Posting Guidelines

I wanted to post some guidelines in an effort to set expectations for posting and commenting:

Civil Discourse
Being that his blog was created in response to the level of irrational and inflammatory discourse in the world today, posts and comments here should endeavor to maintain a high level of civility. It should be obvious that this includes a prohibition on gratuitous and/or egregious profanity.

Beware of Polemics
As such we should strive to remove as much polemic language from posts and comments as is possible. Since the idea is to promote reason and rational discourse, let the argument and evidence speak for itself. By way of example here are a few sentences that I revised from an early post regarding SUVs:

“Not too mention the ridiculous assertions by the Arianna Huffington types that driving SUVs supports terrorism”

Who is more moral by the flawed logic of the anti-SUV activists in this admittedly contrived scenario?

Notice that how the strikethrough words added an inflammatory and unnecessary tone. This is a very gray area, but in general try refraining from “loading” a sentence or paragraph with accusatory bias rather than straight argumentative reasoning.

Minimize Generalizations
Back your assertions with evidence and specific examples. For instance refrain from making statements such as “Republicans are greedy” or “Democrats have no values”. Such generalizations are baseless and serve little purpose in constructing a non-ideological argument. If you want to point out the shortcomings of a particular group, then provide specific examples of specific behaviors. If you make a generalization, then acknowledge it as such.

Additionally, if you cite specific facts and/or statistics, please provide a reference. The easiest method is by way of an HTML link.

No Personal Attacks
Personal attacks on posters and commenters will not be tolerated. Respond to the argument and line of reasoning at hand. Beware of the “Ad Hominen” fallacy. Which is: Person A makes a statement; There is something objectionable about Person A; therefore the statement is false. For example:

"You claim that marriage is good for the well being of children -- yet I happen to know that you abandoned your wife and children – so how can you say that marriage is in the best interest of children."

This is a fallacy because the truth of an assertion doesn't depend on the virtues of the person asserting it.

Use Blockquotes for Copied Passages
In blogging, it is common to copy passages from other sources. When doing so, it is customary to use HTLM blockquotes to indent the referred passage. The Blogger.com editor allows you to do this by using the “ symbol on its Post editor. However, be careful as it seemingly gets confused – making it difficult to return to normal indentation when you want it to. If you don’t know how to edit the raw HTML, I recommend writing and saving your post using another editor so that you can start over if the block quoting gets in a undesirable state. And please cite your blockquoted passage.

Non-compliant Posts and Comments
The team members reserve the right to remove any post or comment that is violation of the spirit of guidelines thus set forth. Please be advised that this is a purely subjective decision not subject for debate. The team also reserves the right to permanently ban abusers from posting and/or commenting.

Finally, for fun here is a link to list of common logical fallacies likely to be encountered in public discourse today. Hopefully we will rise above:

http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/index.htm

Happy Posting…