If you find that your stuff is being deleted, then it would seem that you need to find a way to get your point across without offending the people that delete your messages.
If your comment is "I like apples and bananas" - that fits into the MD forum rather well. Probably won't be deleted.
If you say "How can a reasonable person support a war?" Well, this is technically a
Prejudicial Fallacy. You've just said that anybody that supports any war is unreasonable. If somebody before that message said "I support this war", then you would be saying that that individual is unreasonable. Not very flattering. And the rule on JavaRanch is "be nice", so it would seem that such a post would be a flagrant violation of the rules of JavaRanch. Needs to be deleted.
One of the things I've been contemplating lately is shutting down MD because nice people are turning mean in there. I don't like that. That's not what JavaRanch is all about.
I want to keep the MD forum for jokes and light chit chat.
I don't want flame wars or pissing matches.
I'm trying to come up with solutions to get what I want and so far this is the best I've come up with: just delete stuff that violates the "be nice" rule. And this can be interpretted in many ways by the many administrators of the forum. So each message will have to meet the standards of all of the administrators.
There will probably be too many messages deleted, but at least I'll be a little closer to what I want.
I think talk about the wars and other heavy stuff can probably be done on other sites. And there, folks can really say what they want.
Would I have deleted your message if you were saying I was unreasonble? Let me think about world war 2: I think it's possible that more people would have died if people did not try to stop Hitler. Therefore, it is possible that world war 2 was the right thing to do. And yes, a lot of good and decent people died in that war. But the statement "How can a reasonable person support a war?" would make me think that I am not allowed to even think about fighting Hitler's atrocities. That doesn't seem right. I should be allowed to at least think about fighting the bad guy.
I, too, would delete your message.
I'm guessing that what you really meant to say is "I think there is never sufficient reason for any war."
I could never in good conscience delete this message. In fact, if somebody else deleted this message, I would think that all the other moderators and sheriffs would verbally beat the crap out of the deletor.
Well, unless it was part of big thread of all sorts of bad stuff and the easiest thing to do was to just delete the whole thread.
[ March 22, 2003: Message edited by:
Paul Wheaton ]
(oh, that'll get me in trouble for sure)
