Editor,
It is good that you will remove plagiarized posts. I have long complained about this practice in the online forum. Besides being unoriginal and lazy, those posting whole commentaries are subjecting the Daily Lobo to a copyright infringement lawsuit. (You may be familiar with the Lobos fans site being sued for lifting articles.) Hopefully your extra monitors are familiar enough with contemporary news media to know that “Jonah Goldberg” is not a UNM student but a well-known right-wing commentator.
I am disappointed that your policy restricts attacks only “on the basis of gender, race, class” and so on. This policy will just be dismissed by many as political correctness. Besides that, would it not be more comprehensive and efficient to just remove all personal attacks? I am an Anglo male yet I have suffered many personal insults in the online forum. I have stopped posting comments on political issues because I got tired of the unending, nasty ad hominem attacks (being called an “idiot” and worse) from the same handful of repeat offenders. To me these rude comments constituted an “unnecessarily hurtful attack on an individual,” as stated on your website. (By the way, when could a hurtful attack ever be necessary?)
Why not simply revise the criterion to “posts that attack others — period?” Thirty years ago I learned in a logic and rhetoric class that using ad hominem is a fallacy; as far as I know that’s still true. Name calling is never part of a “healthy debate.” For now, I am skeptical and I “wait and see,” for I see the same handful of rude people posting insults in the recent comments
list — “moron” seems to be the favored term.
Finally, please consider restricting use of DailyLobo.com to people actually connected to our University. As others have already pointed out, the First Amendment does not obligate a newspaper to print all letters, and the reality is that most of the worst offenders that I mentioned above have no affiliation with UNM. Some of them even admit to having no college education at all, and moreover are hostile to higher education and dismiss the work of scientists and intellectuals.
They are entitled to their own opinions naturally, but this is a university after all; we should strive for an academic discourse. They are free to post uneducated arguments on some other blog.
Larry Compton
UNM staff
