Please stop closing threads where productive discussion is happening

I think Timebandit is suggesting that intellectual rigor is not involved. At some point an assertion by an individual is beyond the bounds of reality. All we are quibbling about is the boundaries.

Honestly, jas, I feel like I have answered this and many other questions and I don't think it is possible for me to satisfy you. There is no "conspiracy theory ban" -- like other sites have -- although in my wildest fantasies I dream of such a policy. But there is the ad hoc decisions we have to make, like we always have, to try to encourage discussion, discourage noise, and prevent terrible mulberrry-bush threads from exacerabting existing divisions ultimately getting us nowhere.

9/11 is one of those. The Boston bombing is definitely one of those. The last thread, as I saw it, was one of those.

You can choose to take this personally. You can choose to make this a cheval de bataille and ride it into the ground. Or you can move on and go elsewhere to make those arguments if you really, really think they need to be made. I honestluy can't fathom how you think your point hasn't been made already, many, many times over. It's time to move on.

@ TB

We don't because that would only add fuel to the fire.

There IS a thread open. And these other theories are discussed openly, and even predominant in some cases. That is a small price to pay, IMO, for not giving people a valid excuse to freak out and claim that they have evidence of a conspiracy of silence.

Though if I actually got an offer of some cheques from the CIA, who knows? I might consider it.

@ TB

I am just thinking about how that might play out with the many outright lies in Russian and eastern European politics. It's not that I don't sympathize, and frankly I think the predominance of that crap undermi es the reputation of this site, but it would basically shut down a bunch of threads and be more of a free speech problem than anything it would solve. Again I think as galling as it is, doing nothing, or at most asking people to ante up with evidence, is the most that can reasonably be done. 

And I hear you on that last point, though I am so used to hearing it from those slinging the crap, and calling others dupes and Nazis, this is one of the few times I have read it used it coming from a place of honest concern. 

@ TB 

Again, I sympathize, though I think my personal investment went out the window quite some time ago. Can't pin it down exactly to seeing a complaint about a racist slur go unanswered, or being called a Nazi for the umpteenth time. For some reason I still support keeping things open, even though I wouldn't mind a bit more action when it comes to tone.

And @ jas

Whoever winds up being the arbiter on that, someone is going to cry foul. Sorry, but you allow all of it or none. 

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To equate this healthy skepticism, shared by probably a majority now, with strawmen like moon hoaxes, Holocaust denial or "robotic pandas" (something that Magoo has apparently run across) is intellectually invalid. And you know it.

I think it would be awesome if you could go back in time to confront a moon-landing truther.  And if we could watch you tear them down, brick by brick.

All of it?

Simple. Anything that doesn't explicitly go against site policy. And really, aside from some big no-nos that is more a matter of tone than anything.

It's hardly the riddle of the sphinx, or something all that subjective. I'm more amused at the notion of arguing for inclusion, and yet trying to exclude allegedly not real conspiracies at the same time. I don't think I am the one who needs to be explaining how to split hairs.

The conversation keeps dancing around the same issues:

1) Just about everyone here does not want to see threads about specific conspiracy theories that have been widely discredited.

2) The thread in question was a discussion about how the accusation of being in the category of these conspiracies can be used to silence other topics that have not been explored - not an exploration of any theory. (And not referencing this place either.)

I had an interest in this partly because back in my publishing days I worked on a book that exposed the details of US military preparations on the border. It was not a conspiracy theory but a look at these activities in the context of long standing US warplans against Canada (War Plan Red and what followed it). The person who wrote the book was a professor at a university in Ontario. Much of the questions he raised were never answered and he was drummed out of Canadian Academia being accused of being a conspiracy theorist in spite of providing hundreds of references and sources for the points he made. He went to Norway for about a decade due to the power of the label as it was applied to him.

In the mainstream we have heard accusations of partisan CRA audits labeled as conspiracy theories. Others have named robo call investigations as a  conspiracy theory insofar as they exist beyond Guelph.

I support the closure of threads on the conspiracy theories we are talking about but not naming. I think the participants in the closed thread avoided any reference to those conspiracies so that they would not become part of the discussion which is why I was surprised by the closure.

I think that even a meta-discussion of conspiracy theories will inevitably become a discussion of conspiracy theories in the same way that a discussion of, say, "American military aggression" will sooner or later have to discuss this war or that war in the specific.  How long can you really expect to talk about the U.S. military in the abstract?

Timebandit wrote:

I disagree.  I know there'd be a tantrum, but I'm unconvinced that's a good enough reason not to draw some stronger boundaries. 

