Leaderboard

A forum is a space for discussions/debates. What you are describing is an unmoderated forum (= zero control over content). The owner defines what, who and how. It is not "pretty much true by definition" that a forum is unmoderated. My understanding is that @Boydstun described various choices as to how to moderate a forum, not choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. One does not have an a priori freedom of speech on a private forum. It is implicit in the attributes of private property. The non-owners are guest and are subjected to the rules of the house. Harmed is that owner who does not want his property to be used in ways he does not desire, for example to spread ideas he hates.

You are free to create such a forum, but you cannot expect that a given forum owner, for example of this one, will tolerate on his premises the broadcasting of views he abhors. Or tolerate irrational behavior in a debate, for example when a person refuses to justify his claims, the concept of evidence-based debate etc. This requirement will stop nothing: any idea may be found to have something to do with Objectivism😁 I am not proposing to initiate force against anyone. Not sure what you mean... In any case: force is not the only form of harm.

Related to what happened on the closed topic: --- Tripping Over the Truth [I paraphrase and expand on a quote ascribed to Winston Churchill: “stumble over the truth”.] Tripping over the truth, on the pathway to somewhere, some people, too busy to give attention, hurry onward. Some, like a sleepwalker, will yawn and slumber on, unchanged. Some, embarrassed by the stumble or by the truth, will pretend it didn’t happen. Some will kick it away, angry at yet another intrusion by reality. But there are others, curious and caring, who will pause, look, pick it up, and bring it with them -- hopeful, excited by truth’s potential for goodness and beauty. And some, remembering later that they had tripped and passed over something strange yet attractive, now curious and recognizing a need, return to retrieve it

If you exercise editorial control, it ceases to be a "forum" at all, and becomes a "magazine" or a "journal." That's my point. If I write a book I can control everything in the book. But it's not literally a "forum." It's a book. (My biggest concern is that no one would read it, which is one reason why I like having access to open forums.) (Maybe this is more like a continuum than an either-or thing.) I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Rand said somewhere (perhaps in "What Can One Do?") that as long as free speech exists, the right ideas have a chance. I will agree with @Boydstun that there are a lot of choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. But the thing about a forum is precisely that it does not constitute an exercise of one's own speech -- it constitutes giving others an opportunity to speak, which is a different thing (and can be valuable too, including to the giver of the opportunity). Of course when you provide that opportunity it's pretty much true by definition that you give up control over what those others are going to say. You are signing up for surprises. Some of them may be pleasant, some not. The pleasant ones are what make it worthwhile. (But also, a person may run or participate in an open forum because he wants to test his own thinking and ideas by being exposed to those of others.) Peikoff writes that lies are "impotent" because the underlying reality is still there and will be discovered. This is why people who live by lies end up having to resort to force (because the lies alone are never enough). It's also why a free society can afford to have free speech. So in that sense there shouldn't be any harm in allowing people to speak their minds. (I'm excluding stuff like harassment that would render the forum useless). The truth will come out eventually. Even posting the truth here isn't necessarily going to end the discussion, though, because people have to see that truth for themselves, and they have to see it in reality, not just in the forum. Discussions end when there is nothing more to add. My concern is that the calls to exercise more editorial control are actually rooted in the idea that lies are not impotent, that lies have to be censored because they'll "mislead" people. This is rooted in the primacy of consciousness, but not in the usual way: most people familiar with Objectivism know better than to think that lies "create reality." We all know that I can lie and say I have a gold bar, but the lie doesn't create the gold bar. But there is a "second order" version of the "primacy of consciousness," if you want to call it that -- the notion that if false ideas spread around, people will believe them, and then act on them, and then this will give rise to oppressive governments and cultures. So well-meaning people then conclude that the spread of the false ideas has to be stopped. False ideas need to be refuted; that's the only way to really stop them. The possibility that people will believe bad ideas called "free will" and is metaphysically given, and there's nothing we can actually do about that. We can try to put the right ideas out there, and also try to explain why the wrong ideas are wrong. Trying to fight the metaphysically given is why it's a second-order version of the primacy of consciousness. We can't stop people from thinking bad thoughts. If refutation is not enough then the human species is doomed anyway. I think that setting up forum rules to ban the discussion of certain ideas only serves to create the impression that Objectivism cannot withstand those ideas, which is not true. Further, the ideas are not "gone," they just go to other forums. Merely hiding the arguments we disagree with doesn't help; it can even amount to self-deception. I will admit that sometimes people raise the same tired old objections to Objectivism over and over. In that case it should be sufficient to refer to them to places where the objections have already been answered. However, it is possible that the answer to the tired old objection was somehow incomplete and so another question may need to be answered. There are also people out there who would expect you to "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4, and they won't accept anything you say, so that they are either trolling or their reasoning is irreparably defective. In that case, just stop. There is nothing you can do. (Why get all upset about it?) The correct thing to do, the only thing we really can do, about the evil in society, is try to patiently explain why having an oppressive culture is a bad idea, and how to make a better one -- which is sort of what Objectivism is about in the first place. -- There is a second concern, too. The forum owners may say that they don't want their resources to be used to promote bad ideas. The thing is, when the forum is open, and somebody posts a bad idea, it doesn't count as a "promotion" in the same way it would if it had been approved by editors. This is because people know that the forum is open and that just about anything can be posted. If everybody wins an award, the award is not very meaningful, and that's an instance of the same principle.

