What you call rot, I look on as a sanity break of sorts, a brief detour into the trivial to remind us all that this is not a hostile environment, that the topic at hand is not so intractably serious that dissenters will be eaten alive, and that despite the furvor with which we argue, we still remain friends (after a fashion). Without that sort of attempt at verbal charm, Oscar Wilde would have been nothing more than some bitchy sodomite. I think banter is a benchmark of civilization.
As long as the threads don't completely degrade into fluff, what harm does it do? Nothing wrong with posting "Hey, can we get back on topic?" |
