Why not give James a trial run unmoderated? If he's homophobic or bigoted in his writing, let the board see him for what he is. Who knows - the spectre of that might well keep him 'self moderated'.
Board Policy: "Please do not post messages that are simply mean, or meant to cause trouble for trouble's sake."
From a recent post by Puck: "What Bush did is clearly illegal and an impeachable offense. I have no comment on this as it is inexcusable, but I am a Bush lapdog and so will make a feeble attempt to shift your attention away from it. I am such a dyed-in-the-wool Republican that I prefer the deaths of innocents and the wholesale rape of our country to making an admission that I was wrong in backing such an amoral idiot."
I am sick to death of your discrimination against Conservatives. You have repeatedly failed to clear a number of my comments for posting, while allowing this kind of name-calling to be leveled at Conservatives. It's your Board, and I suppose you can do what you want. But how about a little fairness. If you want a left-wing echo chamber, then call it something like demoncraticunderground.com (oops! already taken).
Furthermore, spare us the fraud that there's some kind of Board policy against "post[ing] messages that are simply mean, or meant to cause trouble for trouble's sake." Allowing a post that calls someone a "lapdog," or allows the typical Democrat idiocy that Republicans are somehow "mean" or "prefer the death of innocents and the wholesale rape of our country" belies the notion that there is any such policy, at least one in effect when such comments are leveled against Conservatives.
If you can't be more fair-minded, then at least be more honest.
You insult people, so you have to expect that you will receive some insults. Puck is not moderated; therefore, I do not always read his posts the way I do yours.
Do not presume to know my political leanings. Frankly, my eyes glaze over when I begin to read most of the far-anything rants. It is your own prejudice and/or your anger at not being given free rein on these boards that has you accusing me of being unfair to "Conservatives." I am not trying to create a balance of liberal and conservative ideas here. I am mostly just scanning unapproved messages like yours for words like "moron," "fag," and other pejoratives.
Staff is approving new moderators and adding them, and this board's new moderator should be added soon, which will make me very happy.
Why not give James a trial run unmoderated? If he's homophobic or bigoted in his writing, let the board see him for what he is. Who knows - the spectre of that might well keep him 'self moderated'.
I am an on center moderate, so I cannot be accused of being a leftwing zealot. I have read posts from the GND and I have not detected bias toward any political position. I am sure that people who you view as your leftwing adversaries can tell you about being moderated by the GND, if you would only listen.
The fact that she is censoring you has heartened me to the fact that she's working hard at being evenhanded about it.
But I would point out that you are deluded if you don't think that YOUR rants have, in many cases, been WORTHY of censorship. I KNOW that the ones that she has censored of MINE have been in the cases where I went over the line, and called you or bribite by the terms I actually think apply to you and your way of thinking (to the extent that any thinking at all is actually involved). And I can assure you that those terms are NOT appropriate for civil discourse, and I was, in retrospect, GLAD that GND had chosen to filter some of my most extreme posts rather than post them.
If you are genuinely looking in the mirror and see in yourself an objective, rational-thinking centrist, all I can say is that you need to replace that funhouse carnival mirror with a somewhat less distorted one.
He didn't call you meaningless, insulting names, here. He took your political POV and told you what he thought it looked like to him, grotesque as that may be to you. With skill, thought and effort, you can counter it, unless you truly have a weak and losing argument to begin with, which means you lacked skill, thought and effort when you developed it.
In which case, calling on an authority figure, whether the moderator, the government, or the ayatollah when you're opinion is challenged strongly only protects you from the responsibility of defending it. Further, it also gives certain of your ideas an aura of sacredness, almost like it's blasphemous to oppose them.
Frankly, it also makes you look like a wannabe "lapdog," whether you like the term or not.
Well, one man's satire is another man's violation of policy.
And you really missed the point.
I have no problem with defending my point of view, or having it criticized.
I do have a problem with an appeal to objective criteria that is selectively and discriminatorily applied, as it clearly has been here. It's frequently a vehicle for censorship or, as here, viewpoint discrimination. And that's certainly the owner's prerogative. It simply should be outed for what it is.
Whenever I post to this or any other forum, I follow a simple principle that I have believed in all my life - Even though I am posting anonymously, from the comfort of my home, I never write any message that I would not also say if I were standing face to face with the subject of the post.
It is too damned easy to throw about insults of other's intelligence and get into pissing matches from the safety of a keyboard.
And James86, don't get your pants so wadded up over Puck's posts. They do a great job of showing how wacky and ill-informed he is.
What I was attempting to do was to goad you into answering the post you mocked. Diverting attention from the subject matter is how talking (pumpkin) heads like Limbaugh deal with points that are incontestable - but it's transparent to any reasoning human. I would much rather you address the point of Bush committing what seems to me a clearly impeachable offense, playing fast and loose with allocated funds to advance his agenda. I wholeheartedly believe that innocent lives, Iraqi and civilian, were and are being sacrificed for an immoral and unnecessary war. That does not mean that I don't consider Hussein a bad man deserving of removal by any means, or that I would prefer him in power - but what is under way in Iraq turns my stomach. Our country is being raped - economically, having turned a stunning surplus into an historical deficit in the space of a year, rewarding outsourcing of jobs, handing sweetheart contracts to cronies (as a direct result of the abovementioned military action), promoting an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, using law enforcement and intelligence resources to ferret out victimless crimes such as prostitution and the manufacture and sale of drug paraphernalia at the expense of national defense, not to mention the litany of abuses to the environment and the gutting of environmental laws to the benefit of business - I could go on, but I hope you can see my point. I would be grateful if you would deign to actually address these things instead of posting snide comments about my character and that of anyone who disagrees with you. I love my country and I suspect you do too - and dissent and questioning authority are not treason but rather one of the things that made this nation the great place it is.
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