Outrage holds an unfortunate amount of sway in the digital era... — VagabondSpectre

That's right, and people routinely move from slight annoyance to outrage in a half-step. Outrage is just rhetorically more useful. I don't think that anybody owns history. Whatever we are -- holocaust survivors, Native Americans, gay men, blacks, whites, Norwegian autoworkers, Turkish farmers -- we don't own the history we are involved in.

There are many thousands of unique groups with particular historical experiences and no group holds a patent on itself, or its own history. We can elect our biographers if we want, but if someone else also wants to tell our story, there is nothing we can or should do to stop them from telling it. Once told, if we don't like it we have legal recourse. We can also write it ourselves.

If the streets of NY are the property of those who live there... As such the public has the right to dismiss either of them at will, or both. — VagabondSpectre

More likely the streets of NY are the property of the City of New York.

It's getting harder for artists to make art that is both original and doesn't offend too much to be tolerated. What's an artist to do? Art has spun around from hard core realism to abstract expressionism.

They just go ahead and paint what they want in whatever style they want and let the paint chips fall where they may. Method is no longer an edge that can be sharpened. Everything has been done. So, what's left is social statement. Here's an example of Sam Durant's work:



It is not an original work of art; it's just a slogan picked up from the Zeitgeist feed.

Durant got himself in hot water at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last week. He had built a sculpture that looked like a large gallows and referenced the hanging of 32 Dakota men in Minnesota in 1862 (among other hangings that included Saddam Hussein). There would have been more hanged in 1862, but Lincoln had pardoned some of the men).

Once news got out that the sculpture would be featured in the renovated Sculpture Garden, Dakota people objected on the grounds that "this isn't Durant's story to tell." They weren't consulted, and they objected strenuously. The conclusion of the story is that the Gallows sculpture will be given to the Dakota community who will tear it down and burn it.

Thoughts — VagabondSpectre

I'd have made the dog bigger.

The problem is that socialists seem to think that resources are infinite. — Harry Hindu

Some socialists seem to think this, and some capitalists also think so.

Human ingenuity is a great thing, but we should have learned by now that there are serious costs to using up resources that are readily available, and going after resources that aren't so readily available. Surely, the planet still contains a lot of resources. Just as surely, the easy materials have been extracted.

Even then, there isn't enough money that we can take away from the obscenely rich to pull everyone out of poverty. Who do you choose to keep in poverty? Like I said, we either make everyone poor, or keep things like they are with some tweaks. — Harry Hindu

Liquidating the wealth of the rich and distributing it evenly among 7 billion people isn't what is being proposed. Certainly, the rich would lose their wealth, especially capital assets like land, factories, shipping, retail properties, etc. They will also be divested of any interests they have in capital assets. What they will be left with is a box of personal property (i.e., their favorite blanket) an outbuilding to live in, and odds and ends.

The capital assets of the formerly rich will be turned to produce for the needs of the people. Food, clothing, housing, mass transit, cultural goods (books, music, etc.), and such basic things. The People will need to take charge of this production, because the rich will no longer be hiring overseers. This presents no problem. Hired hands already perform all of the labor that creates wealth. Everyone from managers to janitors is already at work in the plants.

The tricky part will be coordination. Resources, factories, and needs will have to be sorted out and matched up. This can be done through a sort of market system.

Like this. So even if the smartest, most informed people in the nation go to vote, their vote doesn't matter. They don't have sufficient votes. In the end it's still the below average that decides. — Agustino

You are assuming that the "below average" (unenlightened's stupid, the ignorant and the irrational) would somehow vote differently than the "average" or "above average". How well people perceive their own interests is quite possibly only weakly correlated with intelligence.

Those who fear the changes that vigorous response to global warming might bring (no more coal mining, for instance, no more dirty industries of which there are many) and in which their jobs are located are likely to vote for a candidate who does not promise a vigorous response -- or better, no response at all. The same thinking might apply to very wealthy people who own dirty industries -- coal, oil, chemicals, etc. Their wealth, instead of their jobs, might be very negatively affected by a vigorous global warming effort.

It is also possible that there are dull air heads and not terribly thoughtful people who vote for candidates in favor of strong responses to global warming because they entertain fantasies about a purified, fresh new world free of the smell of asphalt.

