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My vote is for Politics. Very little 'discussion.'
Same people making same arguments. I think reading it actually makes me angry (regardless of point of view).
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I bolded what I think is far and away the worst aspect of the Politics forum.
Copy & pasted, 20k word articles with follow up comments from the poster that read like "See?! Anyone who disagrees with this is a retard, ipso facto that this article exists and I posted it here! Now discuss" are also annoying.
But, IMO, the politics forum is annoying simply because politics is annoying.
A relatively famous study of public opinion is done every election cycle by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan; one constant finding of the study is that among the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the federal government, Congress consistently enjoys the lowest approval/favorablity rating of the three. The study concluded that it had little to do with which party was in control of Congress, or what Congress had recently accomplished/not accomplished.
What the study did conclude was that Americans just hated disagreement. Most had little patience for, or understood the rationale behind a body that spends a great deal of its time incapacitated by debate. The typical respondent involved in the study just assumed that answers to complicated policy questions were obvious, and that most rational people frequently come to a clear consensus when faced with a policy question. Political debate, according to most survey participants, is just relatively pointless partisan wrangling.
I can’t locate a link to this study; but I was able to locate
this article from
The Hill ; here’s an excerpt that refers to what I’m getting at:
“Voters see Congress as consumed with partisanship, which they understand to be an unprincipled battle for political advantage. Debate, they believe, is not philosophical disagreement, but an ominous sign of social dysfunction. Americans have faith in the notion that reasonable people, motivated only by the public good, could easily agree. Debate itself is taken as a sign that pernicious influences have entered into the decision making process.”
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My point in this: I think this forum, and politics in general, gets people so angry because some just have a relatively small threshold for disagreement and debate.