@Fweeb
Firstly, appreciate your input imo shedding further light on the decision too lock that OT discussion.
For the sake of clarity I chimed in rather late, appending a comment subjectively thought relevant to the topic. Perhaps with hindsight included overtones of bias against those elected entities especially in my region both on a State and Federal level which collectively had mismanaged a raft of national disasters sequentially afflicted my country since June 2019 :
Mega Bush Fires
COVID
Hotel Quarantine
Mega Floods
âŚand now currently a pretty much botched nation wide vaccine rollout that may not be complete until early 1st quarter 2022?!
If not for the strict, well practically damn near heroic adherence to public health guidance by the Australian populace at large, I really dread to think where we would be otherwise as consequently illustrated elsewhere.
Anyway, a mostly thankless task âdamned if you do / damned if you donâtâ voluntary role moderating such huge divers active community as this site has morphed into so my apologies if contributed to shutting down the aforementioned thread.
I donât get this thought process. You didnât specify what kind of an art project Iâve posted but then you conclude it has nothing to do with carburators. What if I posted a model of Toyota Corolla carburator and then there was a discussion of cleaning that very same carburator, still off-topic?
More relevant to vaccine thread; what if I posted something titled 1970 Toyota Corolla carburator but then people told me it is a carburator for another car model. Having looked at reference images for so long, I would question their expertise. Then the cleaning discussion happen, they say they own the car etc. etc. Seems like you think it is fair for a mod to come and close my thread at this point.
What is the harm if there are a few off-topic posts in a thread? Why is it so important that mods must fire a couple warning shots and then close the thread?
Not true. Original thread was about vaccines and the virus, discussion stayed on topic. Iâve alread had this discussion with @DeepBlender . You draw an arbitrarily small border around the post and say itâs off-topic if replies step out of these borders just a little. This is why I call this thought-policing.
If Iâm going to be required to keep my opinions and arguments to a list of approved items, let us publish that. With that knowledge I can make an informed decision to enter a discussion or not.
Itâs speech-policing. Itâs complicated, controversial, and necessary. Sure mods will take unpopular actions or make mistakes from time to time. Itâs still their job to make the (oftentimes difficult) decision.
Yes, they have to rely on their experience and judgement. Yes, itâs subjective by definition. There is no âtrueâ course of action. Only what they think is best.
And political discussions are generally unfruitful and guaranteed to go ugly. They have to draw the line somewhere.
It has been mentioned early on in the thread that going in that direction is considered off-topic. That usually doesnât change. This is neither though-policing, nor censorship or trying to push through some sort of agenda. It is called moderation.
Now, if you believe their interpretation is too narrow, you can start a new thread, where those discussion points are clearly not off-topic. Thatâs how it is handled very often in this forum.
If there was an agenda or through-policing, you would definitely not be allowed to start your own thread about that topic.
No, it wouldnât have been off-topic in that case. Did I really need a preface that the artwork was about a rainbow pony?..
I counted about 15% of posts in that topic actually talking about vaccines and concrete data, i.e. the subject matter. The rest varies, from a bit of joking around (which is never a bad thing taken in moderation), to speculation (in a topic about dangers of doing so!), to outright conspiracy political land, which is something we try to avoid here. Which started early on, which is why Jason intervened the first time. An hour later it couldâve been me intervening, and personally, Iâd say I wouldâve closed it off there and then, and we wouldnât have been having this conversation.
I have made my point and we have had a discussion around this. Even mods were kind enough to express their opinions on the subject. We have disagreements but it will feel like repeating myself if I keep responding here. OTOH I feel a bit unkind not to respond to a reply. Anyway, all I want to say is that we have had a discussion here.
When they have total control, yes. In reality it doesnât work like one day itâs all sunshine and daisies and the next day a wild dictator appears. If you find this subject interesting you can find examples, in recent history, of dictators having this kind of rhetoric and then subsequently sending people to jail.
I take objection to this language. If you truly feel that weâre running a dictatorship then I suggest you find another community that better matches your personal preferences.
Our biggest rule here is âdonât be an assholeâ and youâre getting very close to that boundary nowâŚ
Correct. You canât go around here calling either other members or moderators dictators, even if indirectly.
@muhuk youâre well aware of our policy now - if you donât agree to it, please leave. If you continue to challenge me or other moderators on our policies, I will suspend you for a week.
To be fair, the term âconcrete dataâ can be subjective as well. Many sites for instance will only accept data and information direct from the WHO and from national governments, and we all know how history shows world governments as having an impeccable track record of telling the truth (hint; they donât have such a record, which is why the total shutdown of debate is concerning).
I am not talking about this site specifically, as there does appear to be actual room for debate on this forum as long as it remains civil and intelligent.
this is the heart of the matter.