I can see the sense of this. There’s no reason why a topic on a serious subject should get derailed by off-topic joke comments, sexual or otherwise.
But, c’mon, we’re talking about a college student deciding to march in a parade wearing no pants and half a pope costume. That’s a topic for serious discussion? No, that’s a topic that says fire up the jokes and let them fly. And if you go out in public with no pants, you better expect some of the jokes will be sexual.
Racist!
OP:* “Can we finally get some clarification on what’s “misogynistic” and off-limits now?”*
Answer: No, no you can not. Posters are practically begging for it and are being ignored. The mods are pretending there is no new rule. It’s clear to anyone reading the board that there are new moderator guidelines in posting notes and presumably future warnings with regards to what is being labeled misogyny. It should be very easy to tell us as a community what will raise a mod’s eye - but it ain’t gonna happen.
My favorite mod here even blew an early call on enforcing these new bullshit standards. This latest note was ridiculous as was the stated reasons for giving it and even more so the retroactive reasons. But that’s SOP coming from twix.
How fucking hard is this? Mod clearly misogyny comments directed at actual posters. The end.
I’m female and I happen to enjoy all kinds of humor, even the juvenile stuff referenced in this thread. I really hate this new moderation. This board is gonna get awfully damn boring.
I’m a bit confused by the discussion.
AFAIK, the mods have made it very clear repeatedly that their is no rule against making misogynistic, racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks.
In fact, quite a few posters have pretty regularly weighed in with remarks about blacks, Muslims, Arabs, and too a lesser extent Jews that most would view as bigoted without being moderated.
The question is motivation behind the comments and the context.
If you claim that women are overly emotional, blacks are stupid, or that Muslims are naturally violent, is the comment germane to the conversation and is it intended to be part of the debate versus just trying to piss people off.
Obviously, there are going to be inconsistencies.
For example, this comment here was considered an example of both hate speech and worthy of a warning.
Countlessly similar comments have been made about Muslims being “terrorist-like” without once being labeled as hate speech or even worthy of a mod note much less a warning.
At the time I was upset at the decision, but at a certain point one has to realize that the mods have to make judgement calls and since they’re not a hive mind or always in the exact same mood, there are going to be inconsistencies.
It saddens me that something so plainly obvious should have to be explained to anyone who’s been on The Dope for more than a few days. But the heightened sense of indignation has now apparently risen to the level where Dopers aren’t even allowed to crack a few jokes about a half-naked female dressed as a pope with a “pubicrucifix” (crucipube?), and when they do, they get reflexively accused of misogyny, as if only a misogynist (?!?.. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.) could find humor in such a serious subject.
It’s not that judgment calls have to happen, that’s understandable. And I don’t think many, if any people would be objecting if the comments that were modded were something like “Of course it’s not an effective protest, but come on, she’s only a woman, what can we expect?”
Instead, the moderation was a claim that finding a woman sexually desirable was the same thing as hating women, and that it had to be stopped since it offended women on the Dope. That’s not a judgment call, that’s Bizarro World. To use a similar example, that’d be like someone saying “I went to a mosque, and I really enjoyed the service” and being told “Mod Note: you’re being reflexively Islamaphobic and you’ve offended the Doper community.”
If you saw this lady on the street handing out condoms, would you say to her “Hey, I’d sure like to lick your crucifix and spank you!”
If not, why not?
Interesting non sequitor wrapped around a hidden gotchaya! nougat center.
Do I need to point out to you that anonymous things said into the ether on the internet are not the same as things said directly to a person? Do I need to explain how banter among folks online is different than trying to hit on someone in person? Must I point out that even if someone wouldn’t say something in person doesn’t make it actionable from a moderator point of view?
But okay, I’ll play your game. No, assuming that I was interested in her and wanted to fuck her I wouldn’t use those as initial lines because those aren’t effective as pickup lines since they’re anonymous jokes on an anonymous message board that the woman will never see in any case.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
How is that in any way relevant?
I’m not Colander, but no. I might say it to my friend though and even might post it to a message board (assuming I were one to say that exact thing, which I’m not, but if we’re talking hypotheticals…)
Giving a mod opinion on the subject…
…seems we have two groups on here, both who become unhappy when comments like that are modded or those who are unhappy when they’re not.
Before about a month ago, comments–for the most part–weren’t modded unless they were obvious trolling or disrupting/hijacking a topic.
But then this topic was made, and it became clear, after 5 or 6 pages, that there were a lot of members who disliked the “leery”-type of comments, yes, even when made in jest. So the mods decided (especially those in forums like MPSIMS and IMHO) to try to curtail some of these types of comments a little more than we had been.
There is no way to make or keep everyone happy. Either those types of posts are not noted and we get ATMB topics like this one…or those types of posts are noted and we get ATMB topics like this one.
And yes, that first topic did start out about misogyny, but for anyone who reads through it all, it’s clear it becomes more of a “People being uncomfortable about sexist/leery type of comments in threads not warranting it.”…which is what a lot of the recent mod notes have been trying to cut back on.
Thinking it’s a big deal or not, the posts in question (that got the notes earlier) did get a lot of reports in from people who didn’t like them and were uncomfortable by them.
So again, the mods seem to have a no-win kind of situation here where, if something is said, it turns into something like this…
…if they don’t, it turns into an equally long ATMB thread about “Why wasn’t this modded/noted?” (see first link in this post)
I’m just hoping to try to explain how a mod sees things and an opinion about it.
This recently became a big problem for two sides of posters who have very different views about one subject, so admittedly there may be some overhanded or uncalled for modding sometimes while common ground is found and an “easy medium” is eventually made when it comes to what is and is not allowed.
To close, the mods are currently discussing it again, for the record.
I’m not going to try to defend FinnAgain. He doesn’t get it and probably never will.
