Just a comment from your more or less friendly moderator...
I had yet another tirade in my inbox this morning from an anon who was incensed that I didn't put through an earlier flamebaiting political rant, and insisted that this proved that I, and this forum in general, were all the way over to one side of the political divide in the US. It doesn't matter which side, really, because I delete flamebaiting political rants from both sides of that divide quite regularly here.
It's intriguing to watch the mechanisms of projection at work. From the perspective of both extremes, anybody who isn't all the way over on one side must inevitably be all the way over on the other. That's been a thing all through my blogging career -- I recall the times the same post on the future of industrial society got denounced as dismal pessimism by true believers in progress and as mindless optimism by true believers in apocalypse, or the time that a later post got me accused of being a Nazi by various leftists, while a genuine Nazi posted a rant accusing me of being a Jew!
I get the impression, though, that this sort of rigid two-value thinking has become more common in recent months. Is that your experience also?
Observation
I had yet another tirade in my inbox this morning from an anon who was incensed that I didn't put through an earlier flamebaiting political rant, and insisted that this proved that I, and this forum in general, were all the way over to one side of the political divide in the US. It doesn't matter which side, really, because I delete flamebaiting political rants from both sides of that divide quite regularly here.
It's intriguing to watch the mechanisms of projection at work. From the perspective of both extremes, anybody who isn't all the way over on one side must inevitably be all the way over on the other. That's been a thing all through my blogging career -- I recall the times the same post on the future of industrial society got denounced as dismal pessimism by true believers in progress and as mindless optimism by true believers in apocalypse, or the time that a later post got me accused of being a Nazi by various leftists, while a genuine Nazi posted a rant accusing me of being a Jew!
I get the impression, though, that this sort of rigid two-value thinking has become more common in recent months. Is that your experience also?