I'm looking at it from this perspective:  This isn't a public board, even though it is open to the public.  However, the site itself has a board of directors who determine what the character and purpose of the overall site is.  Generally speaking, it's a pretty clearly defined site.  Babble, as a component of that site, has a number of rules and some boundaries that are in keeping with the character of the rest of the site - or would, if it didn't entertain a lot of loony conspiracy theory talk. 

babble has always been subject to what rabble.ca figures it should be.  I'm wondering if the current evolution isn't at odds with what rabble.ca stands for.

Not to defend discussion of conspiracy theories on babble (as I generally oppose conspiracy theories for not being grounded in a rationalist world view); but to the extent that the current orientation of babble is at odds with rabble.ca, it has mostly to do with the merry-go-round of pro and anti-Justin Trudeau discussion.

And FYI, I don't consider the pro-Russian viewpoint on Ukraine to be a conspiracy theory. The current Ukranian government is clearly facsist in character, and has conducted a brutal war against those in eastern Ukraine who want no part of a country run by fascists.  The western version of events in Ukraine is the biggest propaganda coup in recent times. [url=newcoldwar.org]newcoldwar.org[/url] has a lot of really great news and analysis on this topic.

Left Turn wrote:

I'd be fine with discussion of specific conspiracy theories if people could make their point and then move on. Unfortunately, that won't happen. What will happen is that those for and against specific conspiracy theories would just get into another merr-go-round argument.

How is that any different from politics and Ukraine threads, or the gawd awful polling threads FFS.  Catchfire is right when he said 'ad hoc' decisions are made.  It's about what someone doesn't particularly care for the most, and it doesn't necessarily have to fall outside of the posting parameters.  It's babble's version of the state of exception, or this being Canada, the security certificate.  We're not quite sure of the threat being posed, and questions about the arbitrary nature of the decision making in this regard are met with the term 'ad hoc' as the meat of the rationale.

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Which brings up another thing. There's way too many merry-go-round arguments on babble between folks who are never going to agree on the points at hand, particularly between Liberal and NDP partisans. It's unnecessary, and it tends to drown out other babblers who may want to move discussions in other directions.

Much of it is unnecessary imo, but I support their right to whatever it is they think is being accomplished.

dp

To say that it is an ad hoc strategy is hardly an admission: Decisions made quickly on a case by case basis. If you try to keep up with more than a handful of conversations on this site you will see it is pretty difficult. The issue here is that a moderator is moving very fast by necessity through threads making quick decisions. In the end it was an individual judgment call - that received feedback.

If it was just to register disagreement/protest about the thread being closed that has been done.

If it was to continue the discussion, that was cut off, I think even that has happened now in this thread.

If it was to get an explanation for being quick on the draw even that has been provided: that based on previous experience, conspiracy threads have consumed huge amounts of energy to no end and the thread was closed out of concern it would go down that road. The interpretation of whether the thread risked going in that direction is just an interpretation as nobody can know for certain. What more to say other than agree or do not agree with that single split-second judgment call?

Is there something I am missing that can be accomplished now?

Quote:

Arbitrary decisions would be pretty godawful in a daycare as well, since daycares have policies and procedures they have to abide by, for everyone's safety and for harmony.

I'm sure many have a policy whereby an agressive or violent kid gets separated from the rest.

But I doubt that, even if asked, they could provide an exhaustive list of everything that constitutes agression or violence and everything that falls just short of it.  Exactly how many whacks over the head with a stuffed Elmo?  Precisely how many destructions of some other kid's Lego castle? 

You seem to expect there to be some kind of "breathalyzer" for K00kery, and there just isn't.

Timebandit wrote:

I think you did miss a little context, Sean, in that the thread was an old one and was revived because jas was defending posting some pretty odious conspiracy crap about the Boston marathon bombings being fake.  Limbless individuals notwithstanding. She continued to defend her position as not being a conspiracy theory.

So there's some disingenuity in the discussion from the beginning. jas would very much like to be taken seriously on that topic and some other favourites, like vaccines and alternative medicine. 

jas's position has been that we shouldn't use the term "conspiracy theory" because it silences some discussions.  Well, I don't think that's a bad thing.  Accusing people of lying about missing limbs and dead children are discussions that, IMO, are okay to shut down.  As Smith has ably noted, we aren't going to just stop using the term because someone who like conspiracy theories would like them to be taken more seriously than they warrant.  Personally, I'm not using the term propagandistically, I'm using it to describe something exactly as it, IMV, is.

Maybe we should let the mods do their job as they understand it - and part of that is to make some judgment calls that you may or may not disagree with. Perhaps, instead of suggesting the mods quit rather than limit discussion, one should take a discussion to a venue where it's more welcome.

Thanks --  indeed I did miss that context. I participated in the thread but was not aware of where the conversation came from. If I had seen a thread on the Boston Bombing I doubt that I would have clicked on it.

I don't think there should be a problem with providing feedback on moderator decisions but I was wondering why this was so heated without anything in the thread to explain it. Thanks for filling in the blanks.