The REAL Poll about the Threads on Deaths from Iraq War

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

What should be done about the Iraq death toll thread?

  • Keep everything as it is (leave current thread open, allowing only for reports on coalition deaths--

    Votes: 6 27.3%
  • Leave current thread open, but allow for commentary

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Leave current thread open, but allow for commentary and reports on coalition wounded

    Votes: 1 4.5%
  • Leave current thread open, but allow for commentary, reports on coalition wounded, and reports on Ir

    Votes: 9 40.9%
  • Close current thread and start new one under current rules

    Votes: 1 4.5%
  • Close current thread and start new one under new rules

    Votes: 1 4.5%
  • Fuck it all and have a drink in the Octagon

    Votes: 4 18.2%

  • Total voters
    22
  • Poll closed .

pax

ONE love, blood, life
Joined
Nov 5, 2001
Messages
11,412
Location
Ewen's new American home
Please choose which option you think would be best. As I stated in the "Toll Grows Higher" thread, I will abide by majority rule for this one and ask the team to do the same.

This does NOT mean this is going to be a pattern at Interference or anything. ;)

Thank you.
 
Last edited:
That would be under the first option.

We could leave things as they are in the existing thread, and start a new thread for civilian casualties.
 
My question is, why is the War forum still open?
Yes, the war still goes on in Iraq, but the traffic (and # of threads) in this forum has dropped considerably. Usually, I don't even bother looking here anymore. So why not merge it with the regular FYM topics like homosexuality, abortion, death penalty, religion and George Bush? Lots of wars are going on in those threads. :wink:

*heads over to the Octagon or wherever else there are people*
 
I hope I'm not considered too crazy for this, but I'm happy with the status quo. Horrors! Did I say "happy with the status quo"? What's happening to me? :wink:
 
Popmartijn said:
My question is, why is the War forum still open?
Yes, the war still goes on in Iraq, but the traffic (and # of threads) in this forum has dropped considerably. Usually, I don't even bother looking here anymore. So why not merge it with the regular FYM topics like homosexuality, abortion, death penalty, religion and George Bush? Lots of wars are going on in those threads. :wink:

I have been wondering this for sometime myself.

The policies of the Bush Administration have a huge effect on the rest of the world.

This War forum seems to be a place where some members want things they don't like to read
- banished to die a neglected death.
 
paxetaurora said:
Please choose which option you think would be best. As I stated in the "Toll Grows Higher" thread, I will abide by majority rule for this one and ask the team to do the same.

This does NOT mean this is going to be a pattern at Interference or anything. ;)

Thank you.

Why can't you just leave the thread the way it has been for 18 months? Free of politics and potentially offensive comments. Why ruin what has worked so well, something that has been non-political, with the exception of the few times that rule was broken?

Go beyond the simple formula and it becomes what one person finds or does not find offensive and political vs another.

I'm curious as to why a poll is being used in an arena where certain political views are clearly dominant over others? A bit unfair for those in the minority. Those that want to post other things can start their own threads. Why do they have to change this one thread that has worked for 18 months now? Why tamper with the ONLY thread dedicated to honoring the coalition troops who have died in Iraq, which is designed to be free of politically sensitive material?
 
Because there are good arguments both for and against the change.

I decided to offer the poll so that people would feel they were presented with options, as this topic is obviously quite sensitive.
 
paxetaurora said:
Because there are good arguments both for and against the change.

I decided to offer the poll so that people would feel they were presented with options, as this topic is obviously quite sensitive.

Its totally unfair to the spirit of the thread which has lasted for 18 months. How can it be fair to potentially change that through a vote? Dreadsox started this thread with one intent. He came back in when things got out of hand and asked everyone to keep politics out of it and stay with the topic of HIS thread. When did people gain the right to fundamentally change someone elses thread, especially a thread that has lasted for 18 months?

If this can be done with a thread this special, it can be done with any thread. How can it be right for others to be able to take away something that has lasted for this long, which they did not start?
 
Threads derail all the time, STING, and usually when they derail, we just close them. Keep in mind that if I had closed that thread, and then someone started a new one, it could have been closed as a spin-off, and any other subsequent threads could have met the same fate.

