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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29087)	9/25/2006 4:56:35 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541604

Ken was a wonderful moderator. There was no "arguing" per se- of the kind you see so often now. People weren't allowed to go on endlessly about some hobby horse topic, or argue back and forth forever about some banal political hot potato. Ken wanted informative posts, and he wanted information sans intensely partisan slants, and sans intensely partisan bickering. Somehow he managed to run a really interesting thread, dealing with current topics, and including both sides (although people from each side bitched about him- so that shows you he was probably very centrist :-) , AND he managed to keep it all at a very intelligent level with many many posters. I think the fact that the thread stayed away from US politics helped- it really was foreign affairs- and the US political bullshit didn't intrude so often, which helped to keep it more civil. John may have a different take on it.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (29087)	9/25/2006 8:33:15 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 541604

What was it about the old FADG that you two swoon about so much - the posters, the content, the tone, all of the above? Well, I certainly wouldn't use the word "swoon" to describe how I feel about it. And, as is usual with me, I have ambivalent feelings. However, in the present context, given what's followed, a bit like my judgments of Bill Clinton, the old FADG looks near superb. I joined because I knew that tekboy was going to be the authoritative source; that Foreign Affairs was to be the central sort of text source (which didn't last long) and as such gave me an opportunity to read the establishmentarian view of American foreign policy at its source and discuss it with someone who would advocate its positions and do so well; and I was still new to the fragility of online communications and, in fact, more naive than anything else. Two other things were important. Ken turned out to be a superb online seminar director. He had his views on foreign policy which he was not shy about sharing. I would guess they were largely leftish DLC, about where Clinton and Gore were. Certainly within the larger bounds of the Council on Foreign Relations, the parent body of Foreign Affairs. But he shared them lightly; definitely not the style of most posters. And used them more as a topic bounding device: the Clinton administration was past tense so he kept much of that negativity at bay; the Palestinian/Israeli conflict was intractable and lead only to dead end conversations, so that was off limits; and, positive, because 9-11 occurred early in the life of the thread, many of us began learning together. He was also better than I expected at drawing lines and enforcing them. In that respect, he had the usual problems moderators have and you certainly have. He was much better at doing it than I would have been, as you are, and was flexible at times I would not have been and would have been wrong. He would ban people for a few days or a week or whatever, depending on how serious he thought the infraction and how many repeats it represented. But then he kept up a constant offline conversation with many of those who walked the line and kept falling off. I can't imagine how much time he put in. More than one should. The second thing it's important to remember and hard to get back into the mindset is that this all occurred before the political hard lines had been drawn. The old FADG is simply impossible today. It's among the many unhappy things the Bush administration has bequeathed to us today. Many, for instance, of the folk on Bill's thread today were friendly seminar participants but only growl at former thread participants like me, like eleutheria, like a good many others, today. I don't know whether that answers it. Anything, however, much more specific than this would require private e-mails since we would be talking about SI regulars. Most of whom regularly read this thread.