The unstated premises of your one sentence rhetorical is that spam, trolling and elevated emotions do not degrade discourse. This is erroneous.
I (if my personal case matters) was hoping to observe a conversation among well informed persons on a topic that I could learn from. Out of intellectual curiosity, the only reason I dawdle on this site.
The instant the topic become controversial, that hope disappeared. Thus I expressed my displeasure at that.
And instead I am now having a conversation about conversations with a single person in the least efficient way possible. QED the conversation has been damaged.
Actually, my premise is that there's not much interesting to say about this story. And you haven't come up with anything interesting to say about the topic of "scientists copying US climate data." I contend that this is because there isn't much interesting to say about it, and you haven't done anything to refute that.
The rest is just fruitless handwringing and getting yourself spun up. And this is why I was in favor of the political cleanse, and remain in favor of it.
What if, regardless of the likelihood of deletion, there were no harm in making backups and one obstacle was funding? Would not a post to a site frequented by members of the scientific community be beneficial?
And is not the very belief that backups are necessary, founded or not, very interesting in itself? Particularly interesting to the scientific community, many members of which frequent this site?
A community devoted to science and technology is going to end up completely vacuous if it forbids anything that might upset the new populist order. Certainly the most important topics will quickly disappear. For example, climate change and hacking by certain state actors are out are already out, both are clearly important and relevant.
I (if my personal case matters) was hoping to observe a conversation among well informed persons on a topic that I could learn from. Out of intellectual curiosity, the only reason I dawdle on this site.
The instant the topic become controversial, that hope disappeared. Thus I expressed my displeasure at that.
And instead I am now having a conversation about conversations with a single person in the least efficient way possible. QED the conversation has been damaged.