Issuepedia:Ethics channel

Building a more ethical and humane civilization – one rant at a time.&trade;

Overview
This page is about the official IRC channel for Issuepedia: #ethics on VillageIRC.

The #ethics channel is for discussion of anything relating to what's right and wrong in the things we do as individuals or as groups. This includes philosophy, politics, religion, and probably a lot of other headings.

I want to work out why people believe some of the wacky things they believe – or is it me that's wacky? Show me how I'm wrong! I'll try to post a set of challenges for anyone who'd like to defend points of view that I totally don't get.

Guidelines

 * #ethics is for reasonably civilized discussions of right and wrong
 * All Beliefs Questioned Here, including mine
 * If you don't want your words quoted on the wiki, please say so.
 * Lurking may be necessary for participation; long lulls between discussions.

A Story
Any attempt to describe this channel's underlying purpose in abstract terms seems to end up sounding extremely pretentious, so instead I'll tell a little story.

Once upon a time, I lived in a small college town surrounded by miles and miles of agriculture. Although the majority of the town seemed to be liberally-oriented, its position in the middle of this agrarian wilderness – combined with the fact that much of the liberal population was transient and seasonal – meant that there was a very entrenched conservative vein in the town, especially among those who actually owned most of the property and resources.

Furthermore, due to this town's position in the middle of the Bible Belt, the conservative vein was also generally of the Bible-thumping variety known for its rants against homosexuality and evolution as being the twin pillars of salt sent by Satan to undermine our God-fearing fear of God's righteous wrath and other family-centered underpinnings of these here United Christian States of America.

As a result of this conflict (often expressed heatedly in letters-to-the-editor of the local paper) I wanted to find a way for people with completely different viewpoints to get together and figure out the root causes of their disagreements.

Well, that didn't work out.

But then many years later, IRC and wikis were invented.

And then not long after that, George W. Bush got elected. And then about 4 years later he got re-elected, so I started Issuepedia. And finally, not long after that, I realized that there needed to be a place for Issuepedians to interact with each other in real-time, so I started the #politics channel. And not long after that, I realized that this wasn't a good name, as it tended to scare people off; eventually I came up with #ethics as being a somewhat better (and less scary) name for what I wanted the channel to be about.

Discussions
Notes on various #ethics channel topics can be linked from here:
 * 2007-12-16 ethics chat mainly on the topic of the Federal Reserve
 * religion

Posted Topics

 * 2008-12-18: Conservatives have rules; liberals have principles. This is the essential difference between the two.
 * 2008-09-28: Humanity is not innately warlike.

Use of Content
Anything posted in the #ethics channel should be considered copyable elsewhere (and released under the GNU FDL, the same as Issuepedia); if anyone joining the channel does not wish their words to be quoted, or would like to be anonymized, please PM me (usually TheWoozle) in IRC and we will work something out.

Related channels

 * There is also a #religion channel on VillageIRC, but unlike #ethics it is intended for discussion of religion itself rather than analyses of religion's purpose or value.
 * For casual chat among geeks, there are the SluggySquad channels: see the SquadWiki Community Portal.