Why Was This Thread Closed?

Simple question, no rant.

Because it had gone a day and a half with no serious discussion and then it was resurrected and had gone two more days with virtually nothing but off-topic chatter and veiled insults.
That is a recipe for flaming, not debate.

From your post #199

Ah, I said. The man understands.

Too bad you waited 'til Post #199 to say something. Had you shown up as an off-duty mod early on and said this, the thread might well have taken different turn. You had half a dozen opportunities to support my explicit requests for focus starting in my Post #9.

But then this.

I assumed you were kidding.

Did anyone actually address the main issue except Second Stone who, in several posts, supported the OP based on his reading of Imperialism. Can you point to any posts that reasonably refuted anything he or I had to say? I (jokingly) asked for a cite. Your (somewhat surly if I may say so) response was

And then, YOU brought what’s his name back into it with

25 hr and 45 minutes, actually.

So let me get this straight, any current thread in which you see no light and which you consider “exhausted” is subject to immediate death panel zombiehood?

And then to me

My “off topic remarks” were in response to yours and if “this thread is pretty much horseshit”, it’s due to the relative lack of germane response to the OP.

Here’s a lovely example of another of my “resurrected” (after roughly two mos. of exhaustion) threads which I, myself, had written off to zombiedom but, nonetheless, may still be worth looking at. How to respond to high-frequency trading? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board

Your mod hat is not a crown. I only ask that you let Lenin die a natural death.

Remember,

Heh… I miscounted.

At risk of getting off topic, it’s not the first time.

Nor will it be the last, I’m confident.

Will you please let tomndebb get a word in? Before he shuts us down, of course.

Meanwhile, let me ask you, did you ever bother to read the Preface and Chapter V of Imperialism?

If yes, what did you make of it?

If not, are you still talking?

Speak up.

From what I could see–as I have already pointed out–it had already died a natural death. I was simply driving the stake through its heart to prevent its further unnatural resurrections.

I suppose it would have been nice if I had made the point that Lenin’s evil actions were irrelevant to his authorship at some earlier point. On the other hand, when I first opened the thread and saw the nonsense attributed to Lenin with his utter misreading of the history of monopolies and capitalism, I decided that the topic would be boring and did not stick around to watch it get sidetracked and, since no one reported the sidetrack, I did not revisit the thread until it it was much further along.

If it will give you comfort, I will re-open the thread–with the proviso that if it continues to be little more than cheap shots that I have to keep monitoring to make sure that the insults are not getting out of hand, I am going to close it once more.

Thanks and fair enough.