Guidelines
There are very few hard and fast rules here, but I do have some guidelines for anybody who wants to contribute (either through comments or by writing actual entries). The intent of this site is expressed in the About page, and if you just stay within the spirit of that you should be fine. Some more specific guidelines though would be as follows:
- No spam. It detracts from the quality of the site for all visitors. Some self-promotion may be acceptable (if it’s related to the discussion at hand and presented in a conversational and constructive manner), but I do not want this site to turn into a link-farm.
- Avoid excessive swearing. To be honest, I don’t really care about “bad” language, and the occasional colorful word can actually help some people really make a point. But if it grows to the degree where it is detracting from the conversation (by replacing any actual content with mere barrages of four letter words), then I would suggest trying to expand your vocabulary a little bit.
- Do your best to avoid Ad Hominem, e.g. do not invoke unnecessary or excessive personal attacks (as well as the all-too-common guilt by association fallacy). This is, all things considered, a casual website, so I’m not expecting people to express all their arguments in flawless logical form or anything. That said, I do expect a certain standard in the discussion here, so if all you want to do is complain about how Republicans/Democrats/whoever suck, then there are plenty of other places for you to go.
Aside from these general suggestions, the main underlying rule is that what I say goes. This isn’t to say that I want everybody to agree with me - I strongly encourage constructive discourse and in fact very much hope that there will be people to take up oppositional views. I just want the dialogue to remain reasonably courteous and stay in the spirit of the site. Though I very much doubt that there will ever be any real issues (it’s unlikely that this site will ever become popular enough for that anyway), if anything does come up it is ultimately my discretion as to what is done. I don’t expect to be forced to censor or ban anybody, but if it does happen don’t start whining about your First Amendment rights. If you think what you have to say is really that tremendously important, go out and start your own website. Free speech gives you the right to talk, but it doesn’t force anybody else to listen to you.
One other issue that I again doubt will ever matter too much but is worth addressing is that of intellectual property. As you have likely noticed, the bottom of each page of this site links to the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License. In a nutshell, this means that you can freely copy, distribute, and use the content of this website, and you can also make derivative works (that is, take something here and modify it for your own purposes). The catches are you must attribute it properly, it cannot be used for commercial purposes, and this same license applies to it. It is possible for me to grant exceptions to these rules if you provide me a good reason, so get in touch with me if that’s the case. And note that this license only applies to what I (Aaron) write here - any comments or entries made by other people are by default copyrighted by them unless they explicitly choose another license.
