Post Nazi said felch..uh-huh-uh...

this is an interesting debate.
in fact as noctilucent mentioned above your post, this should not be a beauty contest. and like you mentioned, it has to be in an impartial manner.
prior to this, i have only edited another post. that one was partial in terms of editing. i only took out a sentence that can be read as direct sexual assault on somebody like denise scott brown of VSBA, when they were moving the lieb house and that archinect thread was mentioned or linked to nyt. the post was put there late night by one of archinect members whom i respect even though we don't necessarily agree at all times and fan of his representation of what is generally viewed as 'conservative..,' i find him much more imaginative than most partisan conservatives here.
to this day, i still think i saved him from perhaps feeling awful about it in the morning, it just sounded too 'rough' to repeat here by any means, nevermind it was directed to a well respected urban planner in her seventies who is also someone's wife and mom.

that is it! in three years of being senior editor as well as contributing writer of features, news stories and my everyday posts. this was the summary of deleting whole or partial posts in which total of 5-6 words were deleted. the current 'incident' was followed by a request e-mail asking the poster it is not okay to post such (now admittedly un-intended) racial joke and he was thanked in advance for future refrain from such.

so far, this is not to include my behind the scenes relationship with archinect, fellow editors and some members i personally exchange advise, ideas and trust. yes it does mean something to be a senior editor in archinect and yes there is a publisher, other editors, advisers and behind the scenes communications among them. i really don't know how paul and others in archinect hq really pull it off, but this is a well respected and huge web publication that is put together with a lot of organization, 24/7 involvement, expense and flow of editorial content. you can imagine countless time and effort goes behind every word/image you read on the home page alone, in a very dynamic fashion, by mainly the publisher and to the lesser extend by the editors and members. i am only involved with archinect in an above described limited way and as i possibly can. i like the people and the energy...
i have many other hats. i am a registered architect, a studio teacher in an architecture school and few other responsibilities. i can safely call myself a writer and architectural critic who spends hours sifting through research, material and actual time to materialize what i do. if you think i sit here with a red pencil and look for a virus all day, you are mistaken.
however, when i am involved with archinect browsing, i do occasionally find things here i wish it wasn't but except those two incidents i explained above, i don't really touch the stuff. i do use my editing privileges mostly for correcting grammar and spelling of my own articles and posts. it is really helpful to me as a writer since i learned english later in life and my pieces are read widely, so you can imagine. i don't always have copy editor i can work with...

lately, as i have been also pointed out by javier, who was a former editor in chief, i have been noticing a lot of messages written in twitter or text messaging manner and length. i think this is not really working for this discussion board. even though we have a room for it, this is not a chat board, mind you. over the years, as students of architecture, professionals and simply people who are interested in this and related fields, we have been contributing a lot to the discourse of architectural culture via this site and via its offshoots. one has to look to the roster of names who are involved with this site as content and idea providers one time or another and over the years.
this is not a place you can come in and start to unload nasty chat room material upon registration and call it a free speech. please don't. you have no place here to chase away people who have been thoughtfully and generously contributing opinions, information and discourse. go fuckin' back to your facebook and or start your own blog. i have...
no, this is not a site you could post below par commentary for too long nor you should.

free speech can be practiced in youtube, twitter, facebook but here, please keep it to kind of freespeech with certain quality and intelligence, even it is an absurd joke, idea or an exchange.

afterall, it is your own reflection!

now, go fuck yourselves and start *thinking more than 142 characters!

i quit.,;.))))) and won't be editing a third 'incident.'

If its longest thread, actually called Thread Central, is the longest string of daily personal trivia and domestic surrealism, and the allowance of "Random Tangents" are anything to go by, then its quite obvious archinect has always contained a strong dose of triviality...healthy or not. And sometimes a 142 character response does the trick.

But, since i'm actually discussing Archinect (and therefore endowing it with self-awareness...since I am part of its sum-of-parts selfhood), my post now is liable for being deleted. And so is Orhan's. This remind me of my mother, always knowingly in denial.

but noctilucent, while the Thread Central might contain "a strong dose of triviality", it does serve one of the points of the archinect discussion forum mentioned above, namely, the exchange of information.

