Does whereIstand.com have a problem with profanity and insults?

ok... turning this one on to see what happens

Interesting discussion.  I've gone back and forth with the profanity issue for a while.

my only two concerns with using profanity on the site include:

1) Will wIs be seen as less credible bc we have bloggers that use profanity?

2) Will we find ourselves losing users (like Donovan and millions like him around the world, we hope) due to frustration that their current governments censor the content?

On the other side of the coin, you have the following considerations:

Concerning intelligent debate, Nick is right.  Those bloggers who are both articulate and manage to use profanity for emphasis from time to time will rise to the top.

those who cannot engage in intelligent, logical and coherent discourse and substitute reasoned argument with profanity and insults will sink to the bottom and no one will read their material.

And of course if a blogger is insulted or disgusted by another blogger's use of profanity or style of argument there is no law on wIs that requires that blogger to read and or respond.  In other words, just ignore them and they will go away.

Personally, provided Nick does not curse out users that write in to the site, I do not see too much cause for alarm.  Wait and see what happens as we pick up.  Words are only words, right?

I think the problem of profanity is that it truly does discourage intelligent debate. I think anyone approaching an issue like abortion or religion and claiming total non-bias is being a little absurd. Liberal sources are frequently used by liberal debaters, however they claim they're unbiased. I make no such claims. Information has been collated and collected by biased people on both sides of the debate.

And there are all kinds of argument that can happen over what I write, but cursing shut downs much of it. It lessens the professionalism of the site and its automatically using fighting words. I will say that in the last couple of weeks, its been a lot more scarce than in the first five months I've been here.  

to repeat something I said on adam's blog... if anybody is interested in debating this point with me... please let me know so we can start one significant public discussion away from the blogs.

I intend to invite adam and oatney into a public discussion to debate this point... the following is something I was going to post in comments to adam's entry but put in here to take it offline and come back to it then.

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It's not that everyone is "naturally going to be a jerk", it's that there will be at least some "jerks". I don't want the site to function "by example", I want it to function by "self-interest". If what you want is for your stuff to get promoted to where everybody sees it you'll need to be articulate, well-informed, persuasive, stay on point, etc. But you shouldn't "have" to do any of things because the "I" in whereIstand is for the individual. The measure of this will be when we're a bit further along. My own "self-interest" is to continue to express myself as I see fit. Another person's will, hopefully, be to be recognized as among the top bloggers on politics, and thereby have his writing before a larger audience.

In every true marketplace there are people selling goods that you wouldn't want to buy. It doesn't hurt the guy selling religious iconography that there's another guy selling cigarettes.

By the way, your idea of a jerk is different from my idea of one - and to Oatney's original point of me saying that people that espouse certain ideas are dumb... here's you saying that people that use profanity are jerks.

To me, a jerk in a discussion is not the guy that uses profanity, it's the guy that doesn't try to carry the substance of the discussion forward. When the discussions section on the site is working as planned (taking the "discussions" off of the blogs will make me rather happy), it will make arguing constructively be in the self-interest of each user.

You do some things that are completely disiingenuous in the context of a discussion. The measure of the "facts" presented ought to include a certain set of attributes. Whatever those are, it must certainly be true that a web site that presents itself as unbiased but is actually comprised entirely of people of a like ideology with a like agenda

added in response to the recent debates between oatney, adam, and myself.