03-01-2025, 12:58 PM
Moderator Note:
Please recall that the moment you begin to address one another personally and directly, an unwanted element of friction might become impossible to ignore.
By definition, such utterances are in fact (at least in this context,) OFF TOPIC.
Such things are fairly easy to avoid directly, but since we are not robots, we understand that the threshold into the issue can be fluid in practice.
No one has yet fallen to this (although something tells me we're getting there.)
So I offer a touch of a pre-emptive PSA... just so I can feel like I'm still doing something useful...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This conversation seems spectacularly productive to me. We obviously don't agree on many things.... and even so... we want to talk about it... and we ARE letting each other talk... No one has shut anyone down, no one has cast aspersions on another's' values... What matters is that we disagree... not the flummery of the international celebrity clown show, and traditional biases foisted by people we never met.
This is how exactly solutions are found.
I have come into a bit of contention into my assertion that our information sources (ALL of them) are patently suspect. There is no honor in how the political animal manifests when sponsored by theater... "Expedient Appearances" might end up being the death of us all... and yet we worship the storytellers... as if they actually supposed DO anything other than report.
Please recall that the moment you begin to address one another personally and directly, an unwanted element of friction might become impossible to ignore.
By definition, such utterances are in fact (at least in this context,) OFF TOPIC.
Such things are fairly easy to avoid directly, but since we are not robots, we understand that the threshold into the issue can be fluid in practice.
No one has yet fallen to this (although something tells me we're getting there.)
So I offer a touch of a pre-emptive PSA... just so I can feel like I'm still doing something useful...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This conversation seems spectacularly productive to me. We obviously don't agree on many things.... and even so... we want to talk about it... and we ARE letting each other talk... No one has shut anyone down, no one has cast aspersions on another's' values... What matters is that we disagree... not the flummery of the international celebrity clown show, and traditional biases foisted by people we never met.
This is how exactly solutions are found.
I have come into a bit of contention into my assertion that our information sources (ALL of them) are patently suspect. There is no honor in how the political animal manifests when sponsored by theater... "Expedient Appearances" might end up being the death of us all... and yet we worship the storytellers... as if they actually supposed DO anything other than report.
