Let's Get Rid of the Politics Forum

[DanaC]

I don't avoid political threads; but there are certain dwellars and/or subjects I tend to avoid engaging with at a political, or at a serious level. From time to time I forget I'm avoiding them and get drawn in by my own curiosity. But...at that point I'm often just throwing in the odd double entendre.

I don't really have much of a heart for political discussions here, of late. There's only so much searing anger I can handle at any one time. And the landscape is strewn with boobytraps and populated by wolves, ready to ascend on the unwary who has dared to write their post whilst sitting at the computer, in their pants, eating cereal; thereby falling short of the astounding peer-review quality, properly and exhaustively researched, fully spellchecked political argument we apparently see as a minimum standard.

If I sit round a pub table talking politics with mates, we're not correcting each other's grammar; or demanding we present our findings fully supported and properly referenced. But this seems to characterise much of the political discussion here at the moment. Some of it is justified, some of it is funny, but some of it is petty and not much fun to watch, or get involved in. It's like there's some hidden rule which states that, the second a topic becomes political, people start sharpening their weapons.

It's like, in the big online games, there's often a separate arena area where players can take their avatars and beat the shit out of each other with gay abandon. Normal game rules are suspended. The politics forum seems to have morphed into a free for all arena. Which occasionally then spills into the rest of the forums. Some of the stuff people say to each other once a thread has become political in nature, just bypasses anything approaching civility.