(1) I absolutely hate polls like this. They are the nadir of typical threads on ALPB.
(2) One of my favorite shows on TV is The Big Bang Theory. I'm starting to see how tough it is to be Sheldon, living in a world where other people have emotional responses to some issues, and actually express them. It must be hard to cope with people who can't just bottle everything up and engage in pure, dispassionate, intellectual discourse.
(3) The next interesting ALPB thread that doesn't drift a little bit will be the first. Considering that the thread in question was about the relationship between the church and politics, and is now mostly about the politics part, it doesn't strike me as all that radical of a drift. I notice a real dearth of attempts to move it back on topic. As usual, the standard reaction to thread drift is not to post something on-topic in hopes of moving it back. The reaction is to kvetch about the drift. I imagine the next gambit will be for someone to once again call for an interesting discussion to be shut down.
(4) It's revealing when discussions are characterized as "conversations", which has a very different connotation from "discussion". On the other hand, I tend to characterize discussions as "debates", in which bouncing ideas back and forth demands some sort of mental net and a back and forth disagreement. Nothing in the world strikes me as more boring than a tennis match where both participants are on the same side of the net.
Poll