On Fri, 21 Mar 2003 rone at ennui.org wrote: > Philip Hart writes: > I'm a bit unhappy about the imposition of an "if people care about it we > can't mention it (well, except for discussions of G*d)" doctrine but I > won't object as long as it's even-handed and not applied to discussion > directly related to the Vladiad. > > On the specific topic of politics, it is nearly impossible to have > civilized discourse. The recent response by Mr. Congdon used fairly > inflammatory language and as such was inappropriate. It seemed to me Warlord's original input was also inflammatory (tempted to write "flammatory" for some reason) - I hadn't noticed Mr. Congdon's tone because I happen to agree with the substance of his remarks and because I hear much worse from the European physicists I work with. On the topic of religion, the same usually holds as far as I know - during the rock discussion I would have weighed in with my opinion that belief in a supreme being is more ridiculous than a belief in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny (though I think less ridiculous than a belief in astrology) if I didn't think my opinion was inflammatory. So I "suffered" from the self-censorship Matthew Hunter expressed a concern about. I even avoided writing "please read Kant or shut up" when I deleted the nth reply in that thread... > > Anyway, as this forum in my view belongs both to the people > who read it and to SKZB, I for one would welcome hearing his political > views on occasion, especially since we seemed blessed to live in > interesting times. > > And yet he is loathe to discuss them, because he admits to turning > into an asshole when he does. If he shows such admirable restraint on > a topic which he holds so closely and dearly, i think so should we all. I think this forum is sufficiently worshipful to avoid provoking him (for example I have to resist the impulse to capitalize the second pronoun above) but whatever.