But here’s a thread I recently started. Am I making fun of Henry Gribbohm? Yes. Would I call him an idiot if I saw him on the street? No, I’d be polite and avoid the subject.
And there’s also a difference between what I’d post on a message board about a woman walking around half-naked and what I’d say to her in person.
… so what?
Seriously, so what? Why does someone’s level of offense grant them power on the Dope? Does it in all cases, or is this a special case? It sure seems like a special case, as all the past ATMB threads about the Scientific Racists on the Dope ended up with the message being “ah well, just because you dislike what they’re saying doesn’t mean they can’t say it on the Dope”. Why, specifically and exactly, is this issue different?
Why? So far the only reasoning you presented was that there are a lot of members who dislike a certain type of comment. Why do their delicate sensibilities need to be catered to? I could understand if such comments are hijacking a thread, or if they’re inappropriately directed at other Dopers in a thread… but the idea that men can’t make sexual comments about off-board women, simply because that’s disliked by some Dopers? How does that even begin to make sense?
Nor should one even try. The thing is to do what’s right, not what’s popular.
And in point of fact, trying to ‘make people happy’ by catering to their membership in the Offenderati is what’s causing the problem here with bizarre, incomprehensible moderation. It’s the reason Twicks had to retcon her own mod note and is currently asking us to believe that the words she wrote weren’t what she meant, and words that she didn’t write are really what she was saying all along. Okay… so, people are offended. That and 4 bucks will buy you a coffee at Starbucks If someone is offended by a sexual comment about a half naked woman in public handing out condoms, the rational response is “… so what?” not “And let me get right on that and protect you from having to be exposed to things you don’t like on the internet!”
And this is my point about the damage that Victim Culture has done and is doing to our society in general and evidently this message board in specific. Nobody has a right to live a life free from offense or being less than perfectly comfortable. And requiring an authority figure to protect you from being exposed to things you don’t like is far, far beyond the pale.
This is the Straight Dope, for fuck’s sake. Reason, facts and discussion are the coin of the realm here, not emotional fragility and a willingness to trumpet one’s thin-skinned pains.
There will always be people who will complain about any decision. You know this. So instead of trying to play popularity politics, why don’t y’all first try to craft a cogent, coherent, choate philosophical framework, and then come up with some sort of metric for implementing it? Because what y’all are doing now is bass ackwards. Because this suuuuuure looks like the mods pandering to the Offenderati, with no more of a plan for how to properly moderate this new ‘issue’, other than trying to guess what the Offenderati would be annoyed by, and trying to nip that in the bud. If it’s not, surely you can come up with a clear, rule that’ll be applied in all forums on the Dope, right? Equally obvious, any such rule would very, very quickly lead to mob-rule as we’d simply have to poll Dopers to see positions that they are offended by/dislike/are made uncomfortable by.
How long, do you think, it’d be before discussions on abortion or marriage equality were literally made against the rules, since a large enough percentage of people don’t like anti-abortion or anti-marriage equality positions? Is that really the direction the SDMB wants to move to, or is this not an actual principle that can be extended an angstrom beyond catering to the feelings of some-but-not-all women/White Knights on the Dope?
What, specifically, do I not “get”?
FinnAgain, a lot of your points in that post can be summed up with one answer:
The SDMB has always modded comments that could (or do) cause hijacks to topics.
It’s not about keeping anyone happy or anyone having power.
Now you may say the notes that started THIS thread were given to posts that weren’t doing that…hence why I said my second to last sentence in the post above.
[del]Bullshit.[/del] Bovine-of-indeterminate-gender-but-respected-for-its-identity shit. The SDMB has never, in the years I’ve been here, applied that rule in the way it has been applied in this misogyny fiasco. It’s a cop out to claim otherwise.
You’ve got a real mess on your hands here. Similar posts are not moderated in any consistent manner. Hell, there were posts in the sorority girl thread calling sorority girls prostitutes in training that were reported, but got ignored by the mods. Certain mods are selectively and arbitrarily enforcing a “paradigm shift” that has never been announced, with no way for a poster to predict what will and will not be moderated in any particular thread.
Some of you have created a “solution” in search of a problem that does not exist, except in the minds of a vocal minority, and in a handful of mods falling over themselves to out politically correct each other.
That’s fine and I’m 100% behind that.
But that’s not the reasoning you gave and that’s not the reasoning Twickster used. But no, your penultimate line didn’t really address that. You’ve just argued that essentially it’s nothing new. But if that was true, then why would anybody have to find “common ground” or an “easy medium”? Why would there be a question as to “what is and is not allowed?” Those are questions and issues that arise with a new policy, not when you’ve been doing the same thing as always. It’s precisely because this isn’t simply a no-hijacks policy that there’s such confusion. In point of fact, in your previous post you explicitly contrasted the old rules, which is that hijacks weren’t allowed, with the new rules, which are different.
Come on. Despite the ritual circling of the wagons, it’s pretty clear that this isn’t about off-topic posts or hijacks. And despite her retcon, it’s quite clear that Twicks thought it was right and proper for her to moderate folks for “reflexive misogyny” and “offending” women on the Dope. Of course that isn’t simply a no-hijacking-threads rule.
And, seriously…
And, because it deserves its own focus:
This is a clear before/after picture, and one in which it’s clear that disruption/hijacking was the “before” metric. The new one sure seems to look like, as you put it, some members dislike/are uncomfortable with certain comments, and so the mods are trying to cut back those types of comments.
This is answered with what I said here:
And this…
…is answered with what I said here:
Lastly, I’d like to remind you:
All I can do is say again that–admittedly–there may be some overhanded or uncalled for modding sometimes while common ground is found and an “easy medium” is eventually made when it comes to what is and is not allowed.