From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue May 28 2002 - 21:21:48 MDT
Hal writes
> Lee Corbin writes:
> > Well, Dictionary.com suggests
>
> Come on, guys, duelling dictionaries is a waste of time here. Who cares
> what the word censorship means? The meaning of a word has no bearing
> on what our policies should be with regard to topical focus.
Well, it is the name of this thread, and since it was
suggested that "censorship" involves violence or the
threatened use of force, it didn't seem out of place
to bring up its definition. Moreover, a reminder in
this case is especially warranted, since accusations
of censorship had been made, and there was uncertainty
about whether that was appropriate.
> > Some people might, for example, argue that the subject of infanticide
> > *would* be on-topic for Extropians, since it's interwoven with the
> > extropian topics of freedom and sentience. Others, naturally, would
> > find the alleged tie-in far less persuasive. So who decides?
>
> First you seek consensus. If not possible, then the list owner may
> step in. Ultimately if there can be no agreement, lists sometimes
> fragment as multiple other lists are created to cover many of the
> same topics but with different moderation policies.
Okay. But consensus probably doesn't mean uninamity, right?
It would take at only one person to keep maintaining that
something was off topic, or only two that it was on topic.
Into this fuzzy situation, list moderators are probably
invited from time to time, and one would hope that they
would lay down the law, so to speak, only when the situation
had in their eyes gotten completely out of hand.
> > If I saw a topic that struck me as totally unrelated to this
> > forum, and for some reason I lurked it awhile out of general
> > curiosity, then I might finally post to it and say, "What has
> > this to do with this forum's theme?". If the response was, in
> > effect, "nothing, really", then I'd suggest they go elsewhere.
>
> That's what usually happens! Honest, 90% of the time that's all
> there is to it.
>
> > But the hard cases won't turn out that way, of course.
>
> I've been wanting to write a thread on "hard cases make bad law" and how
> it may apply to our recent discussions. But I haven't had the time to
> develop it fully. I'll just say now that hard cases don't occur very
> often in practice.
That all sounds very fine to me.
Lee
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