"Ignorant" is the new "Stupid"...

[TheVat]

Requires a thread about a specific policy or issue to coerce focus on it. But even then, the presuppositional biases and almost sports-team-like allegiances of a public segment usually predictably determine conclusions or judgments about _X_, along with our applicable "culture of paranoia" about the ulterior motives of the "rival side". Or if not that, our "independent" choices for media/information/opinion sources and a fashionable movement to latch onto still amount to preconceptions and para-loyalties with rougher parameters.

Trump being involved inherently tends to derail attention from _X_ docket or polemic off into the pasture or wildwood of moral gesticulations (value corruption disqualifying such from the bother of a neutral lab dissection from the very start). Dispassionate pragmatism is extra doomed with the catalyst effect of the Orange Crush or Sunkist can resting on the table.
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Translation: People are tribal, they get their backs up and entrench, objectivity suffers.

 

[TheVat]

For a lot of Westerners, reared on rather romanticized notions about Buddhism and it's history throughout the centuries, this kind of stuff is like a real slap in the face--possibly more alarming than images of heavily armed Buddhist monks in, well, several S and SE Asian nations.

Yup. Many think Buddhism and think of the Zen schools of monasticism, walking meditation, chanting, tea ceremony, koans, etc. There's a tendency to focus on the self-cultivation side in the West ("wisdom without a teacher), rather than temple hierarchies. Sects like Fuke Zen, where there is meditation with flute playing has a certain appeal - it now offers a token of spirituality without full commitment, which is how most of those disciplines eventually dissolve and maybe a few rituals get repackaged as a secular off-hours seeking of the Buddha nature.