I disagree with you. Human beings as a rule have the infinite capacity to ignore their own jerkish-ness. If poster X does not understand that he is being a jerk, but is warned for that reason, in the majority of cases that warning was earned.
I don’t think it is the responsibility of the moderators to teach posters how to behave towards each other with more civility than 12-year-olds on the playground. If one absolutely must be a jerk, there’s a forum for that. Hie thee to the Pit. The fact that there are posters on this board who complain about not being able to say and behave any way they like, but they won’t (virtually) step foot into the Pit because it’s not couth enough amazes me no end.
SlackerInc, keep an eye on me. I’ve been here from the beginning, and no one has ever accused me of being a “true believer in an almost Maoist politically correct agenda, or be living out your days in pathetically cowed prostration before said True Believers” I currently have no plans to leave this Board voluntarily, no matter how irritating I may or may not find the current political climate.
I guess that makes me the canary in the coal mine. When you no longer see Kent Clark post here, all is lost.
And if they include comments about Islam similar to those that create a Twitter firestorm when they come from OBE Richard Dawkins?
I feel quite confident that paraphrasing Pinker (without attribution) would incite many posters to report “misogyny” and more. If I quoted him, I might be on safer ground since he has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is a Harvard professor and so on.
And this would be a problem why, exactly? That’s called “following the rules”.
You have hit upon why the other thread got closed, then the second thread got a warning, and further discussion of this is supposed to go to a new thread in GD.
Ed Zotti left the building, as it were, a little over a year ago. He is not currently involved in the day to day operations of The Straight Dope.
However, he is writing occasional articles for the Chicago Sun-Times (non-Straight Dope related) and I recommend you look them up and read them, especially residents of the greater Chicago area. They are all about where Chicago has been and where Chicago is going; Ed is very knowledgeable about this sort of thing. Well worth your time.
The statement is not: Stay at home and you won’t be raped.
The statement is: Stay at home and you have a smaller chance of being raped.
This latter statement is objectively factual. To be false, it would have to be true that no rapes occur outside the home. Do you, in fact, contend that to be true?
I am not taking any position on the moderation decisions, but I DO object to the claim that somehow it’s not correct to assert that a woman who stays at home is less likely to be raped than one who goes out into public, especially to places which have historical connection to occurrence of rape. The fact that the statement is true does not equate to a statement that women shouldn’t leave the home, and are inviting rape if they do (which would be an obnoxious premise).
You mean comparing Islam as an ideology to cancer? Put it in the Pit, that’s where rants go. You’ll surely get jumped on, but I don’t think you would get warned unless you started slinging racist slurs. Like saying Muslims are a cancer.
Not disputing your perception at all, but honestly IMHO this place was MUCH more cliquey back in the pre-pay-to-post days of the early 2000s. This place was much more of a social hub for some before the rise of the social media giants like Facebook. Lots of regional meat-space parties, more social clustering of like-minded folks and lots of petty social drama as a result that played itself out in little personal feuds and spats.
What has changed is the degree of political homogenization in board membership. But social cliques per se seem less prominent to me.
If you want to relate this to a moderation decision that’s fine, but if you only want to debate the topic itself, that is not appropriate for ATMB. Take it to GD if you want, but I want no more discussions about the rape topic in ATMB.
Any further discussions of the rape topic in ATMB without being explicitly related to moderation actions or rules will result in warnings.
Going back before membership what cliques you had seemed to me regional (the DC area and Eastern Ohio as examples) and mostly an outgrowth of the Dopefests. Some of that still continued after membership was established but maybe not as much as before. Plus we lost a lot of people like Norinew and when the gatherings became memorials — it just wasn’t the same.
But now there does seem to be something, as I said before, with some Mods getting seriously territorial and the Mods themselves almost being a clique of their own combined with a few of the retired ones as well. It doesn’t make sense in a way; they strike me as pretty diverse in terms of view/politics/background but it still seems to be there. Sort of like among the motorcycle clubs; he may be an asshole and totally wrong but if he’s got the patch I’m going to pile on with him if I agree or not. I see that in a sense among a couple of these latest threads.
It doesn’t concern me much in the end; I am not prepared to call it a totally bad thing. But it is interesting to note. I’ll include it in our next report to The Big Giant Head.
I still read the initial post by SamuelA as a disingenuous way to try and inject a Nazi argument into GQ. The wording was already suspect, and the poster had a history of “stumbling on” bigoted crap (as noted in the Pit thread). The disingenuousness was only made clearer by the poster’s subsequent responses. This was enough to at least close the thread. Their linking it with rape apologia arguments was enough to make it abundantly clear that they were pissing people off. Such a comparison would have no reason to exist in a thread that was asking a factual question. As such, the poster was warned for trolling.
manson’s issue was more of refusing to listen to moderator instructions. He was told not to try and argue about rape-related stuff in ATMB, but he kept on doing so. Even after a thread was closed, he brought it back up again. So he got a Warning.
While I can maybe a small shift in priorities, I don’t really see how either type of moderation was inconsistent with how the board has been moderated in the past. Someone has literally been banned for their continued Nazi arguments, and a poster has been banned for rape apologia. (This didn’t quite go that far, so it got less punishment.)
Let’s say that The Librarian is right and the argument is false. I’ll follow your instructions and not debate it. But let’s say it is false. Why should it be warnable to make an argument that turns out to be false?
And I understand why you don’t want a debate about it, but the fact that there is a debate about it makes it debatable. And it makes your warning to manson, IMHO, a bullshit one.
That’s called “following the rules”.