Do you want to clarify what you meant there then?
Stealing is bad. We should not spend our collective attention on discussing some shmoe (nor a professor) stealing. Unrequited sexual chat messages are bad. We should not spend our collective attention on discussing some shmoe (nor a professor) sending unwanted sexual chat messages. (If you think this was sufficiently bad to warrant public attention of any kind, never ever visit Twitch.tv's chat of any female streamer. Oh Lordie (or oh Kappa, for the in-group).)
The terminal problems all around us which desperately require collective attention are in such a state of being neglected (be they oeconomical, environmental, political, societal, technological or in intersections thereof) and they cannot be solved by experts without mass support (because of the vestiges of democracy) that it is comical (or, since we're in the same boat, tragicomical) to collectively talk about someone's sexual chat messages instead ("instead" because attention is a painfully finite resource). It really is.
It's like seeing someone bleed out in front of your eyes and focussing on a pimple on his/her forehead. I'm not saying this particular outbreak of hysteria (and all the other nonsense we spend our hysteria on) is all some sinister plot/smokescreen from the powers-that-be to keep (part of) the bottom 99% busy. More like a happy coincidence, for them.
I'm not sure if the problem is connotation v. denotation here or possibly a motte/bailey fallacy, but I'm fairly confident that something like that is happening, or some massive failure of communication.
You wrote:
Welcome to the brave new world. Blood and games, keeps us busy from dealing with the issues that matter.
At minimum, the connotation of these phrases is a deliberate attempt to distract from the "serious" issues, which is an extremely different claim than the one you are apparently making above that this simply should be an extremely ...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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