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 Post subject: A completely open, non-private request to unlock that topic ...
PostPosted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 12:09 pm 
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because it would seem that I have inadvertently shut down all the debating which I find interesting here due to the implicit threat that I will go running to Mommy, and a little flaming is better than no debating at all. I apologise to all and promise to let the respected moderators do their own jobs henceforth.

ObDebate: the contents of a private message should never be made public unless there is some actual illegality (such as anti-semitism, murder threats, et al.) contained therein. A private message is intended to be just that; on a forum such as this one, it is perfectly possible to open up a topic for everyone to see if the message is not intended to be private.


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 Post subject: Re: A completely open, non-private request to unlock that topic ...
PostPosted: Sun Jan 16, 2005 5:35 pm 
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Tamayo wrote:
because it would seem that I have inadvertently shut down all the debating which I find interesting here...


Heh, honestly, the only reason I wasn't responding to your proof thread is that I felt we were arguing at cross-purposes. You seemed to be looking at it from a strictly mathematical-analytical point of view, and were bringing in a lot of mathematical theory that I'm simply not familiar with and that I wasn't even sure applied that clearly to the argument at hand.

(Incidentally, I asked WI why he hadn't added his two cents to that thread; apparently, he "pretty much agreed with Tamayo in a practical sense and [me] in a broad sense, and so didn't have much to add."(*))

As for the Philosophical Brawl Thread, I'm just genuinely too lazy to write that Descartes post as I had promised before the thread was locked. However, I will note that the philosophical brawl thread, being focused on such a general and timeless topic, sort of transcends the particular debates that occur within it, and thus I'd disagree with locking it because of the dynamics of the current argument that is happening in the thread.

So yeah, that's my excuse for not posting. :P Also, since college is starting up again for me this week, I'll probably wind up posting to the forums less in general, and considering how time-consuming it is for me to participate in this particular forum, I may wind up hardly posting to DC at all until summer comes around.

(*) The above quote was taken from a Private Message, which, incidentally, brings us to the second half of Tamayo's post:

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ObDebate: the contents of a private message should never be made public unless there is some actual illegality (such as anti-semitism, murder threats, et al.) contained therein.


In the USA, at least, anti-semitism is not illegal, and neither is making death threats over the internet, as far as I know. As a matter of fact, there's really not much one could say via PM that would be flat-out illegal, what with the First Amendment and all. I suppose if one made terrorist threats over PM, it might be a good idea for the person receiving the PM to publicize it, but even then, I don't think making terrorist threats over the internet would be illegal per se, if one were bluffing. Maybe not; I'm not really sure about these sort of things.

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A private message is intended to be just that; on a forum such as this one, it is perfectly possible to open up a topic for everyone to see if the message is not intended to be private.


...But sometimes, one forum member may want to say something that would only be of interest to or apply to another forum member. For example, when WI came back, he not only posted a thread about it, but he PMed me, because I was on hiatus at the time. He didn't inform me of his return via PM because he wanted it to be kept private; he had already made a thread about it. He PMed me because by the time I returned, that thread would most likely be out of view, and so he wanted to make sure that I was aware of his return.

While the forums are group discussion, PMs are basically one person telling another person something individually. PMs should thus be handled the same way one would handle something one was told by another person when no one else was around. If it's obviously something the other person would not mind being publicized, then it's probably okay to publicize it. If, on the other hand, it is clear from context that the message should be kept secret, or it is explicitly stated that this is the case, then one obviously shouldn't mention it to other people. In other words, this is all a matter of prudence and common sense.


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 Post subject: To paraphrase a famous quote the exact origin of which is hard to pin down...
PostPosted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 11:10 am 
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Tamayo wrote:
because it would seem that I have inadvertently shut down all the debating which I find interesting here due to the implicit threat that I will go running to Mommy, and a little flaming is better than no debating at all.

No need to ascribe to fear of draconian mod intervention what would probably be better attributed to laziness :)

Debate Club in general tends to not move very fast. You may not have noticed it before, but there have been plenty of times when it went for a few days or longer without any new posts. As I said in my PM, I didn't think the Brawl thread needed to be locked, but I didn't have anything major planned for it and certainly wasn't staying away from DC because of it.

(I've got some longwindedposts in the works for other threads in DC, but those tend to take a while dependent on how much time I have to goof off at work...)

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Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
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