Only in the long run does global warming matter, and as John Maynard Keynes observed, "In the long run we are all dead". No one -- smart, stupid, or indifferent -- is good at long range planning and implementation. Wise people understand that there is such a thing as long-term consequences, but even wise people can not figure out how to implement consistent policy over 100 years time.

Trump's walking away from the Paris Agreement is not an example of stupidity; it's an example of reprehensible, counter-productive policy. Trump is choosing to appeal to his base, and to fuck over the longer term interests of the American People, and the world's people.

The splendid jargonized pyrotechnic caricatures of postmodernism discussed in your references are apt demonstrations of what happens when people come to believe their own bullshit.

Bullshit took off in the 1960s, in ever so many ways.


Google Ngram

But Jesus does not seem to have been interested in redistribution of wealth in order to maximize welfare... — Cuthbert

Right. Salvation won't be brought about by a redistribution of wealth. What is critical in Matthew 25:35-36 are acts of mercy and unconditional love freely performed. Salvation is one thing, economic and social policy is something else.

But still the most *profitable* (not the best) thing for any individual is to freeload on the charitable giving of others, to take all the benefits of social cohesion and to pay none of the costs. — Cuthbert

There is a slope of diminishing returns here. Freeloading discourages the charitable giving of others, ultimately resulting in the coarsening of society.

Your position is spot on. Fair and square -- no exploitation -- a fortune of almost any size is unobtainable.

After they get done exploiting the workers, they exploited the consumers -- giving and taking a way at the same time. Yes, Microsoft did do away with the rather opaque command based Disk Operating System (DOS) but it also imposed another monopoly of software on PC consumers (outside of Apple). Later other OS came along, but they weren't in a very good position to challenge Windows.

Yes, this is true. Globalism though has mitigated that fear along with the abundance of information at one's fingertips. I don't think a cataclysm would set back us as a civilization that dramatically. — Question

Question, think! Most of the information at your fingertips is dependent on a continuous supply of electricity. Delete the electrical supply (lots of cataclysms would do that) and the information at your fingertips disappears, some of it/most of it forever. Turn off the electrical supply and don't turn it back on again... how long do you think it would take the next generation, or the one after that, or the one after that, to figure out what all those little black boxes had been for? How long to figure out how to reconstruct modern science--from near scratch?

In a post cataclysm novel A Canticle for Leibowitz it takes roughly 1000 years to figure out electricity again. Sounds about right to me.

I guess this is just me whining about why people tend to appeal to ideals when the fact of the matter is that historically idealistic notions of governance don't stand the test of time. Perhaps only democracy, yet the concept of 'democracy' seems at odds with idealistic beliefs about governance. — Question

I guess, but I am not sure what you are trying to get across here. Clarify, perhaps.

We have barely tapped the surface of this planet in regards to minerals and other natural resources. — Question

There is something problematic about this statement:

First, there is a difference between easy to get and hard to get. It takes a mammoth amount of energy to obtain the "easy to get" resources. Think of the huge open pit iron and copper mines. Those resources were easy. for the most part, those resources have been extracted and used.

Second, the "hard to get" mineral resources are dissolved, very deep (too deep), or very dispersed and diluted--even on dry land.

There may be a lot of oil in the ground, but when it takes more energy to suck it out than is available in the oil, then the extraction process is over. All resources have to be "affordable" to be useful.

There are megatons of minerals to be had, but they have to be had at a reasonable cost and with only manageable damage to the environment. Strip-mining the ocean floor for mineral nodules might not be a great idea.

Thus, this somewhat justifies my sentiment that most philosophers are committing an error in omitting what the future may be like with respect to the past, and instead propose monolithic and idealistic conceptions of society and governance. — Question

Any "general thinker" should try to get a grip on as much past and future as he can manage: understand where we have come from (not an easy task) and where we seem to be headed (a more difficult path). Some cataclysm can create altogether new and unexpected possibilities for the future (like the meteoric hit in the Yucatan that ruined things for the big lizards and created an opening for us mammals). Cataclysms are rare, though.

I like the analysis of the industrial revolutions (which began a bit before the steam engine and ends in the early 20th century, 200 years later (give or take a few). We now know the limits of matter and energy. (No, that doesn't mean that everything has been discovered and invented, only that we now know what we have--and don't have--to work with.)

We can be confident that this terrestrial ball is ALL THERE IS for us. We either survive here, or we don't survive at all. Decamping to a planet around another star is a fantasy. Setting up a shop on the moon or Mars is technically feasible for a few dozen people, maybe, but as a "new territory" for the species they are both non-starters.

