Summations Only

Please focus on the topic and not on the people you're discussing with. Your belief that people are lying to you in thread after thread is your problem, not other people's. If you don't start keeping these feelings to yourself then I will suspend you. No replies to this message, please.

From the Forum Guidelines:

7. Never include material not your own without attribution to the original source.

The first word of that rule, "never," is kind of unambiguous.

My interpretation of rule 7 (which I wrote) is that it doesn't matter whether he typed it verbatim himself or cut-n-pasted it - plagiarism is plagiarism. Making minor changes to evade the rule is equally unacceptable.

Since I'm a participant in this thread I would not normally intervene, and I will still refrain from active moderation, but this thread seems in danger of spinning out of control, so I will make a couple requests that I hope people will try to honor.The prohibition against becoming personal, such as with accusations of lying and so forth, is because it so easily derails constructive discussion (for a recent example read the previous 20 or 30 messages), and its inflammatory nature can cause all communication to break down and passions to erupt in all-out flame wars.So even if you're 100% certain someone is lying, here at EvC Forum you're restricted to more neutral characterizations, such as being mistaken or misinformed (which in my opinion is much more often the case anyway). Please help keep threads on-topic and discussion constructive by avoiding imflammatory personal accusations like lying and so on.This thread has experienced multiple iterations of some believing they have, through a series of back-and-forth messages, succeeded in proving a given position and others believing they have failed. When later reference is made to the exchange the difference of opinion as to the outcome comes to light. Not wanting to repeat the earlier discussion that often represented a concerted persuasive effort and possibly even a great deal of research, short cut approaches are often adopted, such as calling people liars. Please don't do that here.So what is one to do when confronted with point-blank denial that a position proven after a significant investment of time was ever actually proven? Unfortunately no short cuts are available. You have recourse to the same tools you used the first go round, which is evidence, argument and persuasion, and you can now also try reminders and links to the old messages. If all else fails you can become philosophical, as indicated by the irony illustrated here: If you've clearly and persuasively advocated for and evidenced your position then nothing more can be done, and perhaps it's well enough to just leave it at that.About some words in some members's messages being asterisked out, the board software maintains a list of censored words for each member account, but most members' censored word lists are empty. But when a member falls too much in love with certain words (usually variations of idiot, liar and so forth) then those words might be added to his censored word list.

This thread is amazing for a couple reasons. First, it's still on topic after 1124 messages. Second, no moderator has closed it yet (don't worry about me, I'm a participant).How about we self-moderate and make sure on our own that things don't spiral out of control. It won't take much. It just means staying mostly on topic, which we've been doing, and keeping discussion impersonal, which maybe we could do better at.

I'm not sure why the thread was closed, so I'm reopening it while I explore the reasons.