A simple wish — and you can all help

1) Critique of Pure Reason. 2) Yes. I am the only one at Southwest with this name.

Enjoy your vacation!

Vaughn - two questions: 1) Specifically which work(s) of Kant did you read? I'm heading on vacation soon and what better time for me to load some up on my Kindle and have a little "refresher"...? (assuming the kids let me have any "quiet" time..!) 2) I'd love to hear more about your "critique of Kant"! Is there perchance a "Dr." in front of your name? If so, I've a good guess how to contact you and will do so sometime after my vacation so we can chat off-line. No sense in boring all of Lyon Co. to death with this stuff...

wasn't you that allowed a letter to the editor a day before the election go through, without giving the other candidate a chance to respond? Also the validation on the people that signed the letter to the editor was never checked. it was brought in to you office by one person, w/o checking if in fact that other people had signed it!!! Because you would have found out that most were forced to sign the letter!!!

Hi CrunchyCon - It was exactly that tension between 1st amendment Free Speech rights and subjective societal standards of propriety that I was thinking of when I asked my question. I would expect the employees of a newspaper, tireless advocates of Free Speech, would be especially loathe to delete anyone's comments.

As for Kant - wow! Very dense reading. However, I found it fatally flawed by his 18th century view of how the brain works. It would be fun to find a way to discuss it with you.

aargh. I see the forum's "bad word" filter is standing at the ready today....!

That word in "*********" below that Justice Potter Stewart was defining (in a real life 1964 court case, by the way) is p o r n o g r a p h y.

thanks for offering your experience, ProdigalSon. I would think that at least *some* degree of forum moderation could be done without imposing too heavy a burden on the Independent's staff. I, like you, often glean quite a bit (especially on the local stories) by what people comment here.

As for Vaughn's question about the difficulty of defining "offensive speech", I'm tempted (probably unhelpfully!) to fall back on Supreme Court Justice Potter's famous definition of ***********: "I know it when I see it!"

:-)

p.s. Vaughn - how's that Kant reading going?

I resolve to continue to make the appropriate comments on the news, letters and editorials that appear in this newspaper. I do not appreciate the name-callers and those that do not comment on the issue at hand. When attacked, I will respond. Happy New Year to all!

It is not that hard to see the difference between posts that are commenting on the subject matter, and posts that are simply commenting on the person posting. There's a big difference between "I disagree because my opinion on the subject is ..." and "I disagree because you're an idiot." It shouldn't take that long to find and delete the personal attacks.

I've been a fairly long term moderator on a couple of internet forums, and to manage and maintain civil discourse isn't that tedious. There is no room or place for personal attacks, and personal attacks are simple enough to identify. Some post with the intent to inflame, incite arguments and assault sensibilities seeking a shock affect. They get weeded. In reality, this is basically a no holds barred soap box forum, and the trolls know that. Keeping a forum is a lot like maintaining a garden. If the rodents are damaging things, you might have to get rid of a few. Your garden will be about as good as the maintenance effort you put into it. Most who won't maintain a garden usually quit and let it grow over, moving on to something else. I'd hate to see that happen with the comment / forum section here. I pick up a lot of insights from those who see from another angle on home town issues. Things get clarified. Sometimes more is revealed in comments than in the article

I agree wholeheartedly, Per! Respectful disagreement and debate is needed nationally, but starts locally. There have been some gratifying examples of civil disagreements on this forum that have been a welcome "anti-venom" to paralyzing cynicism.

Happy New Year, CrunchyCon! I just wanted to offer in response to your comment that close moderation of comments is time-consuming and full of pitfalls: who gets to define "offensive speech"?

Agreed, Per!

Although, a question for you: why doesn't the Independent actively monitor the comments more closely? (Is it because of time/budget constraints?) If you were quick on the draw and deleted any offensive comments, folks would get the hint awfully quick. And you have every right to do that - the user agreement we all clicked "yes" to when creating our username spelled out pretty clearly that comments were supposed to be respectful and civil.

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Can I add "agree" or "disagree" based on the content of the post, not who is posting it? I once posted "the name of this article is..." and the exact name of the article and still got disagrees on something it was impossible to disagree on!