Technical point: I did not actually claim that Silverstreak Wonder was too ignorant to post in the thread; I noted that he possessed no knowledge that he had not derived from Kent Hovind.
I was clearly not complimentary, but I did not actually claim that he was “too ignorant.” 
There’s a whole lot of ways to be a jerk, clearly. There’s a whole lot of ways for people to dance the line of jerkish behaviour. I really can’t fault a mod for calling it as he sees it, (I don’t expect to always agree.), and acting when he does.
A more challenging group of line dancing, semantic splitting, erudite pains in the ass I cannot imagine. I think they do a hell of a job, wrangling the obtuse especially.
If the rule is, “Don’t be a jerk”, do you seriously expect it will be enforced always only as you interpret jerk? Doesn’t the vagueness of the rule sort of hint that the interpretation will be highly subjective?
True. I am however reluctant to either close a thread or boot it over to GD if I think it can be avoided. And it’s generally better to let posters address factual errors rather than try to do so as a moderator. (Although I will do so as a poster if the thread is in my area of expertise.)
I just found this and that it was about me. I was told I could not have an opinion against evolution, and to not post in that thread. Everyone else was allowed to post views and the OP never said that once you post what you think it is, you cannot then defend your position.
In fact it is called “great debates” but I see I am not to take the other side on evolution, that is for sure. I gave my view on what it was in first post just as others did. I had not even posted in many hours, no fight was or had been going on, yet out of the blue, here is a mod saying go away because my views are not correct to the mod. Wow.
I did not ask the mods opinion and did not want it, why didn’t he just give his view as a poster? Instead he gave it as a mod like I had done terrible to express the opinion I did, and told me to keep quiet. Why? Do rest of you want to see this happen to you if you disagree with a mods opinion?
Evolution does have to include the origins of life, just because someone decides to name that something else because it gets in the way of the theory of evolution was just the point I made several times. I am quite sure if you poll random people and ask, does TOE include life forming by a random process most will say sure.
By the way, if anyone thinks I am a “creationist” nut I am not, I know big bang happened and it was 14 billion years ago. I believe elements were indeed formed in supernovas and so on, because that was the plan. I also think something did originate life or we would have made it ourselves. Posts in the thread after mine actually asked many of the same issues, and were discussed yet they were not told to leave. The OP also said he did not mind debates, which made sense in “great debates” doesn’t it? So who was the mod out to protect anyway from my views?
I am the OP of that thread, and I did not consider what Silverstreak Wonder did to be threadshitting. SW was being remarkably obtuse, perhaps even willfully so, but he or she was not off-topic. Threadshitting would be something like, oh, someone starting a thread on the upcoming Lovely Bones movie, and me beginning another insane rant about how Return of the King is the worst movie ever made. Or, since the thread is in GD, if someone had repeatedly and insistently claimed that Darwin’s theory should be referred to as evilution and begun witnessing that all scientists are doomed to hell.
While it is true that the degree of ignorance on display was remarkable, the EXPLICIT POINT OF THE THREAD was to elicit misconceptions about evolution so that they might be rebutted. While I admit I was really thinking of things like people attributing all evolutionary change to mutation rather than genetic drift, the fact that SW was so outrageously and risibly in error gave more knowledgable posters the opportunity to correct his or her misconceptions.
I would add that the moderation action of forbidding SW’s further participation in the thread might seem to validate the claim that scientists seek to squelch discussion.
You don’t get to decide what a scientific field includes. Modern Synthesis in no way includes any postulation about abiogenisis. It includes only the mechanisms by which evolution occurs. The fact that you can’t accept this fact I believe was the mods point and the point of other posters. So your points were not on the subject at hand and you also displayed no idea how evolution works so you weren’t even offering anything to debate. You want to discuss abiogenisis than start a thread.
And this: “I also think something did originate life or we would have made it ourselves.” is utterly meaningless. Because we can’t currently do something the only explanation is a supernatural one? Do you not see the glaring lack of logic in this?
Anyhow, I don’t want to hijack the thread. The point is, you were showing ignorance of the subject being discussed, no willingness to learn about it and not answering points raised by other posters but instead saying the same thing over and over even after your logic was clearly show to be faulty.
Capeo, Sure sounds like you can give your opinion, but the discussion here is about me also being able to do so. Well see, I believe your abio–poop word I never heard of is indeed part of the TOE, but I guess I need run and get a mod to tell you to be quiet about your views then, right, because they are not on the subject which is–do I have a right to post my opinion on SDMB?
Seriously, I would never tell anyone or ask a mod to either tell someone they are too stupid to post, and yes that includes creationists who I would debate on facts while still including their creator as fine, but not crap like the earth is 6000 years old. But I would never say they cannot even post such beliefs, and that is what happened here to me. By the way, all the crappy beliefs they have are not those of scripture, but of some minister I have found.
Hey Silverstreak! Debate to your heart’s content.
Not really. No one is posting a scientific treatise and critical comments of any specific scientific position are not being silenced.Instead, a poster quoting from anti-science sources who is not actually discussing the various theories of evolution–simply denying them–has been told not to hijack the thread. He is perfectly free to open a new thread proposing his attacks on evolution or discussing his ignorance of the theory.
