Was there a separate Politics forum on PS at one point?

[AGBF]

I didn't know there was an ATW forum before. A simple "It didn't work out" would have sufficed for me!

I actually love politics and discussion of it. I'm not going to complain that Hangout has been more active lately either. It takes all kinds. I was mostly just curious if this was a thing here before or not.

In my opinion, it worked out very well. As ksinger said, discussions there tended to be far deeper and more intellectual than they are here on Hangout. We took off the gloves and no one whined. We also did not engage in name calling. We were all pretty serious posters and stuck to the issues. Changing the place for discussion of politics from Around The World to Hangout was fine with me, however. With the change of venue we got far more participation in discussions. So there were pluses and minuses to each approach (keeping it isolated and merging it in with a bigger forum). (In my opinion.)

AGBF

 

[OreoRosies86]

I didn't know there was an ATW forum before. A simple "It didn't work out" would have sufficed for me!

I actually love politics and discussion of it. I'm not going to complain that Hangout has been more active lately either. It takes all kinds. I was mostly just curious if this was a thing here before or not.

In my opinion, it worked out very well. As ksinger said, discussions there tended to be far deeper and more intellectual than they are here on Hangout. We took off the gloves and no one whined. We also did not engage in name calling. We were all pretty serious posters and stuck to the issues. Changing the place for discussion of politics from Around The World to Hangout was fine with me, however. With the change of venue we got far more participation in discussions. So there were pluses and minuses to each approach (keeping it isolated and merging it in with a bigger forum). (In my opinion.)

AGBF

Ah, okay. Understood. Thank you for the perspective of a seasoned PSer.

 

[aljdewey]

This thread is very informative:

Link...[URL='https://www.pricescope.com/community/threads/would-you-like-to-try-allowing-discussion-of-religion-on-ho.218840/']https://www.pricescope.com/community/threads/would-you-like-to-try-allowing-discussion-of-religion-on-ho.218840/[/URL]

Be sure to read about The Steam Room. aljdewey writes about it on page 3 of the thread. It was the first attempt at allowing "free speech".

AGBF

Chiming in on this.......

As I observed in the thread Deb referenced above, Steam Room did work really well once upon a time, but I personally feel that the shift in vibe here would likely render it considerably less successful now.

During Steam Room days, many of the participants were mature enough to engage in heated debate in that space while still being reasonably cordial in other spaces. They could respect each other even as they disagreed on some things passionately.

Though I can't pinpoint exactly when that shifted, it DID shift, and spillover acrimony began to manifest in other threads. This was a substantive contributing factor to the complete ban of political discussion for a while.

Even within this very thread are examples of haughtiness that typify why I do think it would be a less successful effort today. Everybody's up in everyone's business, and when remarks are delivered with the disdainful and belittling tone they often are now.....well, yeah, probably not gonna work well.

 

[ksinger]

I think a separate politics and government forum would be cool. And if members didn't want to go to that forum they could just flick their thumb a 17 millisecond click away from it

People have expressed they aren't as active in Hangout because of the politics. I love the political talks, but it really is clumping up a lot of the conversational vibe.

The amusement grows. To answer the original question, yes, there once was what was a de facto political forum "Around The World". It was all away by itself. Nobody had to click into it. They could avoid it quite easily if they didn't like that sort of thing. It was quite rollicking, to a level that would make the usual suspects in the political threads these days, have serious fits of the vapours.

And yet....back then, the same types who are these days pushing to have political discussions kept out of sight of decent people, so they don't have to be upset and put off by looking at them, would repeatedly voluntarily come IN to the roped off area they didn't have to look at, read the political threads they said they despised and then grouse about how awful it all was and how it was mean and etc etc. And it was. Far beyond anything going on currently. Not saying I want that level of acrimony back - the mods killed all political discussion until now because of it, but it certainly did winnow the wheat from the chaff, and pointed out a certain hypocrisy among those complaining the loudest. They moaned about how they hated it and yet seemed drawn to it like moths to flame. One thing is for sure, for those who stuck it out, there was zero whining. Maybe some of the other old soldiers from those wars will chime in with other recollections, but that's the bones of it.

But of course, the point is that moving these hot-button topics will not make them any more palatable to people who don't have the stones to handle disagreement, vehement or otherwise, and they will still come in and complain.

Everything old would be new again.

Glad I could provide some amusement, then.

Oh, I'm not amused - as in laughing at - you, but rather the loss of (if you will) so much "institutional memory" of political discourse here. I see the suggestions of a dedicated forum as a weird kind of expansion-contraction-expansion thing. Nothing new under the sun, yes?

Unlike Deb, I recall more acrimony. The mods killed politics here for a reason after all. Like her however, I would agree that the discussions, on the whole, were much deeper. You rarely got a one liner, usually they were well-honed and LONG essays, by lots of people. And there really was most decidedly not the level of personal offense taken, like today. Some things have changed drastically (as in 180) in my years here and I can't quite put my finger on how or why. It could be a generational thing? The humidity? Who knows. Honestly though, even if we had the old ATW back and it was the free-for-all it once was, I would no longer have the energy I did back then, to engage at such a level. That was an insane year for me personally, and I distracted myself from my then-crazy life by spending way too much time here. (I'm sure no one else can relate to that, right....?)

I pretty much read it all, in the political threads, but I read much more than I post. Too much been there, done that, or sadness at how so many people seem so much more hopeless than 8 years ago. One of those things that have changed is that 8 years ago, you got your ass handed to you by conservatives when you criticized the policies of the US. You got accused of being defeatist and un-American. Fast forward, and most of the conservatives (and the libs to larger degree) are now on a total downer about the the entirety of the great American experiment. I find myself on the positive end of the criticism spectrum now - and I'm still critical believe me, but I can't hold a candle to the level of despair I read daily.

It's just....weird....