Quoting Lev Lafayette (lev@levlafayette.com):
True, LUV-talk tends to not have much discussion on local sporting events. Perhaps because there's enough of that on mainstream media. Ditto for celebrity gossip.
You haven't embarrassed the All-Blacks lately. ;->
It's in our blood. It's part of who were are. Politics is, and always has been, and always will be, part of the Linux community.
I'm mildly surprised to find an 'Politics is inescapably toxic and must therefore be banned even on explicitly no-topic-required, anything-goes mailing lists' attitude expressed in Melbourne. No offence intended in making the comparison, but I most often find that view expressed by... well... Americans. (Yeah, sorry. I'm sure the resemblance is coincidental.) FWIW, my own unfashionable basic view is that politics is the public's business. Certainly, there are many places where it should _not_ be raised, and it must be raised only with careful civility and caution about both trolling and the accidental or deliberate triggering of tiresome Internet outrage machines. However, the ability to discuss the public's business is a necessary part of citizenhood.
Part of the prevalence of politics is because everyone has an opinion on the matter, and part of it is the mainstream media doesn't engage in-depth debates on the issue.
Let me try to be a gracious guest and attribute a related fault only to the country of which, for good or bad, I'm citizen and resident: The USA's political culture of the past fifty years has done an abysmal job of preparing its citizens for participating in public life. Young people grow up stumbing into the public sphere and concluding that political activity consists of haranguing as large a crowd as you can find, as forcefully as you can manage, to coerce them into adopting your opinions. This of course doesn't work and gets the speaker massively ignored as an annoying prat with no manners. Worse, the syndrome casts such a pall of suspicion over the entire topic that even those speaking civilly and with discipline against self-indulgent personal twaddle get excoriated for delving into matters deemed inherently impossible to discuss. Such is the damage caused by an immature political culture where nobody can imagine articulating anything other than a personal opinion, or persuasion other than via loud and annoying harranguing. Prior to the 1960s, things were a bit different on these shores, and the merits of civil public discourse had more admirers and defenders than they do now.