Hi

[hmkpoker]

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but to put the burden on one part of the political spectrum to police their responses, to squelch their own political views and not have this apply to others feels quite unfair.


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Nobody is being asked to squelch their political views. People are being asked to respect one another. If someone wants to start a thread about raising/cutting taxes it is reasonable to expect that the thread won't be overun with people that want to talk the government being immoral. When your posts contribute nothing to the topic at hand and serve only to cause others to leave they are no longer welcome.

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RR-

If this is the case, I think it would make more sense if you and [censored] said that you were going to simply enforce that posts stay on topic, in the spirit of the OP. That's a good rule, no complaints there.

[AlexM]

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If someone wants to start a thread about raising/cutting taxes it is reasonable to expect that the thread won't be overun with people that want to talk the government being immoral.

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Why? If you pose an open question to the forum, how are you not expecting anyone to answer who has an opinion unless you specify otherwise? This is like saying that if someone in SMP started a thread on "what is the nature of God" that atheists couldn't respond with their beliefs. They have an opinion on what the nature of God is as well, but because their opinion is in such strong disagreement with the religious crowd, it gets to be censored? That's, frankly, BS.

[pvn]

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but to put the burden on one part of the political spectrum to police their responses, to squelch their own political views and not have this apply to others feels quite unfair.


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Nobody is being asked to squelch their political views. People are being asked to respect one another. If someone wants to start a thread about raising/cutting taxes it is reasonable to expect that the thread won't be overun with people that want to talk the government being immoral. When your posts contribute nothing to the topic at hand and serve only to cause others to leave they are no longer welcome.

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Ah, the old "AC Troll Mafia Hijack Alert" strawman. For those of you just joining us, it has been shown that the vast majority of the "AC Hijacks" that supposedly plague this forum and make it "borderline unreadable" are in fact undertaken by statists. Generally the way it goes is something like this:

Statist #1: Policy XYZ should be enacted.
ACer: But that policy will have effect ABC.
Statist #2: So who is going to do XYZ when there's NO GOVERNMENT? Huh? Huh????

[Borodog]

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but to put the burden on one part of the political spectrum to police their responses, to squelch their own political views and not have this apply to others feels quite unfair.


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Nobody is being asked to squelch their political views. People are being asked to respect one another. If someone wants to start a thread about raising/cutting taxes it is reasonable to expect that the thread won't be overun with people that want to talk the government being immoral. When your posts contribute nothing to the topic at hand and serve only to cause others to leave they are no longer welcome.

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Come on. If someone posts an OP on how to test whether someone is a witch, does it "contribute nothing to the topic at hand" to question whether or not we should be testing for witches? If others choose to leave because they cannot take someone questioning their premises, a perfectly legitimate avenue of argument, how is that the questioner's fault or problem?

You're simply attempting to control discussion and exclude important fundamental questions that deserve to be addressed.

[Borodog]

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ACers a request.

I have a request for those of you who frequently start threads showing examples of where you believe the state is over stepping its bounds, taking away freedom, driving out business, etc in an effort to demonstrate why you hold your political beliefs. these posts are perfectly acceptable and well within the realm of political discussion

however my request is that neilso or someone else could create one thread where you then post these examples from the news and have the general debate about the merits of Acism instead of creating a bunch of separate threads.

as the thread grows and becomes too burdensome just let me or another mod know, and you can create another.

thanks.

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Can we have the Bush-haters restricted to posting in a single thread? How about the conservatives? How about we just have 3 giant threads that everything goes into? [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[Vagos]

From other thread, you told me to reply here,

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All,

deleted a few posts in this thread. one thing I would like to see is for arguments on the AC/non AC type when the OP is about a specific area is for replies to stick to that subject instead of going to a general state vs. no state line which I see happen. there will be plenty of broad philosophy type discussions for that so I want specific area threads to be more focused and unique.


this will of course be a judgment call on the part of myself and the mods and there will be times you disagree but please keep that out of the thread.

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This seems kind of unreasonable to me. Let's look at the OP of the charity thread.

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In trying to deal with the whether there would be sufficient charitable efforts made in an AC society, I haven't seen ACists address the following consideration:

It would seem to me that there is a sizeable portion of the population who, with respect to a large range of the chartable/welfare programs x, would agree with both of the following statements:

1.) I would prefer not to give $z to support x.
2.) I would vote for a law forcing all people to give $z to support x.

That is, they believe that the the charitable effort is worthwhile is given the sufficient funding that forcing everyone to contribute would provide. They are happy to be forced to provide this funding if everyone else is forced to. But given the opportunity to be a free-rider, they would do so.
In short, I think there are lot of programs than many people believe are worthy of support, but only if the burden of support it borne by all, even those who don't want to support it. These programs may be funded by the state, but will disappear in an AC world.

BTW, I'm really uninterested in any sort of "taxation is theft" discussion. I'm just interested in knowing how these programs would exist in AC society , or what would replace them.

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Basically, he is telling us force is alright for the purpose of the welfare of the poor. He doesn't want to hear that force is wrong. Hell, he even tells us the answer before he even asks question(see bolded parts). How can an AC honestly debate this topic without getting into a state vs no-state morality debate? We don't have any charts or graphs about AC so OF COURSE we can't show you how much charity will exist in AC. Our position(well most of us anyways, excluding utilitarian ACists) is one of morality. Restricting us from debating on the "general state vs no state" line is unreasonable I think. I realize a lot of threads get bogged down by the same old argument, but I say if that's where the momentum of the argument is going, so be it. I don't want to see content over-modded in politics. I respect your desire for keeping the debate civilized and keeping offensive material out of the matter but don't mod debating tactics too. Consider this my plea to be lenient on modding the direction of where threads go. It's politics, discussions should be allowed to go wherever they are going.

[RR]

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Restricting us from debating on the "general state vs no state" line is unreasonable I think.

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It would appear that in taking this approach you are running from a legitimate criticism of AC. There are some services that the government is quite good at providing. I am also certain the market can provide these services and deal with the free rider issues. When you retreat to the default position of the state being bad because it provides services by force you are repeating yourself rather than contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way.

[NeBlis]

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I don't want to see content over-modded in politics.

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It is quite likely to be. I am going to hope for the best but I'm not too optimistic considering what I've heard so far. I hope that I am wrong in my pessimism.

*crosses fingers and thinks happy thoughts*

[Dan.]

[img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] *sigh* 3 more mods....nothing personal, I just didn't want to see any.

[valenzuela]

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*sigh* 3 more mods....nothing personal, I just didn't want to see any.

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