JD: I shouldn't be surprised really, but you must know me too well.
Challenging my guts and my desire to stand and fight ... well, I deserve your rebuke. I am most definitely not a quitter, but God has given me enough wisdom to know that there are some battles that aren't worth fighting and there are some battles where a victory actually is a defeat.
To put it plainly, the reason I have admired you, JD, since the beginning, is that you, of all the core users, seem to grasp instantly what I was trying to accomplish on this forum and, most importantly, how fragile a community like this really is.
As the week without the foul four showed, it only takes a couple of bad apples to destroy the whole barrel.
This forum needs healthy, healthy doses of light-heartedness, along with a willingness to learn, and the flexibility to realize that those who disagree with you aren't enemies, but worthy opponents. The worst thing is to take it too seriously, even when there's a serious purpose behind it.
Before I offer my 2 cents about what the history of this forum tells us about modern scoeity, I will say this:
I am willing to help transition this forum to whatever the core users want it to be. Part of moving to this platform -- bugs worked out and all -- was to give us more practical and legal flexibility for community moderation.
My core belief is clear and unequivocal: Let the people speak freely and be heard and the public officials who are supposed to represent their interests will act accordingly. After a stutltifying period between 1996 and 2006, I thought it was time to empower the grass roots. I forgot that around roots, there also are weeds.
BUT
If this forum is going to be an obscene free-for-all, I WANT IT TO DIE and quickly.
If the loyal users and readers know what it can healthily accomplish they will agree to the only reasonable recourse: a lightly moderated forum consisting of an operating board of moderators who have the discretion (and the respect of the community) to delete posts that are offensive, flaming or simply meant to cause trouble, greased with a few private messages back and forth, perhaps, just to make sure they moderators are not overreacting. (We can all be guilty of that.)
They should also have the power to ban, but the board would have to be unanimous on that in my opinion.
As far as the ground rules go, I think it might be a perfect opportunity for some collaborative writing ... perhaps we could ask everyone take a hand in writing them? Easy to create a topic, throw up some suggestions, and let folks "revise" them until we get the finished piece that we can mostly agree on.
Before I decided to close Straight Talk, I had come up with a similar moderation plan that got hung up on the technical and legal issues of turning over a platform (and it's operation, maintenance and private information) to everyday folks. I'll see if I can fish it out.
We could also vote for the proposed "gang of five" moderators -- two left, two right and one centrist -- by asking for a show of thumbs or some such..... (I do think the power of the thumbs is under-estimated. In a world of such sharp differences of opinion, and in a community as sizeable as The Cocklebur, anything from a -2 to +2 is basically an endorsement of it being within bounds. It's the two thirds rule: If two-thirds of people can agree on something, it's pretty much the most unanimity you're likely to get.
The Cocklebur can be saved ... and my decision to walk away was simply because it seemed to my ears as though some of the membership was either painfully naive or in outright rebellion, ridiculously suggesting that this whole enterprise was some oblique and crafty way to push my agenda ... "politics by other means." I can think of way easier ways to do that, believe me.... how about about resurrecting my blog for goodness sake!
From the moment that I ended my true blog, my sole purpose was to allow ideas from the left and right to live or die in the grand marketplace of ideas that our great American founders understood and were willing to trust with the fate of a far greater enterprise than this.
So, in closing, whatever happens here, the outcome will be a mis en scene of our poisoned and paranoid political atmosphere and it will be an object lesson in what happens when the public devalues professionally-sourced information and along with it, the role of the mainstream media in refereeing a rational, community-wide debate while doing its best to minimizing the noise that adds nothing to our collective understanding, except to alert us to "pain" or discomfort.
After a long career in journalism, I have certainly seen much to dislike about the business. But if the smart, relatively sophisticated audience of the Cocklebur can't figure this out, it says a lot about the new information wild west ....
Personally, I think it's going to brutal on our democracy, and far more importantly, brutal on our personal and professional reputations. God help us all.