I called for a vote because I did not want to see that happen with Dread's thread. You know how I felt about that thread; believe me, I like very much the idea of reserving one thread as a no-argument zone! It makes my job that much easier. But there are good arguments against that, too.

So I called for a vote. And that is how it is.
 
Last edited:
I think that the issue is about including civilian casualties, I think that civilian casualty counts will be coming from some very questionable sources and will not be accurate but the principle itself is sound. There should be a seperate thread, it maintains the originals intent and will not cause nearly as much argument. By creating a dichotomy in any single thread its going to stop being one of rememberance and become a pissing contest of suffering.
 
A_Wanderer said:
There should be a seperate thread, it maintains the originals intent and will not cause nearly as much argument. By creating a dichotomy in any single thread its going to stop being one of rememberance and become a pissing contest of suffering.

Maybe it boils down to just that, that every thread around here has to be turned into a pissing contest :sigh:

All I was trying to do was my small part in remembering lives that were lost, whenever I could find the information about non-US casualties I tried my best to keep the thread updated and to post it. Who knew a simple thing like that could create accusations and assumptions.
 
AS the person who started the thread over two years ago I am disappointed that a poll is going to determine the status of the thread.

I am disappointed in the people who can't keep politics out of it, and start their own thread.

I am also disappointed that the forum apparently is going to be run by a vote.

Is this the new precident....that we as members of FYM can start interfering in respectful threads and force a vote? Give me a break. No one has ever been allowed to vote on threads before.
 
Sad part is I cannot fucking vote because the flipping program will not work on my computer.

This blows.....
 
This is my second most disappointing day in this community. I would never dream of interfering in another members thread.

It is disappointing because I cannot even immagine disrupting a thread that has existed for 18 months. A thread in which I posted names of people I knew. Names of people whose family I sit in the pews with a church. names of people who my colleagues taught.

There is no other point of view here. If it were a funeral or a memorial in the fucking real world you would not put it up to a vote. You would deal with the person disrupting the memorial. having served in the military, having lost a member of my community who I worshipped with I see no other point of view.

I FAIL to understand why it would even be entertained that this thread might be closed. I FAIL to understand why, if someone felt so strongly about other deaths, they could not start their own thread. I cannot immagine why a member of this forum would be allowed to treat others this way.
 
Dreadsox; I appreciate what you must be feeling concerning your thread, but pax is doing the most civilised and logical thing to do, given the circumstances.

Its all very well for parties to say that it shouldn't have been surlied with politics - but it has, and no one, not even a mod, can help that, now. What could help is if people helped themselves; it takes more than one person for an argument to occur.

It would be nice if people could appreciate pax's efforts, instead of being negative about the whole scenario.

Ant.
 
Last edited:
Anthony said:
Dreadsox; I appreciate what you must be feeling concerning your thread, but pax is doing the most civilised and logical thing to do, given the circumstances.

Its all very well for parties to say that it shouldn't have been surlied with politics - but it has, and no one, not even a mod, can help that, now. What could help is if people helped themselves; it takes more than one person for an argument to occur.

It would be nice if people could appreciate pax's efforts, instead of being negative about the whole scenario.

Ant.

How can it be viewed as being "civilized" to subject someone's thread to a vote in order to fundamentally change the subject matter? If you look at the majority of the thread, it has not been surlied by politics and has worked very well for months! BUT SOME PEOPLE decided to interject things into the thread that were not there before. Dreadsox had already stated that politics was to stay out of it!

It would be rather simple to simply e-mail the people who have broken with the simple rules of the thread and tell them not to post such things in there.

Everyone knows that a certain political feeling dominates FYM and its unfair to those not in the majority to have their rights trampled on by the mob through a vote!
 
Anthony said:
Dreadsox; I appreciate what you must be feeling concerning your thread, but pax is doing the most civilised and logical thing to do, given the circumstances.

Its all very well for parties to say that it shouldn't have been surlied with politics - but it has, and no one, not even a mod, can help that, now. What could help is if people helped themselves; it takes more than one person for an argument to occur.