We can be confident that if we do not preserve and enhance the environment we have (even though somewhat degraded) we reduce our chances of biological and cultural survival into the longer-term future. If our biological survival is quite likely--sex and DNA will take care of that--our cultural survival is only as certain as generation-to-generation maintenance. A full set of culture has to be successfully transmitted from one generation to the next. When the transmission is less than complete, the culture can be gone in as few as 3 generations -- maybe less.

When the western Roman Empire went out of business, a millennium was required to recover the cultural goods that had been everyday fare in the empire. A collapse of our culture--happening rapidly or slowly--might take longer to recover, likely not much less.

It's not obviously feasible, so if colonizing a planet belonging to another star is a serious suggestion, then you should suggest a feasible way to do it. That's my point.

Sivad, what is your plan for colonizing space? When? Where? How?

The earth is ultimately a deathtrap and the longer we remain earthbound the more we run the risk of being wiped out by any of the many natural cataclysms that are certain to occur within the next millennia or so. Fortune favors the bold, better to shoot for the stars than be sitting ducks. — Sivad

For soft, juicy thin-skinned endo-skeletoned beasts like ourselves, I imagine the whole universe is pretty much a death trap.

True, there are various cataclysms stalking us, some of our own making. And riding our fleets of interstellar ships to comfy planets that we don't know about will involve risks of other cataclysms and catastrophes.

Fortune is a tricky bitch -- don't trust her.

Game of cards bit from a W. C. Fields movie (1930s...)

a player: "Is this a game of chance?"
Fields (the dealer) "No, not the way I play it."

But who was taking the risks? — Agustino

Everybody. The investment groups that fund large projects; the entrepreneur who has put up his own funds and borrowed more; the employees who risk injury on the job, unemployment, and lost opportunities. Not all risks are the same. But, the worker who depends on a job to exist in many ways has much more to lose than the investors and bankers who will not starve if the project falls apart. Entrepreneurs are sometimes bankrupted.

So I think this "original accumulation" is often the product of either (1) chance, (2) hard work, (3) catching the right opportunities. — Agustino

Chance certainly plays a role. Having the right idea at the right time in the right place and pitching it to the right investor is often a matter of sheer, unadulterated good luck. Of course entrepreneurs work hard: To bed late, up early, on the phones, running around all day negotiating, taking risks, doing research -- all that. They hope to be rewarded handsomely.

The hard work that is generally not rewarded so handsomely is the hard work of people hired to turn the ideas into profits. Like the employees at Walmart that VagabondSpectre was talking about. Or the employees of lots of companies who are not well paid. Apple is not the norm.

The exploitation that I was referencing earlier is just the bedrock of manufacturing. Workers create products which are worth more than their wages. Even though the UAW workers at GM, Ford, and Chrysler were well paid--very well paid after WWII--and even though the auto companies payrolls were gargantuan, the workers produced automobiles which sold for far more than the workers made. That's why autos were blue chip stocks for a long time. Thats why the old American Telephone and Telegraph company (ATT - the Bell System) was the bluest of blue-chip stocks: their employees produced products and services at a low enough cost that the revenues of the companies greatly exceeded them.

The shareholders of the auto companies weren't working; the board of directors of the companies weren't working. It was the manufacturing workers who produced the profits.

As many companies have discovered, someone else's opportunities can be the occasion of their collapse as well as their growth.

o be honest, I've yet to see a supermarket - even in my own country - that doesn't do (or try to do) EXACTLY the same. — Agustino

That's right. All sorts of businesses are jockeying to be in a commanding position where they can dictate as many terms to customers, employees, and suppliers as possible. Behind a lot of this dictation are the institutions of finance that are demanding maximum profits.

I think Amazon might be different in some ways. — VagabondSpectre

Amazon is following a different model, in that they have grown the volume of the business enormously without producing a lot of profit for investors. My understanding is that they plow profits back into the business for expansion purposes.

Aside from selling stuff, Amazon is a big server farm operator. Google and Amazon both use extraordinary amounts of electricity to run the warehouses full of little black boxes serving up things like The Philosophy Forum and Facebook.

