Trial By Fire, 2008! The Rules

[shamelessposer]

I had this idea that I figured might help to create a less flamey political discourse in the Pound in the future. Now, I'll freely admit that I think my political views are superior to those of the rest of the board, but it would be wrong of me not to believe that. They are, after all, [i]my[/i] beliefs gathered from life experience and trustworthy sources. [i]Your[/i] beliefs, gathered from a different life experience and other sources, are [i]yours[/i] and therefore you're going to try and claim that they're better than mine. Down this path, flamewars. So I'd like to cut it off at the pass. Every week we'll discuss a specific issue within certain restrictions I'll place in the first post. This will prevent people from, say, turning a turning a thread on the Large Hadron Collider into a treatise on atheism. Here are the rules as of the moment I post, and we'll continue until Friday evening. [center][b]The Rules[/b] Rule the First: Attack ideas, not people. Attack a poster within one of these threads and no one is under any obligation to respond to your posts until the next thread starts the following Monday. Rule the Second: Provide a source proving the same point as your original post to the thread, and continue to post sources as you feel the situation warrants. When a source is posted it can be challenged by other people, which is a nice way of telling a poster that his information is wrong without calling him an idiot. Rule the Third: There will be restrictions on what counts as a source. To avoid any argument about whether or not FOX News is a legitimate source of information, nothing that comes from an American cable news network may be counted as a source. BBC has a long and upstanding history of being a moderate voice in US politics, so they're okay. Unless the subject is religious itself, no holy text counts as a source. If someone claims that bats are birds and sites the KJV Bible, then I say they're not and this proves the bible is a flawed document for science research (which it very much is, despite its many other strengths), we're away from the original subject and onto something that's only going to cause trouble. Rule the Fourth: I'm a referee, but also a participant. I'll try and show through example what I'd like to see from these threads. That means while I will be checking my sources and others extra hard, and that I'll be in a position to enforce the "thread rules" against everyone, myself included. If you see a violation of the thread rules, please PM me. If you see a violation of the forum rules, please report me.[/CENTER] With that all squared off, I'll go ahead and start another thread for first week's debate. It's something that I think can be done with a light touch on these forums, so it'll get everyone in the groove of things without too much worry for ego.