Establishing boundaries: comments that will not be permitted at VFR

In the interests of maintaining a reasonable and civilized common ground of discussion, and of avoiding endless wasting of time in responding to ignorant and crackpot views that have already been dealt with a hundred times, here are comments recently posted by me in which I describe opinions that will not be allowed at this site. The list will be added to as occasion warrants.

(1) What I am doing is announcing a new rule. In the future, anyone who writes, as Mark wrote,

“To Buchanan’s credit, whomever [sic] doubts the policies of Israel is automatically dubbed an anti-semite.”

is going to be excluded from this site. This kind of statement is palpably false and ignorant. No one who merely “questioned” Israel’s policy has been called an anti-Semite. The issue is not criticism. The issue is people, like Buchanan, who side with terrorists and attack Israel’s very legitimacy, yet who claim to be as mere “critics” of Israel who are being called anti-Semites merely for making criticisms.

I’m not going let this site be used by people who are so ignorant and so in denial of the basic issues. We should’nt have to keep dealing with same nonsense forever. It’s not worth maintaining a discussion forum if it means dealing with the kind of stupidity shown in Mark’s comment.

(2) I’m going to add a second item to the index of prohibited opinions: “Bush lied about WMDs.” Perhaps there are other sites suitable to the pursuit of this theory; who knows, maybe in some alternative universe it will turn out to be right. But I am not lending this site to, or spending any of my time discussing, assertions that I regard as crackpottery.

For useful discussions, there needs to be a minimum of a common ground. “Bush lied” lies outside that common ground as far as I’m concerned. Therefore, in future, anyone who makes the absurd statement that Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq (which would mean that Bush knew he would be massively discredited as soon as Iraq was conquered and the weapons were not found), will be excluded from this site.

(3) Now I’m adding a third item to the index of prohibited opinions: Anybody who seeks to minimize the evil and threat of Nazism, such as saying that “Nazism was a minimal threat worldwide,” will be excluded from this site.

(4) As I’ve been indicating lately, I am not going to entertain statements of pure quackery at this website. An example is the comment: “The [Civil] war was fought over taxation, pure and simple.” A similar comment made in the past was that “The Civil War was fought over the tariff; slavery had nothing to do with it.”

If you want to indulge in overheated paleocon and neo-Confederate rhetoric aimed at delegitimzing the United States, then go to lewrockwell.com. Anyone posting such mischievous and nonsensical lies here will be blocked from making further comments.

Here are links to further statements I may make from time to time about this issue:

Comments that are not open to discussion.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 19, 2004 07:36 PM | Send