I can't think of any regular at this forum that hasn't had a post deleted for one reason or an other. You have to understand that the emphasis here is on debate that is free of subject changing, distortion, namecalling, and dodging, etc. Without our very basic guidelines (which are not unusual, they are generally found in moderated debates), we would end up with very confusing threads ... unfortunately that is exactly what some desire.The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust is therefore promoting closed debate.
The most blatant form of closure is the Catch 22 whereby posters are restricted to 'one point, one post', yet someone who strings together several posts, each containing a relevant point, will earn a ban, as Roberto found out here. This closed moderation style makes it impossible to demonstrate relationships and convergences between pieces of evidence. It deliberately generates the assumption that the only true sample is a sample of 1. It is thus the equivalent of limiting a prosecuting attorney to one exhibit or one witness in his closing statement, and not allowing him to infer any relationships between the pieces of evidence he presented during the trial. Conversely, this sample of 1 is then used to negate all the evidence that is not in the sample, on 'falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus' grounds.
CODOH has a paranoid approach to the 'integrity' of documents but what about the integrity of its own debate threads? In the light of Hargis's admission that he "can't think of any regular at this forum that hasn't had a post deleted", how can we trust any thread on CODOH as representing an accurate record of the discussion?
If Hargis had been living in Moscow in the 1930's, Stalin would have given him a job as editor of the party newspaper.
When a denier accepts Hargis's rules, he has learned to love Big Brother.
6 comments:
Bingo!
I don't believe some of their rules are outside the norm, such as the "no namecalling" rule. That is a good idea since name calling on a public forum is rude and does not add to reasoned debate. However the one point only option per post rule is ridiculous. Do they expect the user to post repeatedly, likely taking up more space on the board, eating up bandwidth and giving them higher post counts . . . just so that they can make a detailed argument?
"Do they expect the user to post repeatedly, likely taking up more space on the board, eating up bandwidth and giving them higher post counts . . . just so that they can make a detailed argument?"
No, because users doing that are immediately accused of spamming and banned.
Figures.
It's like the competitions by pseudo-spetics like that Victor Zammit's "Prove the afterlife doesen't exist" competition. It's completely unfair, nonsensical and a waste of time to try to have any reasonable "debate" at CODOH.
"Reasonable" debate CAN be held there, but it is prevented. All of the rules only apply to "believers", whereas deniers are basically given a free hand to do as they like.
The tactic is typically to make "believers" jump through enough hoops and suffer numerous deletions to the point of exhaustion, when they no longer participate.
And Hargis then links to the resultant thread to 'show' how the poster was supposedly 'thrashed' (in his dreams only, of course), when infact the thread was mutilated by his editorship.
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