This is a repeated phenomenon in Great Debates that I am attempting to squelch: in the midst of an otherwise educated discussion of a topic, involving several informed but differing views, some poster (or posters) show up to deny the whole context of the discussion and soon the thread has degenerated into a majority of (surviving) posters attempting, hopelessly, to inform or persuade the poster who is ill informed. Meanwhile, most of the posters simply give up and drop out of the thread. The relative importance of mutation and adaption vs genetic drift is a viable debate in that thread. Gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium is a valid discussion. Denying that evolution can occur because a poster claims scientists have not re-created abiogenesis in the lab, (denying even what they have accomplished, so far), is not relevant to the discussion.
If you really want a serious discussion, you really do not want more Hovind posturing to be permitted, there.
Note the actual OP of that thread and note my reconstruction of it in post #20 of this thread.
The thread you interrupted was not a debate of whether evolution occurs; it was a debate regarding the popular understanding of the Theory of Evolution with an opportunity to correct misconceptions.
If you want to challenge the theory of evolution, you are free to do so–in a separate thread.
I did not point out your errors as a poster because others had done so only to have you ignore them. “Great Debates” does not mean, “wander into any thread and post whatever I want.” There was a particular theme under discussion: it presumed the accuracy of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (as modified by subsequent research). One is free to deny the accuracy of that theory, but one will do so in the appropriate context: a separate thread.
I thought either Showgirls or Starship Troopers was supposed to be the worst movie ever made…
Return of the King? Really?
You are SO in trouble.
I don’t recalling seeing that thread, but it sounds like something the “Why are black people so loud” guy would have posted. Remember him, he worked in a coffee shop and talked about spitting in the customers drinks if they were rude. Ya know, rude, like saying ‘sir’ instead of using his name or something like that.
You cannot be mad enough to want to start me ranting about that movie. You’d have to be schizophrenic, psychotic, masochistic, and probably bulimic all at once.
Besides, Star Trek was much, much worse that RoTK ever dreamed of being.
Hmmmm… “anti science sources” sure sounds like an opinion to me, so does “the relative importance of…blah blah”. Isn’t relative importance an opinion of yours? Which just agrees with my view that I was told not to talk because it seemed to offend what a mod believes on the subject. OK, guess that is settled.
Didn’t the thread SPECIFICALLY ask for a view of it right off top of your head, and not with all the research mentioned above? How about that? Since I hadn’t posted in hours just how was I so disrupting the thread, answer that too?? Looks to me everyone had lots of time to discuss all the other views, you just wanted mine removed from the discussion because it was not your view. Why didn’t you stop the discussion after that, about creating life as not part of the thread as well?
I find Silverstreak Wonder’s arguments less than convincing and his style less than engaging, but several posters chose to engage him in discussion. The OP didn’t complain that his thread was being hijacked; indeed, he clearly stated that he welcomed the debate. But the thread was starting to branch out in a direction that one moderator didn’t like, so that part of the discussion was squelched.
I expect this will be dismissed as nostalgia, but thing that made these boards fun a few years ago was opening a thread and not knowing from the OP where it might lead and what facts are opinions it might reveal. I’m not saying that SW necessarily had anything new to offer, but as people responded to him, and others responded to them, something interesting could have developed. That seems, in fact, to be the kind of thing the OP had in mind.
But some mods seem intent on restricting the course of a thread to a single, straight line rather than allowing it to choose its own path, or multiple branches. Recently, at least one mod (not tom) has made a habit of locking threads because the topics weren’t interesting enough in the moderator’s opinion to start a discussion, even though several posters had begun discussing those topics in the short time they were open. These behaviors make the board much less interesting than it could be.
Let OPs set the initial course of threads. Let the participants in a discussion determine its progress. Step in when there’s a clear rule violation or a clear disregard for other posters, but don’t try to make every thread in your own image.
lurking guest
Your wish is granted. Long live Jason Giambi.
What in blazes is a “hovind posterior” or whatever it was I was called up there a few posts? Is this board run by lawyers or what? Wow, just wow, and here I thought great debates meant you could debate stuff. So do you all actually agree the origin of life has nothing to do with TOE, and if so how does it go from creating the elements to that pond and suddenly we have life and DNA to change and all that? So just leave that part out, right, if it deflates the theory all had to be random. That was my opinion, you can deny it but I ought to be able to say it in that thread as it sure was relevant.
Which is exactly the problem with such hijacks: there is so much wrong with each post that every knowledgeable poster feels duty bound to reply, leading to a massive hijacking that goes nowhere.
Had Skald been around a bit longer, he would have recognized that what he believed to be a minor point of discussion was about to consume his whole thread. That’s why they pay us to Moderate these things–because we recognize different repeating scenarios that most posters find obnoxious.
Both Skald and Silverstreak are welcome to open a new thread to hammer out whether evolution is a valid scientific theory, and, in those terms, it should be pretty safe from Moderator intervention, (as long as Silverstreak or some other poster does not then set out to prove that Darwin was really behind the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon or some similar theory).
Your problem is that you are defining debate much as John Cleese defined argument in the canonical sketch. Throwing out random, irrelevant contradictions is not debate. It’s silliness, pure and simple, and contrary to the spirit of Great Debates. This is why** Egmond Codfried’s **recent thread was closed; the original poster persisted in throwing out irrelevant observations to the extent that the argument was essentially verbal chaos. When fellow posters are making observations about how evolution works and someone comes in talking about spontaneously appearing televisions, that’s not contributing. As the moderator said, you are always welcome to start your own thread on the absurdity of abiogenesis. Not that a misinformed argument would carry much weight on this topic either, but hey.