I've been thinking about this for a few days, and I'm going to step out of line here.
I know that this is Phil and Fraser's board so it's their decision and it will stand no matter what, but I have to disagree with the decision.
It has been long said about this forum that the reason that any CT was allowed was to attempt to promote Critical Thinking, I really can't see that this should have changed. Were there problems, yes, but to my mind, not unsurmountable ones. For a long time we have been asking that rule 13 be applied, and now it has, which is good, but I would have liked to have seen how it would have affected the forum before the topic list was clamped down on.
There are several reasons I say this. Firstly it would have given a chance to see if the problems could have been fixed without the topic clampdown.
Secondly it wouldn't have looked like we lost. Sorry I need to say this. This was one of the few boards out there willing to put CT under a scientific microscope. Yes there are a lot of CT forums out there, but mostly they are run by CT's and many of us that belong to this board don't have the desire or the time to go off to debate on those boards, and it is impossible to hold a scientific and well mannered debate on them anyway. Here that was possible. To end that looks like we can't hack it any more, and that is just wrong. I hate to use a political analogy, but there is one staring me in the face so I'm going too and hope people will see the point rather than getting upset and turning on the idea. I see it a little like pulling out of Iraq with the job half done. Just as doing that will let the extremists and terrorists claim the chased the US out of Iraq, so too here by doing this retreat it is just going to allow the CT's to claim victory, that BAUT is scared and has run from the fight. Yeah I know that they'd have used something similar eventually anyway (usually, "I was banned because...") but this time we've given them huge ammunition and we have no come back.
Thirdly, this board has a lot of talent in engineering, physics, chemistry, geology, history, and more, all able to tackle the aspects of most CT's and educate people on the way. Many of us have learned a great many things from the arguments given against the Non-Astro based CT's posted here, and that opportunity is now lost.
Lasty, in the current climate, I don't think that there are enough Astronomy and Space related CT's out there. Planet X is pretty much dead for the next couple of years. Apollo gets a run through now and then, but it's generally the same old arguments and most of that crowd is focused on 9/11 anyway, and Hogaland's been pretty quiet the last few months. As such, with this restriction of topics, I think this section of the forum is likely to die. It was already one of the slower sections (c.f. ATM of General Science) and now will be even more so. I fear that in the end it will be so slow that it will just be merged into ATM and those of us that do tend to reside in this area will lose it.
Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter. Feel free to disagree, most people probably will, that's fine, but I can't say I like the decision, I guess though I'm just going to have to live with it just as I did the loss of the Apollo Section in the transfer from BABB to BAUT.
|