existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Incidentally, this is wrong: these threads can, and do, have real world outcomes. As a small example: it was on a precursor to this very thread that a discussion ensued that led to my decision to go to the police and disclose abuse from 40 years ago. They took it seriously enough to start an investigation that resulted in ten new victims hitherto unknown to them being found and about 30 charges of offences against children being brought, and a second offender facing further charges.Again, this thread being hijacked code...
It simply means that if someone is disturbing our inquiry by, shock horror!, disagreeing with the direction in which it travels, then they are ruining our grand project.
There are two points to bring out here:
First, this is a thread on a public internet bulletin board. There is no grand project. There is nothing to be ruined. You are not building anything. You have not launched an investigation. You are simply whiling away the hours. To pretend otherwise is, quite frankly, absurd in the extreme. There is no architecture, there will be no hulking remains. This is ephemeral entertainment that means nothing.
Second, if you argue that dissenting opinions are "hijacking" your conversations, perhaps you can play that through in to free speech implications. Or perhaps you cannot because you have not thought about them.
That simply would not have happened if it hadn't been for that discussion, and the rather sneering suggestion of one poster that it was a waste of money for the police to be investigating these historic cases.