A Flag for Blatant Contradictions
Posted by deleted 10 years, 1 month ago to The Gulch: Feature Requests
I think if someone consistently makes contradictory claims that we should be able to flag their comments as an alert to others that it is on our radar. If I walked into the gulch and saw some of these remarks and thought they were typical for this gulchonline place I'd hit the pavement. There has to be a way of letting new comers know that certain things are not okay with the bulk of objectivists in here and I don't want to scare the shit out of people the minute they land. People find their way here to get AWAY from that kind of non thinking.....
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Regarding the inconsistency flag, many (maybe most) discussions involve people thinking the other person holds two contradictory propositions. The interesting part is working out why that is. Do they disagree fundamentally, e.g. one person is anti-objectivist and thinks “good people put others' interests ahead of their own” or do they disagree on some fact or reasoning. It seems to defeat the entire purpose of a discussion website if every time we see something that doesn't sound right we click a button instead of discussing. It's basically a second downvote button.
Another thought I had is to have Categories where certain ideas can and cannot be discussed. For example, religious people wanting to discuss how religious people can be objectivists could have a Category where criticizing the very notion of religion or religion and objectivism is prohibited. There could similarly be a Category for people who accept religion is incompatible with objectivism. People wanting to discuss how to support/oppose candidates could have Category where criticizing the idea of supporting/opposing candidates. The point is to keep people from being distracted by tangents if they don't want to be. The hard part with this idea is keeping the number of Categories manageable.