I have a bit of a complaint.
I opened a thread asking a question. The question was obviously one that was going to be somewhat controversial, however I tried to couch it such that it addressed only a specific small piece of a specific issue.
The question was regarding the objections to the licensing scheme proposed by Al Gore. I was intentionally trying to avoid the general mish-mash of over-the-top responses that come up in the Great Debates forum, especially on the topic of gun control.
Our moderator (manhattan) chose to kill, what I think is a perfectly reasonable and mostly well behaved thread because he/she felt that I had ulterior motives.
In fact, I think, if you reread my responses, I did everything in my power to keep the discussion focused on the stated issue. I avoided espousing my personal preferences or beliefs. At every turn, when someone tried to steer the discussion toward other tangents, I politely asked that we try to keep it on track. I don’t see any evidence of soapbox antics and the only points I debated were with people’s understanding of the question or questioning the validity of their assumptions.
In fact, for the record, I oppose Al Gore’s licensing proposal, but since I’m in favor of stricter gun controls, my reasons are different than those of pro gun people. I simply wanted to understand what (if any) were their rational arguments against licensing.
Now I can understand if the moderator decided that the topic was more suited to the Great Debates forum after all. I wouldn’t agree, but I would have accepted that without complaint. However the moderator decided to kill the subject, midstream:
My complaint is threefold:
(1) The moderator is guessing (inaccurately) at my motives and taking an action based on that assumption. His/her prerogative - obviously, but hardly conduct becoming a moderator.
(2) I don’t think a reasonable answer was given and certainly the subject was not exhausted so there may have been more opinions forthcoming. If I have only the responses, so far, to go on - my conclusion has to be that gun people don’t like it because they are irrational, paranoid, and don’t understand the proposal. All of this may be true, but I was hoping that maybe there was something more.
(3) For some reason, this thread seemed to be held up to a completely different standard than all others. The implication seems to be that it is unacceptable to engage in any discussion or debate in any other forum except great debates. History clearly indicates otherwise - many, many threads in the General Questions forum engage in debate. I was trying to avoid the GD forum because I wanted to avoid all of the other control issues and stay focused to a specific issue and frankly, the topic that I opened was not a GD topic.
Well, that’s all I wanted to say. I thought the moderator overstepped the line in killing the thread and exercised poor judgement based on poor assumptions about my motives.