But retail has been in flux for a good century and a half. One wave of innovation after another has occurred: First the big department stores up ended retail; then the catalog companies -- early Amazons, really -- came along. In small towns, the regional chain stores (selling groceries) disturbed the local market place. The shopping center was invented. Then more and bigger chains, and finally Walmart. The department stores have mostly died off. There are hundreds of dying or dead shopping centers--structurally sound as far as the concrete goes, but without any business, no cars in the lot.

When wall-mart is through destroying local businesses they jack up their prices and hire all the out-of work community members all on part-time shifts for minimum wage. They contribute nothing to any community other than to drown it in a temporarily affordable wave of stuff. — VagabondSpectre

Walmart doesn't just destroy the competition, they are very hard on their suppliers -- forcing down prices until the companies are forced to take their manufacturing to the lowest paid workforce overseas or go broke.

And not everything in Walmart stores is remarkably cheap. A lot of their prices (for things like electronics) are about the same as Target or other mass merchandisers. Specials are cheap, of course.

They aren't unique, but they are a very bad model.

I wish a UK labor person would provide a good "25 words or less" explanation what Corbyn does or does not stand for (might take 25 pages or more) and why there is so much disaffection directed his way -- at least, that's the impression I get from the Guardian.

Wall-mart — VagabondSpectre

Good example. Amazon?

The past is never past.

We have a lot of technology on hand already. Here's a picture of the Erie Canal, which it turns out, is coming in handy for moving cargo that is too long, too large, and too heavy to move on railroad or truck. The cargo are tanks (12 in all) for the Genesee Brewery in Rochester, New York.



Twelve enormous beer tanks, headed to the Genesee Beer Company in Rochester, are among the oversize cargo populating the Erie Canal. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

I think you are quite right about asymmetric advantages. Possessing substantial advantages (the well-defended high ground; or rich resources; or a corner on beans; or relatively more cash than others -- whatever it is) lays the groundwork for maintaining or gaining more advantages. If one is lucky or careful and doesn't lose it, the advantage keeps delivering.

In life, somehow an "original accumulation" has to happen.

Sometimes the advantages fall from the sky. The western railroads in the United States were given swaths of land alongside their intended routes as an incentive to build and invest in the barely settled areas. The Great Northern Railroad (survives as the Burlington-Northern-Sante Fe owned by Berkshire Hathaway) got great wheat land, timber, coal (still mining it) and other resources.

Sometimes the advantages are the product of shrewd investment, ruthless competition, and the labor of others -- Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller for example.

Financial assets (see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty- First Century) are highly rewarding and are somewhat disconnected from production and consumption (unlike steel and oil). Having a lot of financial assets is very much like having a lot of chips in poker.

The original accumulation generally involves the exploited labor of others -- Andrew Carnegie couldn't make enough steel himself to make a difference to anyone. The highly paid help at Apple Corporation doesn't make phones, computers, or music. Other people do that -- generally not at much profit to themselves. Apple employees design and manage. A lot of "original accumulation" has happened there (and at other corporations, of course).

So, the asymmetry of wealth depends somewhat on chance opportunities, but it must rest on exploitation and quite often the exploitation has been simply horrific, appalling, and ghastly.

I don't know much about Faulkner, but can any of us be certain we are telling only the truth about our individual pasts? Maybe it is necessary to lie about our pasts? Maybe the truth about our pasts is impossible?

Thoughts? — Question

At 70, my future is a lot shorter than my past. I'm fine with that. Ten more years would be about right--twenty, too long. But I could be dead this afternoon. There aren't any big exciting events on my schedule, so that would be alright too.

Our collective future is more interesting and most likely at least somewhat dystopian. Dystopian rather than utopian, because our species does not have good skills at foresight. I do not see a techno-utopia in our future, but certainly more machines and AI. Some people expect life-altering, paradigm-redefining technology. I do not, because I expect that little new technology will be developed first and foremost for the benefit of humankind as a whole. IF retinal replacements, enhanced memory and thinking implants, or body replacements made to order turn out to be practical, they will be standard fare for only a small elite.

We won't be leaving our terrestrial ball for distant celestial orbits, and for the same reason that I don't expect life-altering, paradigm-redefining technology to remake this world. We have discovered the basic principles of matter; that revolution can not be repeated. Human travel to the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) isn't inconceivable, but offers no escape from our difficulties here. Biological science has plenty of room for development, but the hazards researchers will risk will create more, and perhaps insoluble new problems. Our deficient foresight comes into critical play here.

