Should the Tea Shop have a subsection for politics, like the subsection for helmet discussion?

[661-Pete]

you can turn up and destroy your ballot in protest, I believe these are counted. Do people really turn up to say they are not sure about something?

Plenty do, so it seems....

[Caution: some of the images are Not Work Safe]

[Psamathe]

.....As it happens, in recent weeks I've been making more frequent visits to that thread - I mean the one that now runs to over 350 pages of mostly drivel. And this after virtually ignoring it for the bulk of its duration.

My aim, of course, is to inject a bit of flippancy into the thread now and again. And of course, to try to drag it as far off-topic as it's within my ability to do....

Unethical? Moi?

Not at all. It's a discussion; people make the contribution they wish to; hence the Tea Shop. Just as a group of people sitting around chatting, people say what they want.

It's like I regard all threads. Even cycling ones where after a couple of pages where several people have more than answered the original question and discussed it and reached a consensus I have no qualms about asking a "related" question (in effect dragging it off-topic from the OPs original question). How appropriate that is depends on judgement (mine and others) and I suspect get it wrong and somebody will make a pointed comment.

A threads about QR Skewers has a pretty defined subject but e.g. "The Brexit Thread" intentionally has a far far wider scope of subjects.

Ian

[Psamathe]

Thread drift attempt: what might have been the result if "don't know" had been on the ballot papers on 23.6.2017?

you can turn up and destroy your ballot in protest, I believe these are counted. Do people really turn up to say they are not sure about something? I don't think apathy or indecision are typically great motivators to action.

I have. In the 1st Police Commissioners elections - I (and many others) disagreed with the whole undertaking and the political party I was involved with at the time suggested that if the number of spoilt papers was above a certain threshold it also sent a clear message (I can't remember the threshold byt politicians would do what they always do with messages - ignore them). I don't know if the official party policy was to spoil you ballot papers but the local constituency group I was with were adopting that as their "stance" (officially or unofficially).

Ian

[RickH]

Most people use *show unread posts* so one can easily ignore things that do not interest

Do they? I don't, I usually click the "live" notifications then browse the sections, read the posts I want & then click the mark all as read to remove the "unread" red marker.

I usually at least glance through the political stuff, if I don't want to read it/ get fed up with the way a conversation is going I will just include it in my "mark all as read" strategy. If a particular poster has an adverse affect on my blood pressure I will occasionally mark them as a "foe" so I don't see their posts unless someone quote them, but I don't do that very often. (I don't have any at the moment - I thought I had one or two but they must have been removed from the forum.)

(Grr OT rant - something has changed my keyboard to US layout even though everything in settings, as far as I can see (I'll have to have another look), is set to UK so I'm having to use the @ to get a " (among other things) The wonders of technology, eh?