It’s a satirical essay written by Jonathan Swift and published anonymously in 1729, which suggested that the Irish could deal with their poverty by either eating their children.
Ah but unfortunately board rules should not be a matter of public opinion. Every moderator action sets a precedent and has the potential to either expand an old rule or establish a new one. So when we encounter an odd grey area like this one, the question becomes: What kind of precedent are we going to set? Is the moderator’s ruling going to stand, in which case it should be applied universally going forward, or will the moderator concede that their ruling was in error and retract it?
Personally, I feel that this note oversteps the boundaries of the board rules and sets a precedent for something that would be harmful to the board to enforce.
Well even the OP admits that what he said was against the rules, he’s now arguing that the same rules need to be enforced across the board. I think that’s silly. There’s nothing wrong with having a set of relatively strict rules that are relaxed for certain forums. He’s essentially arguing for the Pit to be abolished or the entire board to be made like the Pit, he can’t see the value in varying the rules across the forums.
Did he? I’m fairly sure the point was that *if *this sort of thing is against the rules, then such a rule would need to be enforced consistently, which up to this point it has not been.
ETA: I see the post you’re referring to now. And the fact remains that if the rule is to be interpreted this way, it is consistently ignored in other situations, so **Bo **is being chastised for something that *every single moderator here *permits many other users to do with impunity.
The only way that the Pit is different from other forums is that you may personally insult other posters there. Other than that, the distinctions between the forums are simply a matter of subject matter. You can swear outside the Pit, for example (doing to gratuitously and with no other purpose can be cause for a moderator to step in and ask you to back off).
You seem to have a mistaken impression of the rules of this board. Insults *are *allowed outside the Pit, if they’re not directed at members of the SDMB. Jokes *are *allowed in GD, if the people who want to make them wait until the question has been answered (or when the question is patently ridiculous).