unlikely considering the time difference. Then Natter sweeps it away and I'm out of the discussion. Because the spread of threads is both arbitrary and not enforced, it's bug-making.

Now, it's not so bug-making to generate real resentment, but I do think it's problematic.

Also, the virtue of focused threads discussion (from my experience) is not that I don't see people in other interest areas, but rather I only get to regularly interact with certain people because of the focused nature of the thread. I only really get to see Jon and joe boucher in the Music thread. I only get to see candy and le nubian in Spoilers. Lately, I only got to see Victor in the deathmatchs.

So instead of dividing off the community, it has enhanced my contact with people with like interests.

As Nutty noted (to her dismay) the board is already too big to not be somewhat subdivided. It's not been a negative. I can't maintain a relationship with 1200 people.