Analogies Banned in GD - Part II

About This Message Board
21

And yet this has been happening since the board started, and for the most part has gone completely unmoderated for the past 15 years. The incident under discussion here seems to represent a new definition of moderator responsibility in GD, and it’s quite a significant change from what has gone before. And if there’s something you should understand by now, it’s that people around here respond to changes by discussing them. If things are going to change now, and this new moderating strategy is going to become the norm, that’s fine, but don’t be disingenuous and pretend that everything is just the same as it’s always been.

While analogies are clearly not banned, this decision by Jonathan Chance represents a moderator intervening in a debate to rule on the argument itself, and on its validity. If mods can make a ruling on whether an analogy has or has not been rebutted, and issue an edict that a rebutted analogy is no longer permitted in a particular discussion, then they should be able to do this for all types of debating strategy. And if they can do this, it means that moderators effectively become the arbiters of good and bad arguments, and thus are effectively policing the content of the debate itself, which is something that you have all said, time and again, that you will not do in GD.

Again, i’m not arguing that this new moderating strategy is necessarily a bad thing. It could, in fact, improve things in GD. But if this is going to be the policy, then it is a new policy, and we should discuss it here. Furthermore, as i said in the now-closed thread, a policy like this is going to require more moderators, because there are literally hundreds of instances every month where people make completely unreasonable and illogical arguments in GD, and where people keep plugging on with a particular line of argument even after it has been (to my mind, at least) clearly refuted. And this happens at all parts of the political spectrum. Some people are just dishonest or really crappy debaters.

And the problem with a policy like this is not that it will always fail, or even that it will always be controversial. There will be times when just about everyone agrees that a particular argument has been rebutted, and that the person who continues to advance that argument is a bonehead. But while the policy might work fine in black-and-white cases, it will fail precisely where most of the (good) debate in GD takes place: in the grey areas where debates turn on small pieces of evidence and subtle differences in analysis and interpretation, and where there might not be consensus over what constitutes a valid argument. And because this is the case, i believe that moderators will—probably unintentionally—tend to evaluate the validity of people’s arguments based on the moderators’ own personal beliefs about the subject matter under discussion.

Can you please spare us the patronizing backhanded compliments about how we are all so great that we should aspire to a better quality of debate? It seems to be pretty much all you have to offer in discussions like this.

You’ve been here since the very beginning of this message board, you have more than 10,000 posts, and you’ve made precisely 76 total posts in Great Debates over that 15-year span. You’ll forgive me if i don’t look to you for guidance on how the forum is supposed to work, or on what we need to do to make it better.

Your own performance in debates over board rules in ATMB suggests that you would probably have to be moderated for poor and non-responsive arguments quite frequently in GD if you spent any time there after this new rule were put in place, and your main contribution to debate seems to be deciding that it needs to be shut down by closing the thread.

22

Your thread about the analogy wasn’t closed when I posted in it a few minutes ago. That should demonstrate that even that analogy didn’t get banned.

I’ve seen many moderator warnings about similar behavior, but most I remember is from creationists and such. Very little pushback that I can recall. And the problem wasn’t creationism, it was the lack of responsiveness.

23

To be fair, when Shodan posted in all-caps that JC had banned an analogy because he thought it was bad, it’s totally possible that Shodan didn’t realize a thread was active about that specific analogy. Two hours had passed since he’d posted in that active thread, and he may have forgotten.

24

It shouldn’t. And how do we determine an analogy is bad or has been refuted, anyway? By popular vote? One person holding his stance against many is in no way a proof that the analogy is bad. And obviously, if analogies considered properly refuted by a moderator can be banned, then so could any argument of any nature.
I’m pretty sure that if this board had existed in the 60s, using gay marriage as an analogy to criticize interracial marriage would have been considered overwhelmingly as a very bad analogy, because a man marrying a man is entirely different from a man marrying a woman of whatever colour. And people would have argued that the analogy has been refuted times and again, with the troll stubornly persisting in using it.

25

It’s difficult to discuss this issue while honoring the OP’s insistence we not discuss a specific example. That said, I see no evidence that analogies in general are banned, or even that insanely terrible analogies are banned; the only thing I see banned is laughingly crowing about a dumb argument you’ve made, taunting folks with the dumb argument, and not addressing the critiques of the dumb argument.

26

You pretty much just changed the words to “dumb argument” and restated the issue.

27

You have already been refuted, and are ignoring it and simply reposting the same argument over and over. Therefore you should be Mod Noted.

Regards,
Shodan

28

And I would add this thread to the debate, since it seems to be a very similar issue.

On page 4, Tomndebb shuts down the discussion on a specific point apparently because everybody disagrees with XT’s views

[QUOTE=Tomndebb]
More to the point, given that your view appears to be shared by no other participants of this thread, it is wandering well into hijack territory.
Feel free to open a new thread to discuss your views, but drop it in this thread.

EVERYONE ELSE! Do not bring up “rebuttals” to XT’s views in this thread.
If he is not permitted to respond, you are not permitted to harp on the topic.
[/QUOTE]

This seems to amount to ban an argument because, here too, it’s deemed invalid by the majority and as a result unworthy to be discussed by the moderator (especially irritating in this case since XT’s contradictors seem to be unaware of this hypothesis and not really grasping it).

29

I see tons of dumb arguments that have been refuted thousands of times still being used in GD. Some people are still arguing that god exists, for instance.