Orhan,

I have a question for you. Do you think you were over-sensitized since Islam and Moslems figure prominently in your background and the natural weariness you would have apropos the western antipathy towards islam post 9-11? I actually feel that the comment was more a result of lame harmless and unsesitive generalization (we are all prone to doing that) than actual hateful and racist vitriol. I've read far more genuinely insulting and hateful comments on Islam and Moslims that were more cleverly and insiduously cloaked and were therefore allowed here.

As such, wasn't it really the lack of knowing political correctness and the abundance of political clumsiness on that individual's part that really got to you and triggered off this anti-islamophobia reaction than anything else? If stupidity and lameness were a reason for 'moderating out' people's posts, then why only this one?

I can see, though, that PC protection has worked for Judaism in the West; try saying the same comment about the Jews. This anti_Islamophobia/PC rhetoric, and your kind of reaction, i think might be essential for securing the western secular space for Islam to exist in unmolested. One might claim that although this silly jester did not harbour hatred and vitriol, nevertheless s/he took advantage of the imposed estrangeness (rather than strangeness) of Islam in the West, as a freak phenonemon (think 'freaks' in a circus) and thereby contributing to the further bullying against Islam.

fay.panda,

yes...and your point?

my point is nominated against orhan's; exchange of information was not the subject matter...but rather the exchange of some information and the withholding of particular (ie. trivial) information. orhan wants us to exchange substantial (in nature and amount) information whereas archinect allows and reserves particular space for the trivial. Exchange of any Information is not in itself a virtue; would it really add value to your growing knowledge base to know that i had sex with a hairy man yesternight?

unsensitive..insensitive

only if you are a man, too.

Then that's some juicy gossip.

i have no longer have an issue with the original poster but the wider question of slender and hatred you mention.
and it doesn't stop there but spills out to other areas and groups i mentioned. hateful and racist vitriol is there and if i detect it, i take a position against it.
i agree with you, the most vile ones are not the ones easily detectable to the naked eye, but they happen everyday quite a bit. this started way before 9/11 and it became a norm since. it was always there but now it runs toward becoming a cultural norm. really scary and sad without going into detail.
and, when i see the innocent islamic kids peacefully trying to grow up and be part of the society they are in, i do think establishing some kind of PC could be useful at least to the level these kids are not alienated from the very society they are born into and speak its language so well.
PC as an immediate ceasefire if you will...

noctilucent, yes i am sensitized. sometimes over sensitized for over the top belligerency for very reasons you have eloquently put together.

personally i grew up in a very secular household where we had my father's bounded and stamped volumes of torah, bible and quran next to each other in that order as a trilogy in the western history area, (yes my father's book shelves were organized in that fashion.;.)
kids were told to treat each with respect even though no particular religion was practiced in the house.

political correctness is not something i sympathize/identify with or pay that much attention... but it would (?) be perhaps useful in this case as i mentioned above to establish some perimeters of the unloading on communities concerned...

hillandrock,

i fail to see why my being a guy having sex with another guy would be "juicy gossip" for you. are you really this infantile? another stupid comment.

Orhan;

political correctness is not something i sympathize/identify with or pay that much attention... but it would (?) be perhaps useful in this case as i mentioned above to establish some perimeters of the unloading on communities concerned

yes, i understand that it has its place, although you're not being clear about its place. people who dismiss political correctness are usually people who have secured it beforehand; dismissing political correctness for people lying outside its margins altogether is something else altogether. people who dismiss political correctness usually dismiss an assumed connoting latent silence , an negatively potent absence that might mask antipathy. well, i tell you what, i would rather be hated silently and yet be protected by law and convention than be hated loudly and be vunerable to the influence of that loudness.

what about jokes? where is it ok to draw the line? Everyone has personal taboos, but how do you mediate public taboos across so many cultures?

oh god? really? really?

bwahahaha.