REPOST: Eloriel's thread. Plus a word on conspiracy theories

[EarlG]

I want to be clear: at the beginning of this whole disaster I reminded the moderators to remove particular topics of discussion which we have removed in the past. This week has certainly demonstrated - again - that the Bush administration is criminally incompetent, but we are not going to be hosting discussions about weather control any time soon on Democratic Underground.

Earlier I removed a thread by Eloriel which had been previously locked. At first glance this thread appeared to be inappropriate, specifically because of the premise that the Bush administration deliberately planned the poor response as some kind of social experiment.

However, DUers were using this thread to build a large and useful collection of links, and attempting to create a timeline of events. As a courtesy I have spent some time recreating the links from the deleted thread and they appear in the post immediately below this one.

We have also instructed the moderators to back off a little on locking threads. I hope you can understand that this has been an incredibly difficult time to moderate the message board, and the moderators and administrators have been doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances. Inevitably there will some arguments about threads that were locked which shouldn't have been, and threads that weren't locked which should have been. We appreciate your patience as we continue to try to work through this, and in particular we would ask you not to repost threads which have been locked. Please contact me directly if you have a question about a locked thread.