30

Again, there’s a difference. It’s a regrettable feature of this board that each thread is treated as tabula rasa; if a new thread comes along, you can decline to participate or you can refute the same tired arguments again.

There’s a difference between that phenomenon and the Analogy That Must Not Be Named.

Did that even sound clever in your head?

31

Perhaps this is implementing a largely unspoken provision of mod rulings - they sometimes don’t extend beyond the one thread. Witness Jonathan Chance’s de facto ruling that his prohibition on jtgain making the analogy didn’t mean jtgain couldn’t argue the same analogy in a different thread, apparently without consequence.

To be fair, it is a provision that has been applied to other Dopers, albeit in a rather sporadic fashion - witness a certain well-known Doper and his anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-prolife rantings. At first the ruling was that this was not going to be moderated provided it didn’t happen more than once a thread. Then that was reversed, and it was in fact, moderated. Then the mod notes accumulated up to the point where warnings or perhaps suspension was pending, at which point it changed back to mod notes for some reason.

Maybe it’s like that now. Jonathan Chance meant that jtgain was forbidden to make the analogy in that thread only. Which sort of reduces but leaves unaddressed the question of whether the mods are now responsible for deciding what analogies are invalid and must not be repeated in that thread.

LHoD you have been refuted. Please stop repeating the argument until you have addressed the critiques.

Regards,
Shodan

32

Again, pitiful attempts at too-clever-by-half gotchas don’t rise to the level of actual arguments, nor do claims of refutation equate to refutation. Do better, if you can.

33

Fucking A. What would TubaDiva say? Remember:

You need to do better,* man, to get your arguments approved around here.

*With “better” we mean you have to agree with the majority of posters, or, at least, moderators.

34

No.

Notice that Bricker is able to argue with me in the other thread substantively. Notice that when jtgain argues substantively, people argue right back with him. Notice the difference between responses to posts like this, where at least some new argument is put forth, and posts like this, rehashing things that have already been said and critiqued without addressing those critiques. Notice even Shodan’s half-baked contentless wanna-be-gotcha snipes at me, and how those continue.

Plenty of conservatives post around here, saying things that mods disagree with, without getting in trouble. That ain’t what’s going on. What’s going on is that some people think that repeating dumb arguments without addressing critiques of them is best practice (cue Shodan making another snipe at me–go ahead!) and others look for a reason to declare that conservatives are being oppressed and jump on the bandwagon.

jtgain, I am confident, can do better, and has.

35

I think it’s a mischaracterization of events to say that the same argument that had been refuted was mentioned over and over for pages. jtgain posted on the subject maybe 5 times over the course of 6 pages, each time clarifying, and arguing his point. It seemed like a lot because most of the responses disagreed with him. He responded to others who disagreed. This wasn’t parroting the same thing, nor was it blogging. Regardless of the quality of any argument, he should be allowed to make it. If it’s bad, it will be refuted.

I think this was a bad call by JC. The mods shouldn’t take on the role to determine what is a good or bad argument, other than in the form of a poster refuting said arguments.

36

Uh-HUH. Right. Would you like names of posters and links to threads where certain posters who I am not naming (because I don’t want to give the administration here yet another paper-thin excuse to shut down discussion in ATMB) do that ALL THE TIME and despite multiple complaint threads, have polluted GD discussions for a decade or more?

Or is this yet another case of people who’ve been doing this for more than 10 years can get away with bad-faith debating, but this is a magic one-off exception like the stupid never-before-and-never-after used rule about “All thread titles must be 100% accurate in every detail” rule that started C*ntgate? And other dumbass one-off rules of that sort?

Because if the mods/admins here are suggesting that there’s always been a “Bad faith debating is a no-no” rule, I’m calling “That’s bullshit, you’re lying” right now*.

If this is a magically appearing, yet unpublished new rule, wonderful. I support it fully and think it would, if actually enforced, add to the quality of GD. Upon getting an answer, I’m very eager to help the mods by starting reporting people who’ve been doing this since the early days of the board.

*It also has never fallen under the “Don’t be a jerk” rule either.

37

Whoa. When did this become personal?

I get that you’re not my buddy. Just the same I treat you with civility. I cannot say the same for you. Disliking me does not give you the right to slap me around, not in ATMB or anywhere else.

38

Moderator Note:

Let me remind you all again that this is not a forum for fighting with other posters. (Or with moderators, neither.) There are other, more suitable forum areas where you can beat on each other all day. That is not About This Message Board.

Be civil in this forum. To everyone. You can disagree without resorting to insult.

39

This seems to amount to ban an argument because, here too, it’s deemed invalid by the majority and as a result unworthy to be discussed by the moderator (especially irritating in this case since XT’s contradictors seem to be unaware of this hypothesis and not really grasping it).
[/QUOTE]
I made no comment on the quality of the argument. However, XT’s point was being discussed only by XT and one other poster, neither of whom could agree even on the terms they were using, and it was leading to a direct hijack of the thread.

I explicitly said that his viewpoint could be considered in a separate thread that was not interfering with current discussion.

40

To answer the OP’s questions, it’s the moderators’ job to moderate threads. And that means when somebody is doing something disruptive, they head it off.

There is no general rule against making analogies. But in one particular case, one poster kept posting the same thing over and over again - which happened to be an analogy - and a moderator told him to drop it. It was the disruption not the analogy that was the problem.