I think that depends on your organization. A history museum would have no business blindly “celebrating and honoring” major parts of our history which were, at the time, ingrained into our culture. Just to name two examples I’ve been involved with: a group of prisoners working in terrible conditions on a chain gang who were killed in a tunnel collapse, and a segregated “Jim Crow” passenger car.

What does this thread have to do with rail preservation? It seems like a forced attempt to inflame a culture war, given that nobody but the aforementioned professor are taking the threat of pumpkins seriously.

Guys, it was humor. And, I thought, pretty funny at that.

Sadly, I see no stark evidence that this was indeed intended as satire or humor. We're not talking the increasingly-clairvoyant Babylon Bee (whose spoofs keep annoyingly coming true) here.

And, regrettably, the themes and concepts mentioned in the abstract dovetail perfectly with all the bilge emanating from academia and the various "woke" movements in education.

The authors didn't mean it as satire:

I did. Unfortunately, many, if not most papers in the "social sciences"; arts and humanities read like the Sokal Hoax. Eloquent nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

From today's comics:

This 'discussion' reminds me of what used to be painted on the wall of the University Cottage Club billiards room:



Superheater's original post was excellent sarcasm. In one post. Most of the rest of the posts have killed the joy of the original.

I, for one, vote that we let this discussion peter out.

If sarcasm, the OP should have gone in railfanning.

Wesley

Ah, c’mon guys. Don’t get grumpy if you didn’t get the joke. Though I can appreciate that sarcasm isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I do have an appreciation of it. Sometimes we shouldn’t take ourselves or every single thing so seriously. Trust me, you’ll be in a better mood if you don’t.

Does every thought have to be in the form of a dry technical dissertation.

It's less applicable to "railfanning" than to this forum. Nobody is going to be hindered or stopped from chasing trains by some ne'er do-well imputing invidious motives into their actions. OTOH, The sort of fanaticism activism I parodied has already been employed by "disability activists", looking for an ADA claim.

The reason I posted it was to draw attention to the thin reed the claims of collegiate erudition stand upon. And to be honest, sometimes it's fun to fire up the laser pointer and watch the cats chase it.

Some years ago, I posted an April 1 post here. It might have been the one about the R&N buying Chinese engines or the one about Steamtown rebuilding the 514 as a GP22.

The following Saturday, I was working at Steamtown and for a change, was early for the crew meeting. One of the engineers, said "you SOB, I believed that crap, stop writing that".

As I told him how gratified I was that my mischief was persuasive; I also advised him that it was unsafe to imply I had matrilineal canine DNA, as I had a thin skin, but Mom's honor was unimpeachable and her life was already made difficult enough since the first time I demonstrated my mordant pen by responding to punitive essay requirement as a fifth-grader by a missive entitled "This is a Second-Rate School."

For a couple days, my teachers called to read their resumes and ask where I could have gotten such an idea. After a while, my mother was reduced to asking "do you have any experience with ten year old boys?"...

The original post, and the thread, have little if anything to do with 'railfanning' (other than the initial idea that "railfanning" was set up as the designated off-topic place where posts that were not strict preservationist would be relegated, in a place intentionally hard to navigate to from many places in the RyPN site...)

I suggest, since the mods know how to set up and operate a new 'forum' and can move posts between them, that we have a forum entirely dedicated to "OT issues" and move all these non-preservation, non-railfan posts there as a general rule. And add some boilerplate to the TOS that gives the criteria for that.

If the energies that go toward telling the moderators how to run the forum were actually directed toward on topic discussions, we would have one helluva kick ass place for discussion! But alas, there is much more interest in how the forum works than what the forum does. Thus RYPN is dying a slow death.

Maybe once we get to the point where there are at least 25 to 30 active topics being discussed daily with a half dozen or so new topics posted every day, then we can start talking about creating additional sub forums. We aren't there yet and probably never will get there. Railfanning was created as a way to sideline rail related topics that are not preservation related per se. Severely OT postings here are deleted, but I don't think this one is severely OT. It is good to be aware of general trends in society that may impact us.

Here is a radical idea that could solve these problems. Just don't participate in threads that are of no interest to you. Aside from my duties as moderator I did not have any interest in visiting the Reading postwar paint colors thread every day, so I didn't. It is amazingly liberating to be able to just read the threads of interest and to not feel obligated to comment on every thread as it appears. If you see an OT in the title of a new thread and want to only stick to on topic issues, just don't read the thread. This is so amazingly simple of a solution that I am sure it could work if tried.

BTW the aforementioned thread was last posted to in July, so it appears that everything does eventually come to an end.