Also, I will give a shiny nickle to whoever can tell me a good yardstick for assessing the "trampling of curiosity", as deprecated in our guidelines. (Beware poetic terms of service.)
Generalizing, rules about P only exist when there is consensus about what is or is not P. So if you're unfortunate enough to be living through an era where literally everything is politicized, you can expect the definition of politics itself to be one of the key prizes in the debate.
Plato nailed it when he had Socrates say that 'not to philosophize is to philosophize.' The same is true of politics, as we've all discovered, to universal chagrin.
