I'm slightly torn here.

My first impulse was to point out that, just because there happened to be seven people on this site with the poor sense to upvote this unintentional self-parody, that doesn't justify an eighth person having the poor sense to unilaterally delete it.

Then I remembered kuro5hin's decline and death. A self-moderated forum can transition from "temporary lull in activity" to "permanent death spiral" if a critical mass of trolls pounce on the lull, and it's not a pretty thing to witness. The "critical mass" doesn't have to be very large, either, since self-moderated forums generally weight their users' opinions proportionately to amount-of-available-free-time, which most trolls have in surplus. I suspect it wouldn't have taken too many swings of the banhammer to save that site.

There's got to be a better solution, though. I'd hope there's even a simple better solution. Maybe a "trash" category alongside "main" and "discussion"? Then moderators can move posts between categories, while users can upvote/downvote within each. That would still allow moderators to keep the new users' queue cleaned up in a way that can't be "gamed", but makes moderator mistakes much less significant. "They're deleting me!" is a half-decent rallying cry; "They're calling me names!" not so much.