Trust me I like a big stick.

I don't mind the political stuff as long as like Takeda says isn't the same person posting the same thing ad naseum.

You might remember a guy called subman1. He ended up in the brig.

Union scum at it again.Unions are like many things, started with noble cause but those in charge use it as a cash cow and as their way to power since theyd more than likely be just another guy on the assembly line if not for their position.They slap a shirt and ti on some guy and call him President of the Union, he suddenly gets respect even though hes prob just a thug and simpleton.Unions have numbers though and they vote, so Dems play to them via class warfare, its digusting.

Because it might be a pleasant change. You never discuss - you sit on a high horse and mock anyone from "the other side", all the while denying the fact that you're exactly like them.

Same thing. As Takeda Shingen noted, Neal tolerates political discussion...barely. Some actual discussion might be nice, as opposed to diatribe.

First of all, I don't think it would very much encourage topic spamming. The people who would post topics about politics are already posting topics about politics at this very moment. The only difference is that they'd do it in another forum.
Secondly, I can't quite agree with the assumption that it would mark a change in the direction of subsim. Trust me, if you google for "political forum", you're not gonna find subsim. That ain't gonna change if you separate the political forum. The only members will be people who play submarine simulators. The only change would be that lots of people who as of now post their topics in GT, would then post in a separate political forum.

Thirdly, I'd enforce the "topic spamming rules" a bit stricter. Either allow it, or don't allow it, but not semi-allow it such as now. How many "The Dems are BAAAAD"-threads are there? (this is NOT any criticism on the moderators, but more on the rules)

This isn't the first complaint about this. The very fact that many members are starting to complain about the abundance of political threads, is a sign that *something* has to change.

So then a Political Forum could be made a subforum of GT. It would definately keep similar topics together, and as a subforum of GT it wouldn't be off-topic in relation to the website.

In that case, as I more or less stated above, disallow it altogether.
But none of those sites is as great as subsim:yeah:


In any other circumstance I would have PM'ed these points of concern to either Neal or a GT moderator, but personally I think this is a point to which many other members might want to add something, either for or against a separate forum. I really do not care what's gonna happen, but as I said, the relatively large amount of complaints lately is a sign that something has to change.

A good suggestion, and one which would work in this forum as well as a dedicated political forum. "Either post reasonable discussion, or not at all."

Possibly, but then you'd have people posting politics here anyway. How many threads appear in the actual game sections that are about new movies, books etc?

There's an idea. Ban all political discussion, period, and see how many people who post in them come around anymore. As far as complaints go, if someone doesn't like a thread they don't have to read it. I frequent most of the forums here every day, and there are certain threads that I've read once and don't bother opening again.

The fact that GT is already a de facto politics forum - American politics, let's be clear about that - and has been for a number of years kind of makes any editorial intent redundant at best. Neal Stevens may own the site, and he might have any number of visions he wants for Subsim, but the unspoken truth is that it's Steamwake, The Third Man, Bubblehead1980, etc. who effectively dictate the tone and content of the board. No single poster approaches the volume of, say, Subman1, a fantastically knuckleheaded poster, now departed, whose entire contribution to this place was over 10,000 bulletins of the standard Subsim reactionary script ("Dems...drinking the Kool-Aid...anchor babies") and who basically functioned as a sort of one-man RSS feed for the latest in crazy right-wing spam. Even so, the depressing regularity (up to 15 topics on page one alone some days) and ultra-partisan nature of these posts is enough to persuade many non-US members that GT, despite all hopes of the ineffectual Management, is more or less an unofficial affiliate of sites like freerepublic.com, handling the particularly monotonous overspill.

Exactly how diuretic have Americans become about politics? Well, how about this:

http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/6...espolitics.jpg

A forum (which I, uh, found while researching a doctorate paper on chronic masturbation) that while dedicated to detailing every permutation of grot conceivable - enough to keep any pervert entertained until soft-headedness, wankers paradise essentially - still manages to attract Americans who would prefer to repeat the cloned ravings and reactionary sludge that country produces as an everyday byproduct.

Seriously, just how humourless and pathologically self-absorbed a people have you become? And why do you think the rest of the English-speaking world might be interested in your frankly insane political chest-thumping? Which it isn't, except as a freakshow spectacle of a nation digesting itself.

And while we're at it, let's have a separate sub-forum for all those tedious farts who post "grabs popcorn" after each latest piece of US political spam. How about grabbing a slice of smart-ass pie, smug-a-tron.

You know I frequent one other forum regularly (US-based) and I hardly see anything political posted there but I guess that's because they bitch about politics IRL as most of the members of this small forum know each other personally.

But it doesn't matter really, why there isn't any political discussion going on there, fact is, the tone in that forum is much more friendly, so although I enjoy reading some of those walls of text in certain discussions, I'd rather have political postings forbidden in exchange for a nicer, lighter tone around here.

The reason that people ask for the banning of political topics is because they are inherently contentious. Banning it means that people will fight about religion, which we would then have to ban as well. Then the big fights would be over aircraft manufacturers, so that would have to go also. The members would then have tiffs over American vs. European football, eating meat, automobile manufacturing, World War II, cats vs. dogs and chess, so they'd have to go too. At that point, it just might be time to close down General Topics.

You cannot prevent people from fighting with one another, and yet at this time there are very few political topics on the forum. So we come back to the real problem being topic spamming. Creating yet another sub-forum does not resolve that issue.

Jack in the Box gets a waiver? Those socialist bastages! :har::har:

People will always want to argue stuff on forums that they really don't argue that much in RL. I imagine most of us avoid politics and religion like the plague at dinner parties, etc.—and for good reason.

This sort of thing will always pop up on a forum since it's not the same type of gathering.

:rotfl2:

But hold on maybe Steam is really onto something.
Worldwide Bowling...thats gotta be the Socialist Internationale at work

It's no more disgusting than the GOP.