Dancing with the Universe

This is the middle of Day Three lost to chemical exposure and exhaustion. And people wonder why I don't carry a full class load.

I'm a little shaky, so I've been sitting at the computer most of the morning. I'm not sure that reading the idiocy from GArrow and Sun-King in the political discussion on lily is helping much, though; to an extent, I agree with rm -rf * that the place has turned into Fox News Lite. Between the rampant White House talking points and Sun-King's utter obsession with the super-early primary races, it's probably more stress than it's worth. Somehow I never get around to quitting the discussion, though.

Both sides of the spectrum complain that it's only when their side tries to call out inaccuracies that the media objects. I'll have to take the right-wingers word for that, as I've mostly been seeing the political cartoons and pundits labeling the congressional investigations and criminal prosecutions going on as (literally) Democrat-driven witchhunts; I see little to suggest there's a converse to that. I do suspect that, like so many things in ideology these days, it involves different definitions of common words, like "object", "partisan", and so on, and their expectations of media and government behavior. More than ever, I want an objective metric for semantics, so that we can figure out not only the objective:subjective ratio of any given statement, but whether the reaction by the media at large is really for, neutral, or against. It seems like each side sees it far too differently to ever agree without a common measuring stick.

Whether they would agree to a common measuring stick is, of course, another issue entirely...

The moderator of the discussion is free to tell us that we are off topic. When she tells us that she doesn't understand how we came to be talking about a tangent, and makes other comments that have me truly wondering whether she's been following the conversation at all, I don't really know what to say. When she gets actively snarky about the fact that she doesn't see how we could get to point K from point A, I give up.

I am still interested in the topic of the discussion, and will probably get told to take my conversations there if I stray into that territory. I mostly respect the moderator otherwise. I just see no reason to stay in a discussion where we are kept sternly and blindly on topic.

Sigh.

Edit: she wasn't even a moderator... just bossy enough for one. Maybe I should go back in, and bitch if she gets all cranky again.