Pints and Politics: Time for Another Round?

As for the comments of other BA community members, that isn't my place to say.

 

Well, at least you admitted tacitly that this thread has become nasty, even if you won't openly agree that I'm correct (nice goalpost repositioning, BTW)

And my point was that online political conversations always devolve into nastiness, unlike discussions about beer, and that's why the former should be kept off a website devoted to beer. If beer advocate policed political convos from its forums, it would still exist; not true regarding politics

 

Not always, but . . . yeah . . . basically always.

 

I love that, in the middle of all the hand-wringing about having political conversations on BA, we have a couple people who took it up on themselves to demonstrate why BA has a relatively low tolerance for political discussions that don't directly involve beer/industry-related political issues.

One commenter was practically salivating at the chance to drop a hint about his politics and the perceived intolerance with which it would be met. Another was happy to jump in and, instead of systematically tearing down the first commenter's suspect assertions, waded right into the mud with insults, doing nothing more than validating the first commenter's assumptions.

And while no political ideology has a monopoly on getting down in the muck and playing dirty, you'd have to be foolish not to see how one side has set up permanent residence there while the other may just take the occasional vacation into the muck. It's hard to have civilized discourse when one side seems to revel in the idea of making the other side mad while simultaneously redefining what constitutes a "fact".

But I digress...

 

Always.

 

what?

 

To distill and reiterate your perfectly correct thesis, I think those two people demonstrated, albeit unwittingly, why BA has such a low level of tolerance for political discourse not involving beer/brewing.

 

If beer advocate eliminated threads involving politics, it would still exist. If beer advocate eliminated threads involving beer, it would cease to exist.

 

Honestly if you can't discuss politics without hurling insults by all means remove the comments and punish the users that act that sophomoric. But under a political thread I think it's completely fine, especially if the topic relates to beer. And the idea that anyone would click on a forum labeled with the word "politics" and get mad about political talk being in it is really strange.

 

Do you even internet, brah?

 

Honestly, American politics aren't *that* different from other countries. The binary nature of our political landscape is somewhat of a trick of perception that results from the way our election laws are set up--specifically "first past the post", winner-take-all voting.

And I started to write a long diatribe explaining why this is, but then thought this might work better: in our voting system, there is no benefit for coming in second. Only the winner gets to influence policy. As such, smaller groups of people and parties with less mainstream political ideas (on the left and the right) realize that they are better off forming a coalition with larger parties that bear a passing resemblance to their own political leanings than going it alone and (likely) losing.

Parties in non-binary systems also do coalition building, it just happens within the legislative body, because the problem with non-binary systems is that no single party typically has enough votes in the legislature to actually make policy.

Anyway, this has been How To Politick with your favorite BA, LambicP.

 

Which is a good thing, as is it much less likely for one party to dominate policy making, like with one party having dominance in both the Executive and Legislative branches, nor can they completely stifle it when the Executive and Legislative branches are occupied by different parties.

 

It's funny you mention such things when your own posts are doing about the same bloody thing, and then you play softball and try to duck out of the matter altogether.
We're going to have to talk about politics at this juncture with out nation being handled by an irresponsible jevenile, and beer is going to have to be involved.
If someone like @jesskidden has the historical notes for it. You should take note of how much was consumed in the forming the documents which founded our nation. It's black out drunk level of drinking. That also means, our nation was founded in a pub, and they yelled at each other and came to blows frequently.

 

From Wikipedia for City Tavern in Philadelphia:

“Called the "most genteel tavern in America" by John Adams, the original tavern was the favorite meeting place of many of the Founding Fathers and of many members of the First Continental Congress.”

Maybe not too many fights there (or less fighting than other taverns)?

Cheers!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Tavern

P.S. If you are ever in Philly a visit to the City Tavern is worthwhile. My wife is a BIG fan of the Colonial Turkey Pot Pie (accompanied with Yards George Washington Porter).