It would be nice if people could appreciate pax's efforts, instead of being negative about the whole scenario.

Ant.

Don't turn this into me against Pax. I have been a member long enough to have voiced opinions in private with Pax and other mods. When I think something is wrong I have the right to voice my opinion.

I have never in my almost three years of being here, seen ANY thread voted upon!

In my almost three years of being here, I am the only person who I know of, who has had a thread title changed by a mod because of another member, even after I cleared the thread with a "super" mod.

When I see something as wrong, I can voice it. If it were a memorial outside of cyberspace, every member of this forum would say respect the memorial. Why should it be different here?
 
This isn't about me versus Dread, or the mod team versus anyone. It's about trying to do right by EVERYONE who is vested in this decision.

Let me be candid for a moment, about a couple of things, if I may. First of all, I have been a moderator for almost three years. I started as a moderator because I asked to moderate FYM. (Yes, hard to believe, but true.) I had modded another forum in the past and I genuinely believe it's a good thing to do: to try to uphold civility in the largely unchartered, even now, territory that is Internet ethics. If I may be grandiose, it's a bit like being one of the first Mounties (our Canadian friends may now that Mounties originated in response to the lawlessness of the American West in the frontier days; Mounties went ahead of Canadian pioneers to ascertain that law and order would be waiting for them in the West). In that time as a mod, I've had to make some quick, easy decisions and some long, agonizing decisions. Sometimes I've conferred with one or two other mods, sometimes I've conferred with the whole team, and sometimes I've had to make calls all by myself. Such is the nature of moderating.

This is the first time I've ever made a decision in this manner, and I will be extremely frank as to why I did this: I had, and have, no idea what is the right thing to do. I have read intelligent, heartfelt arguments from both sides of the issue. I do not own this forum. Neither does any individual poster. Faced with the obvious controversy of having to make some decision about the continuation of the thread, I did what I thought would be the least controversial thing: rather than choose myself the best course of action, I left it up to the post-ers in this forum. Was that, at least, the right call? I firmly believe that it was.

This leads me to my next point: When you post a thread here, or anywhere, it's not exactly yours anymore. By the very act of posting a thread, you invite disagreement, debate, derailment, humor, and many other things. You can encourage people to post in certain ways; if you're nice to mods, you can have mods do it for you! :wink: But, ultimately, a thread becomes the property of the community. And it is now the decision of many people what happens to it, unless it gets nasty and a mod does have to decide by fiat what happens to it.

Contrary to popular belief (and, admittedly, my own joking about it), I don't enjoy closing threads. I would love to see a Free Your Mind, and a whole Interference at that, where people could ramble and laugh and argue for pages upon pages and then all get together for a drink in the Octagon--in the O'Neill/Reagan tradition, if you will. But that is in a perfect world. In our world, things go bad. More than one party occupies the grounds of right and wrong.

To sum it all up, if you've started to skim: No one owns that thread, or any thread in this forum. And I believe I did the right thing. And I have the support of the team, too. I'm honestly sorry that we couldn't reserve just one thread in this whole place for lack of discord and argument, but it didn't work that way--and BOTH sides, dare I suggest this, contributed to the arguing.

So now I leave it to you to decide the thread's fate.

And that, as I've said before, is that.
 
paxetaurora said:
This isn't about me versus Dread, or the mod team versus anyone. It's about trying to do right by EVERYONE who is vested in this decision.

Let me be candid for a moment, about a couple of things, if I may. First of all, I have been a moderator for almost three years. I started as a moderator because I asked to moderate FYM. (Yes, hard to believe, but true.) I had modded another forum in the past and I genuinely believe it's a good thing to do: to try to uphold civility in the largely unchartered, even now, territory that is Internet ethics. If I may be grandiose, it's a bit like being one of the first Mounties (our Canadian friends may now that Mounties originated in response to the lawlessness of the American West in the frontier days; Mounties went ahead of Canadian pioneers to ascertain that law and order would be waiting for them in the West). In that time as a mod, I've had to make some quick, easy decisions and some long, agonizing decisions. Sometimes I've conferred with one or two other mods, sometimes I've conferred with the whole team, and sometimes I've had to make calls all by myself. Such is the nature of moderating.

