Bone
February 14, 2018, 5:05pm
28
The treatment of group insults on the boards has been a common topic for discussion. When I came on, I did quite a bit of searching through old threads, warnings, notes, etc. to familiarize myself more with past practice in consideration of how I wanted to proceed moving forward. I’ve actually wrote about this before when I first came on, in post #69 here:
The rule remains, attack the post, not the poster. Attacking the ideas and arguments within a post is one of the raison d’être of Great Debates and Elections. It is when the attack on the post is inseparable from an attack on the poster where a person can run afoul of the rules. Consider the following as a general example:
A: [content]
That line between attacking the post and the poster in this example is so thin as to be non-existent. That is an example of a personal insult. If B said that “[content]* is poorly conceived, a failure of deductive logic, inconsistent with the world as we know it, and unrelated to a degree that makes* [content]* incomprehensible”* that is attacking the post and not the poster. A good example was also given in post #61 – being critical of a book is not the same as being critical of the author. Telling the author to their face that their book was dumb is not the same thing as telling the author that they are dumb. It would be rude of course, but we are not in the business of moderating manners. If on the other hand you told the author that only a dumb person would write such a dumb book, that would cross the line because the distinction between book and author has been swept away.
This is especially apparent in instances where descriptors are used in a way that blurs this distinction. *That post is assholish *- I’m not sure how a post can be assholish, but that’s a far cry from saying that post is poorly thought out. Both characterize a post, but the former IMO is hardly separated from the poster at all whereas the latter is addressing the argument.
And in case it wasn’t clear, context always matters and there will be grey areas. We are not going to be able to come up with acceptable and not acceptable ways to rib other posters - folks are way to creative for that to ever work.
You actually replied as the very next post. We had a brief exchange and my sentiment is unchanged from that time. It appears yours is too.
The topic came up again here:
Group insults do lend themselves to bright line rules. In discussions all across the Great Debates and Elections there are disparaging comments towards groups that it is clear from past posting history that some of our posters are members of. Insults towards Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians abound and while I personally am not a fan of sweeping generalizations, it’s not something that I’d prefer to moderate.
It is when the attack on a group is inseparable from an attack on a poster where a person can run afoul of the rules. This would be context dependent. I gave an example in post #3 where a group insult would be inseparable from a personal insult towards another poster.
On the other hand, we often have posts along the lines of ‘Democrats are thieves because they want to tax all our money away!’ , or ‘Republicans are racists who hate the poor!’ . Both of those are childish and add little to productive discussion, but probably not something I’d moderate for personal insults (withholding judgment for other potential violations). However, depending on the direction of the thread, if it’s clear that the intent is to disparage other posters by adding the veneer of the group insult, then that would be moderated. In general I’d avoid sweeping generalizations since they are often false.
And again here , where I basically quoted the above again. The thing about this last one is it has a loosely similar fact pattern to the warning that was the catalyst for this thread. This is on point with my earlier comment about trying to ride as close to the line as possible. Doing that, sometimes people end up on the wrong side.