Editing a significant amount of time after posting is sort of suspect, mainly because, why bother? But it would depend on the change.

But Tech perfectly illustrated the poisonous potential of self-editing by changing the sense of his post 180 degrees. Which turned it into a kind of sneak attack on everybody who’d replied, especially those who got heated, who now might look like assholes to a casual observer. On a more abstract scale, it’s an attack on the integrity of the conversational record…which is why the software has revision tracking and I don’t have to consider the practice an existential threat to the Zone.

You handle the power responsibly, Tom. Techie didn’t and lost it.

Some good questions, and I wish I had a good answer. We already know that the radicals will bring the fight to us if we ignore them. There was a hole in the New York skyline for a long time. We also know that “reforming” Middle Eastern nations is something our modern political culture can’t handle.

We dropped nukes on Japan, then held them under military occupation for seven years before we let them go forward on their own. This seemed to work. Japan became a peaceful democracy. But doing this required an entirely different set of ideas than America holds now.

This occupation did not create generations of Japanese terrorists, but of course the Japanese culture was not Islamist culture.

I mean, there’s editing, and then there’s out-and-out deception.

Actually, I rather liked it. Something about a deadline, getting it right the first time, as fast as possible, especially when in the trenches, made me a better writer.

But a wholesale rewrite is a different matter. It makes all the responses sound, well, stupid. In a way, editing a post this way also re-writes all of the responses to the post. For example, my own response to Tech’s original post now seems like I’m responding to a different post entirely.

Which I was.

I don’t mind editing a post to make it a better presentation with images, format, what have you. Changing every single word? Un-cool.

Obama’s not the only President who’s said something the entire nation wishes he could take back. He’s just the most recent.

And you’ll get precious little defense of Hillary from me. She’s far too deep into too many pockets for my liking. Bernie I could get behind, but I don’t think that’s a sentiment widely shared (though we do have a ways to go yet).

Soon enough, the question of who screwed up the worst, Bush or Obama, will be relegated entirely to students of history. More interesting and pressing questions now include: are we going to hand ISIS the conflict it wants? Can the movement be encouraged to implode by leveraging the horror and discontent that’s apparently growing in its ranks?

But it’s mostly, you know, actual editing. I don’t like that the header line doesn’t show up on the comment board, so I set it aside using paragraph markers instead. These only stick if you edit them in after the first posting. Same goes for adding images, and then resizing them, which sometimes takes more than one edit just by itself.

Also, composing in a tiny scrolling box is hard, and I don’t see the whole thing until it’s up. Often I move a paragraph around, or fix typos and HTML codes.

Generally speaking, this is all done within about two or three minutes of the first posting, but in this time I’ve done as many as eight or nine edits on complicated posts.

A lot of forum software allows you to “preview” a post and polish it up before actually submitting it. This one doesn’t.

And I know what it looks like now.

After seven years, at some point, Obama, Hillary, and Kerry had at least something to do with the current state of affairs. Speaking of deposed dictators, how’s Libya doing lately?

What about Iraq as “an extraordinary achievement?”

Sorry I missed this as it unfolded. I believe I would have done as you have, Robert, and used the Powers of Moderation to present the before and afters, and to modify SDAI’s access. Total agreement.

We’ve a pretty much self policing policy when it comes to editing posts -especially root posts – full disclosure by the author.