This is the first time I've ever made a decision in this manner, and I will be extremely frank as to why I did this: I had, and have, no idea what is the right thing to do. I have read intelligent, heartfelt arguments from both sides of the issue. I do not own this forum. Neither does any individual poster. Faced with the obvious controversy of having to make some decision about the continuation of the thread, I did what I thought would be the least controversial thing: rather than choose myself the best course of action, I left it up to the post-ers in this forum. Was that, at least, the right call? I firmly believe that it was.

This leads me to my next point: When you post a thread here, or anywhere, it's not exactly yours anymore. By the very act of posting a thread, you invite disagreement, debate, derailment, humor, and many other things. You can encourage people to post in certain ways; if you're nice to mods, you can have mods do it for you! :wink: But, ultimately, a thread becomes the property of the community. And it is now the decision of many people what happens to it, unless it gets nasty and a mod does have to decide by fiat what happens to it.

Contrary to popular belief (and, admittedly, my own joking about it), I don't enjoy closing threads. I would love to see a Free Your Mind, and a whole Interference at that, where people could ramble and laugh and argue for pages upon pages and then all get together for a drink in the Octagon--in the O'Neill/Reagan tradition, if you will. But that is in a perfect world. In our world, things go bad. More than one party occupies the grounds of right and wrong.

To sum it all up, if you've started to skim: No one owns that thread, or any thread in this forum. And I believe I did the right thing. And I have the support of the team, too. I'm honestly sorry that we couldn't reserve just one thread in this whole place for lack of discord and argument, but it didn't work that way--and BOTH sides, dare I suggest this, contributed to the arguing.

So now I leave it to you to decide the thread's fate.

And that, as I've said before, is that.


"I'm honestly sorry that we couldn't reserve just one thread in this whole place for lack of discord and argument, but it didn't work that way"

If those that want to keep the memorial from being destroyed by others win out in the vote, you'll have to reserve the thread as a memorial which makes the above statement a bit strange as well as any statements suggesting that threads can't be reserved as memorials.

Why allow this one memorial, dedicated to coalition troops who have died serving their country, to potentially be destroyed? There is plenty of space for others to start their own threads and commentary about other things.

I cannot be certain, but it seems to me using a poll obviously will have a predictable outcome given the type of political views that have the majority in here in here, don't you agree? How is this fair to those in the minority here? Is FYM a place where all political stripes are treated fairly, or where the majority political stripe can use its greater numbers to get their way anytime a conflict comes up?
 
Just a post to apologise to Dreadsox for clearly not having made myself clear - it was not an attempt to single anyone out, especially Dreadsox. If it had been I would have contacted members myself, directly.

As pax has already mentioned, the thread does not belong to anyone, but rather, a community. The fate of the thread is now in the hands of that community.

Ant.
 
I would like to reinforce the fact that I cannot vote....to save my own thread.
 
I propose that the voting itself is biased because it does not offer the option to maintain the tread to honour the dead soldiers as it is and at the same time have a seperate thread too have civilian casualties, it is essentially giving people a choice between acknowledging civilian deaths or choosing to ignore and in that the question is leading. I think that most people have expressed the intention to retain the thread as is but at the same time have somewhere to acknowledge dead civilians - who is for two threads?
 
Dreadsox;

I have taken the liberty in editing the vote as to include yours - under option number one.

Ant.
 
Last edited:
A_Wanderer: if that's what you want to do, vote for the first option.

This is really only to decide the fate of the existing thread.
 
Thank you ant. You are writing me well!!!!:wink:

I am sorry for my rant yesterday. There was a death that I learned about in my circle of friends within two hours of posting. I have a feeling my emotions were running a bit high.
 
I voted option 1, even though I haven't actively participated in that thread I do read it and there are plenty of other threads to fight in.

:hug: Dreadsox
 
Since everything seems to have calmed down, I'm going to unstick this thread, close it, and leave everything how it is.

Hope we all can live with that.
 
Back
Top Bottom