Our best bet is orderly devolution to a smaller population, sustainable lifestyles, and no innovation beyond our capacity to manage risks. Fat chance, right?

""The past is never dead. It's not even past." Faulkner

An old psych professor in college put it this way, "Want to is more important than IQ." A person of measured average intelligence (say, 100-110 on a Stanford Binet individually administered test) who is ambitious, energetic, persistent, and curious about the world is likely to become a learned fellow whose intelligence won't be questioned. Similarly, a measured high IQ person (say, 140) who has little curiosity, not much ambition, is lazy, and feckless will probably come off as a dumb cluck.

Plus, people often "get smarter" as they get older. Years of reading, good conversation, paying attention... all that, greatly enrich one's working intellectual resources. So, one "gets smarter" as one gets older.

On the flip side of the issue, people who are extremely depressed can come off as rather dull, because their mental activity is very subdued.

Perhaps the problem is that "The philosophy forum" is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps you could rename it : "The subset of philosophy that allows for the deletion of posts based on arbitrary judgement and a hidden agenda forum." I know it is a bit of a mouthful, but at least you would avoid the risk of being done for false advertising. It could also be a point of difference between this forum and other philosophy forums. — A Seagull

I don't know why they pull one post and not another. I would be much more worried if they started killing off threads, wholesale. I have never seen a thread deleted except for being a product sales pitch or a bald "you can only be saved by the Blood of the Lamb" thread. (There's a clear, unambiguous difference between discussing whether you think people can be saved or not, and from what, and making specific religious demands of forum participants.)

You, and others, have strongly reacted to having posts deleted. I would be a bit upset too, but I wouldn't worry unless you see a clear pattern of depravity on the part of moderators toward your posts.

I don't know what it is, or even if indeed there is one; but I am hoping to find out. — A Seagull

Remember, the Mods are volunteer, unpaid, and have lives to lead apart from moderating. How much time do you suppose they have to pursue obscure agendas?

Over the last x number of years, I've been active on the old PF and the new PF, with some of the same people moderating. I haven't seen evidence of moderators pursuing private agendas. Of course, I don't know what all they do behind the scenes. Maybe it's all smoke and mirrors.

Good question. Quick answer: Sort of, perhaps, maybe. We all make these assessments. Usually we have to get to know somebody well to judge whether our assessments were right or not.

A person can make rough estimates about someone's intelligence, but which way would be best would depends on context, content, and you.

First, intelligence isn't one single aspect of thinking. There are verbal intelligence, spatial relationships/mechanical intelligence, social intelligence, visual intelligence, and so on. Some people can't look at a realistic painting and see anything except a literal picture. Maybe they lack visual intelligence, or maybe it's a bad painting.

Second, the context is critical. What time/place/activity are you interacting in? Bus stop? Bar? Classroom? Coffee shop? Very late at night, or mid morning? What are you talking about? The weather? Existentialism? An art show? a mechanical problem with your car? A ball game?

Third is you. How smart are you? How good do you think you are at assessing others, compared to how good you actually are at assessing other people?

So, you're talking with a new acquaintance in a coffee shop about a science fiction book you are reading, in which worm holes enable travelers to cross large distances in the galaxy very quickly. Your new friend is a musician and doesn't like science fiction. You think worm holes are a reality, he thinks it's kind of stupid. Which viewpoint indicates intelligence? (I don't know.)

It turns out you both play chess, a chess board is on hand, and he beats you in short order. Does that mean he is more intelligent than you? (I don't know.}

The skill needed here for you to evaluate his intelligence is "How well does he explain his objection to worm holes. Is it a knee-jerk reaction to science fiction, or does he have reasons for his opinion? Then too, how well do you explain your belief that worm holes are real? What about chess? How much chess have both of you played? If you are just learning, and he has played all his life, he would of course check mate you in short order, whether either of you were very smart or not.

If you like somebody a lot, you'll probably up-rate their intelligence and other features. If you dislike somebody, you'll probably down-rate them.

That's why intelligence testing is best done under controlled circumstances.

Have a wider variety of moderators — Agustino

That would mean people like you stepping up to the plate. You too could be a moderator!

I would agree that the moderatori are more left than right, more atheist and less theist. This doesn't represent the demographic of the United States (which demographically is the opposite) but it might represent EU countries better. It does represent the academic faculty profile in the US which tends now to be more leftist and atheist.

