I won't call attention to all the errors and nonsense that you've already called attention to in that thread (Genes and rapid extinction), and I appreciate the great effort you've made to help IamJoseph understand where and in what ways he's unintelligible and not making sense, and maybe you interpret his posts differently from me, but what I see is persistent restatements of gibberish that use responses as points of departure while for the most part ignoring their contents.
well, agreed -- had the suspension been for being off-topic, i would have totally agreed with it. though it probably should have applied to me as well, but i was at least trying to drag it back on topic. kicking and screaming.
i'm just not sure that suspending the opposition is a good debate technique.
i know you and i have talked about this before. it's been a point i've argued for a long time. i think i figured out what bugs me so much, last night. look at a forum like uncommondescent. basically, and ideological wankhouse -- if you don't toe the religious line, or you dare to challenge to the "goddidit" consensus, or you have any scientific credentials at all, you're banned. for life. you end up with all creationists nodding along, and nothing actually going anywhere.
i don't want us to be like them, not even in the slightest. but it seems like we suspend and ban an awful lot of creationists. yes, i know, at the heart of it all, our rules are fair. sometimes i'm not so sure they're applied in an even-handed way. but mostly, the fault is in the rule-breaker. and the lack of creationist content on this site makes questions like IAJ rather difficult. do we suspend him for not following the rules of debate? do we let him continue, because he's obviously trying to say
something?
from a strictly ideological standpoint, it might even be better to let people like IAJ just go off on whatever. if there's 20 or 30 people on one side that sound rational, and one on the other that sounds incoherent... well maybe suspending him is the best thing you can do for him.
i don't know.