How many people TRULY post and respond to others without considering (at least a bit) the character of the other people with whom they engage? That is one reason I am personally against deleting posts that are not horribly offensive (as mentioned elsewhere, I don’t like deleting ANY posts, even the horribly offensive–people have the ability to avoid them by themselves and do not need some faceless entity deciding what they can and cannot handle).
In the current situation, I would much rather other people had a chance to see a part of my and satanic’s character (the part that compelled each of us to write what we did) than for someone to arbitrarily decide that he wanted to delete the posts in question. Yes, I know ILP policy, but a) it’s the very rare case in these forums that people’s characters (or online character, which ALWAYS contains at least a part of their TRUE character, as much as they might try to deny it–I try to be as similar in 2D and 3D life as possible, minus the total empathy I try to have for my patients/clients)) can be divorced from the content of the posts (either when writing or when others read the posts); and b) we leave this decision in the hands of very subjective individuals who have not done a very good job of applying ILP policies equally (thankfully, otherwise there would be far fewer posts out there).
Pax, if you look at some of the early responses to TUM’s original post, you would see that you are being quite arbitrary in your editing (once again, PLEASE do not take this as an invitation to edit MORE; I am very glad that you did not, for reasons I’ve mentioned already).
Just a few thoughts…