Why do people complain when there is some celebrity scandal, that others are talking about it here?

I really don't get it. I mean I think that, at least on DU, people are capable of dealing with more than one thing at a time. I don't think that Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski or Michael Vick will cause people to stop discussing health care here on DU. People have stopped discussing the war, but for entirely different reasons.

Personally, I think celebrity scandals or deaths are good opportunities to address broader issues.

When one talks about Michael Jackson, for instance, one usually also talks about racism, poverty, homophobia, child abuse, prejudism in the media and so on.

The Polanski case I think is relevant, because it is related to the broader issues of class justice and rape.

For instance, if one looks closely, today one can observe some Hollywood figures admitting that they think that
they stand above common humans. That in itsself is worthy of alot of discussion IMO, from a progressive pro-working-class point of view.

I wonder about these people who shout "stop discussing this" sometimes. Sure, one can argue that there were quite a few Polanski threads present in GD at one time, but I doubt that this is "wasting anyones bandwidth". You can just ignore those threads if you like.

My suspicion is that whenever people say "can we stop discussing this now because it has been discussed enough" it usually means that the person saying it is uncomfortable with discussing a particular aspect of this particular case and would rather see the topic dropped for that reason.

Whenever somebody complains that no one must care about some other issue because we dare talk about something else I want to smack them in the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

Needless to say, K&R.

I don't think I've ever done the sort of post you allude to but I must admit to being tempted a few times when DU appears to go off the deep end over something that, in the overall larger scheme of things, doesn't seem that important (to me, anyway).

But it's my conclusion there is nothing to be done, subjects take on their own lives here and the natural arc of some subjects are just longer than others.