Yours is only ONE conception of what a forum must be or should be. There is nothing in the technology requiring that model, and any conventions about it were born yesterday and should anyway be rattled with experimentation. Over at Objectivist Living, the owner openly restricted content to: do not criticize Nathaniel or Barbara Branden. In the later years, he had the covert content restriction: do not criticize Donald Trump. It's still a forum. The highly content-restricted forums (FB Groups) named "Ayn Rand Group" and "Leonard Peikoff Appreciation Group" are still forums. An electronic forum could have all the topic-restrictions and scholarly-level requirements I put on the Objectivity journal and it could have management such as the absolute monarchy as I did it there, and it would still be a forum. And it might be a useful forum for some writers and readers because of those considerable restrictions on content. The Comments section of online magazines are also forums. In the case of Philosophy Now, the owners have adopted a sufficiently hands-off policy that anything favorable to Ayn Rand or even accurately representing Rand will be met with vicious personal attack on the commenter as ignorant and idiot. The management allows that routine dynamic, and they evidently get the participants and product suited to their project.

The reason it's closed is because you are arguing against the facts of reality in a prejudiced manner without ever stating the core purpose behind it. But this isn't the place to have a second flat earth game/discussion. And yes, your argument and style is exactly the same as those that do the flat earth thing while knowing the truth and just trying to practice argumentation for the sake of argument and arbitrary skepticism contrary to the facts of reality. Stay in reality because that is what is discussed here.

It seems like some of the most controversial threads of late have been on point; the main question is always how to discover what the facts are. This can get into questions of what sources you trust, and under what conditions you trust them. Objectivism obviously reaches different conclusions depending on what facts you put into it; if Objectivism were impervious to facts, it would be arbitrary! It's proper to reject claims of fact when they clash with lots and lots of well-founded abstractions, though, the way perpetual-motion machines clash with the known laws of physics. It's also proper to identify situations where a fact really doesn't make any difference, like whether Abraham Lincoln ever dyed his hair. It should be possible to integrate everything without contradiction. So I think part of having an active mind is to read a lot and see if you can integrate what you are reading with what you know. (This includes identification of claims as falsehoods or as arbitrary, where appropriate). Writing some of your conclusions and seeing how people answer can be valuable and thought-provoking as well. My inclination was to think it would not have done any harm. For myself, I figured I had said my piece, and had nothing further to say. So as far as I was concerned the thread was already dead and it was time for me to move on to some other topic. I suppose there could be "vampire" threads that could refuse to die and suck the lifeblood out of the rest of the forum... such a thread would need a stake through its heart... but was this thread really one of them? (Probably the worst thing is unneeded repetition. I don't like reading the same thing over and over, and I don't like saying the same thing over and over, either...) Often people leave not because of the forum itself but because they have a "life event" such as a new job, a marriage, birth of a child, or a funeral. Life events are why I left and came back, and not because of anything wrong with the board itself. Right now I have time to participate but other times I have just been too busy. If the administrator of a board has such a life event, the board itself may come to an end. This sort of thing is not the fault of the content. People can also leave because they are no longer interested in the topic, or because they find the forum "unfriendly." Moderation can help with keeping things on-topic and civilized. That sounds a lot like "guilt by association." Lots of, e.g., Metallica fans, don't necessarily like each other. A forum is not like a magazine where the content can be completely controlled (for quality or anything else). It is proper to remove spam, and stuff that is off-topic could probably also be removed. But you'd know it was off-topic because nobody who is interested in this board in particular would be interested in it.

OO is supposed to serve a particular purpose, which is not the same as the purpose of Twit-Face or alt.philosophy.objectivism and its spawn HPO, if you remember them. When content deviates from that purpose, it is right for management to take corrective action. My judgment is that adherence to that purpose here is not strict, and it has gotten much looser since I first joined about 20 years ago. Every person who contributes here should be able to articulate their justification for contributing, to say what value you receive in exchange for your posts. If you can’t do that, you should re-evaluate your self-sacrifice. In fact, very many former contributors have done so (by which I mean, the vast majority). There are loose guidelines which state what the purpose of OO is and what contributors should and should not do. Intellectual honesty is one of those requirements, the problem is that intellectual dishonesty comes in many flavors, one being evasion and the other being unreasoned reliance on authoritative statements. The covid thread reeks of evasion and was worthy of closing on those grounds. I concluded that there was no rational value to be had in the thread, and that put paid to my participation there. I might, in another incarnation, contemplate whether just leaving the thread open does any harm. There have been many fora for Objectivism, most of which have fallen into complete inactivity. When you peruse the content of other Objectivist fora, ask yourself if you would want to be associated with that group and if not, why not? My judgment is, “No: crappy content” (NB this explicitly does not refer to HBL). The potential harm of crappy content to Objectivism should be obvious, so now we know the basis for closing crappy threads, what remains is a specific evaluation of one or more threads, to decide if they are overall above that crappiness threshold (I will not engage in a specific autopsy here). I would like to avoid reaching the “crappy content” conclusion w.r.t. OO.