I don't know whether my posts are getting weeded out or not, here or in the old PF. I don't know whether I'm getting a pass or not. I haven't been tracking it.

Were I a moderator, there are posts I would delete. A few people take offense too vigorously with too little provocation, and I would at least tell them to calm down. Some posters have very poor writing sills, and sometimes one can't really tell what they are trying to get at. Some posters are repetitious. Some, like me, are too verbose. Oops, verbosity reach critical stage... must stop.

The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains — Dawkins

This is pretty much meaningless, at least as far as I can tell. No one else could be Dawkins, nor me, nor you. We aren't missing any number of Newtons and Keats; neither are we missing any number of monstrous despots.

I don't especially care for the lottery idea either, though if Dawkins imagines there is a gate through which only so many beings can pass, I suppose a lottery is a logical idea. But only so much water can run out of a faucet and we don't call the kitchen sink a lottery of water. We need have no feelings or thoughts about the water that didn't make it.

In ancient Greek mythology, Lamia (/ˈleɪmiə/; Greek: Λάμια) was a beautiful queen of Libya who became a child-eating daemon. Aristophanes claimed her name derived from the Greek word for gullet (λαιμός; laimos), referring to her habit of devouring children.

There are various web sites about Lamia, some behind paywalls. For those who feel a need for free assistance in understanding Keats' poetry, the links below might help. Some of the assistance is elementary and obvious (which can be quite helpful, actually) and some of it is a bit more elevated.

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/k/keats-poems/summary-and-analysis/lamia
http://www.keatsian.co.uk/keats-poetry-lamia.php
https://henneman.uk/john-keats-biography/lamia-annotated-text-part-1-lines-1-26/
https://henneman.uk/john-keats-biography/lamia-annotated-text-part-2-form-structure-language-context/
http://crossref-it.info/textguide/john-keats-selected-poems/40/2965

That's the kind of thinking that misses opportunities. Anyone who is interested in philosophy should be hooked in - it's not the healthy that are in need of a doctor, but the sick. — Agustino

There are many websites catering to the lowest common denominator, in every category of website you can think of. The achievement here lies in rising above the LCD and aiming for "mid-brow" quality. "High brow" quality (sites like Stanford University's Encyclopedia of Philosophy) requires major institutional support.

As for needing a doctor, we are not going to be the Mayo Clinic of philosophy websites. We are a volunteer-run aid station.

It seems that the mods are pushing this place to become more academic and less communal. That is a mistake. — Agustino

What do you think the academic credentials of the moderators are? As far as I know, none of them are any more academic than you are. Like you they have jobs, families, laundry, meals, other interests--lives, in other words, that take up much of their time.

From what I can tell (and from experience here and on the other PF) they are serious readers of philosophy (far, far more than I am) and, for some odd reason, willing to slog through all the text we all generate. Their's is a tremendous contribution to the quality, consistency, and vitality of the site.

Everything is a business. Even a Church is a business. Any community is a business. Any organism is either growing or dying. To grow effectively, and in a lasting manner, it must cater to the needs of its people. It's quite simple. I know you have a personal vendetta against me, but it's not my fault that you can't put 2 and 2 together. — Agustino

Everything isn't a business; there are other models. I'd say we are an "enterprise of common interest". That any enterprise might have to rent a room or a server and software in which to meet doesn't make us a "business".

An organism grows if it meets its needs as the kind of organism it is. The Philosophy Forum caters to the needs of people who want a reasonably orderly, not academic but reasonably serious place to discuss philosophical ideas. The moderators and contributors make it "reasonably orderly" and "reasonably serious" or not.

I don't think anybody here is running a vendetta against you. You take 'minority positions' on many issues and defend them vigorously. This stimulates a lot of response from others, which is a very good thing. Don't take equally vigorous offense responses as vendettas; they are just "in kind" responses.

Your chicken's gizzard was found wanting. The Moderators are inscrutable and therefore irrefutable.

What criteria do the mods use for the removal of posts and/or threads? — A Seagull

A chicken is slaughtered by the High Moderatum of the Forum who drags out the bird's innards onto the altar and searches for the gizzard. If the gizzard is found to be insufficiently bright and firm, the Post or Thread is struck from the record and the offal is then handed warm, wet, and stinking to the corroding and offensive author.

The chicken is forthwith barbecued and enjoyed by the Moderata on duty.

Hunger raises the standards by which the gizzard is judged.