Good morning Doc,

Justin, as moderator, makes decisions about deleting posts. He must be offline having a life, otherwise I'm sure he'd have responded by now. As Justin's sometime backup, I can give you my lesser opinions in the meantime.

I did see the regrettable post in question. My rule of thumb is to act on my own initiative to maintain the "commons", the table of contents that everyone shares; and to intervene inside messages only under extraordinary circumstances, generally in response to a complaint. EP's subject line, which everyone is forced to read while scanning the TOC, was marginally offensive, but not quite over the line. If somebody had complained about the content of his message, I'd have felt an obligation to look into it and probably act. If your message constitutes a formal complaint, it's the first one, and it will be taken seriously, though I must defer to Justin for final judgment.

I'm inclined to use restraint about censorship because I think people have a right to hang themselves with their words. If we'd deleted that post, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to alert PAO to add EP to the kook list, right? We'd have protected EP from the consequences of his words, and I'm not comfortable with taking on that responsibility. EP routinely expresses himself that way, and if we deleted all such posts, we'd be editing his public persona and presenting a sanitized image to the world. I don't consider it my job to polish his public image, nor to deprive his audience of all the information they need to judge him--his use of language is a window into his mind. Bottom line, deleting that post would have enhanced his credibility, and it doesn't sound like that's what you want, is it?

--Robert