Disputation and The Straight Dope Message Board

About This Message Board
1

I have separated this out from Bone’s thread to focus on this query exclusively.

  1. **Bone is no longer a moderator on this board. ** Like all of us, he had times when he was glorious and times when he was wretched. All moderators have this; we are humans, with all the potential greatness within us and also the most base and faulty choices possible. I’ve made plenty of both in 23 years here, I freely admit error. None of us are immune. (But we’re not always wrong.) We do the best we can with what we have going at any moment. The hope is that we learn the greater lesson from all we do and move forward.

Bone is no longer a moderator on this board. Nothing is changed or improved by trashing him or (literally) Monday Morning Quarterbacking his choices. This should not be used as an opportunity to revile him on the way out. You can disagree with his choices but that doesn’t mean you should slap him around.

  1. There is no doubt the Board has fallen far from our highest ideals and many of the principles we had in mind about how the community should operate. If you look back over our history you will see rises and falls. There’s times we got things exactly right and times we have failed. All we can do is look at where we are, put on our boots, and go back out to strive for betterment.

We are overdue for this evaluation and correction. And it’s time for action.

The SDMB reflects our society. Today we are in an increasingly tribal, unceasingly warring culture. People don’t discuss or debate in good faith, they decry, they demand, they assault. On the scorched fields of discourse they relentlessly search for targets to attack and destroy. Much of this is played out on the board, and it makes for hard going.

There is much that needs adjusting here. Everyone needs to be less judgmental, less aggressive, less inclined to condemn. There needs to be genuine social discourse. The entire idea about this place to begin with was that this would be a place where we could talk about damn near everything. More and more it’s a place where we can’t talk about anything.

That’s messed up and we’re all to blame. We own it all; all the goodness in places and all the toxic spots too. It belongs to all of us. It’s the house we all built a post at a time. And 22 millions posts later, here we are.

We can make things better. We can have nice things. It might not be exactly the place you personally envision 100% because we cannot be all things to all people. But we can and should make room for everybody. We can hear most every note in the symphony of the human spirit.

I ask for your assistance and your forbearance too; we can’t get there overnight. And we can’t get there unless everyone does their part. Be an active force for better; model the attitudes and behavior you want to see here. I believe good content has the potential to drive out the bad. Light can dispel darkness. I believe we can go back to a time when we were more gracious, where we gave the benefit of the doubt, where we respected the right to agree to disagree, when we didn’t judge people so hard and so harshly and hated them because they were different.

This change comes from all of us. Please work with me to make it real.

Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

292

You can take this URL:
[NOPARSE]https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/misc.php?do=whoposted&t=885910[/NOPARSE]
and replace that last number (after the “t=”) with the thread ID. If you don’t know the thread ID, you can usually find it by looking at the “Previous Thread” and “Next Thread” buttons at the bottom of the page. If you are replying to a thread, the thread ID is at the end of the hyperlink near the top right, the one that reads the thread’s name, right under “Log Out”.

Frustrating perhaps, but no more frustrating than typing out the BBCode for any other link.

~Max

293

For what it’s worth, I’m on the professor’s side in this hypothetical. Appealing to the negative consequences that you write into the hypothetical is not enough to convince me that the professor is in the wrong in the general case.

~Max

298

Part of being conservative is having a tendency to keep the status quo. (the “conserve” part?)

Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, at the turn of the century, I thought that girls were inferior creatures. They couldn’t be cool, they couldn’t be smart, they couldn’t be fun like us boys. I didn’t tell anybody, or think to do so, this was self-evident to me. I was mean to girls. Apparently I would cut up their hair or spit on them, etc. One summer I became friends with this really cool guy (named “Brett” I think) at one of the lovely beaches here. We did like, sandcastles and shell collecting, made shark-tooth necklaces, Florida stuff. About three hours into our friendship we went into the water. He took off his shirt, and to my astonishment was wearing a bikini. “Why are you wearing a bikini like a girl?” “I am a girl. Is that a problem, Max?”

Nervous laugh. Worldview shattered. I was so ashamed, and still am, to this day.

I cannot stress how important that lesson was and is to me as a person. It is so incredibly easy for me to understand how a person might grow up and never realize how wrong they are about other people.

I guess it’s not a perfect example, but life doesn’t always give me perfect examples to build on. I’ve noticed that people project themselves upon others when using the internet. You can see it happen in this very thread. The internet presents a great opportunity to reach all of those ignorant people who may never listen to your words in real life, but do so here. I want this to be a place of learning, like that beach was for me nearly two decades ago.

I want someone - me, you, whoever - to come here, bring their bigotry, their ignorance, have their world shattered, be ashamed, and then become a better person for it. That’s my vision of fighting ignorance.

~Max

300

It was a childhood memory. Epiphany moments are not limited to one’s childhood. I don’t know how it works as one grows older, but during my eight or nine months on these boards I have shifted to a different foundation for my personal moral system. I also flipped from entertaining the possibility of physicalism/epiphenomenalism to physicalism/substance-dualism. As a direct result of participating in debates, here. There were moments where I just realized that I was wrong, and sometimes that someone else was right.

You have to realize that some of these people, on the alt-right or whatever you want to call it, they are young dudes like me. It would have been this easy for me to be one of them. That was the point of my story. I’ve met some of them online and in person. They aren’t all stupid and they aren’t all rotten to the core. It’s not too late to talk sense into them.

Have you read Plato? Maybe bigots won’t let us speak back in the cave, but if someone should happen to stumble halfway into the light, covering his eyes with his hands, shouldn’t we be there to say, “lift your hands and open your eyes”? Lest he fall back inside and convince his compatriots that there is nothing to see out here.

~Max

303

Jragon mentioned white men engaging in “civil debate” as if it were mental masturbation. That’s precisely the kind of mentality I would expect message boards are suited for. Somebody comes here to get a rise out of critically thinking (I know I do, and this is me projecting myself). In doing so, they end up learning something and becoming a better person.

It’s stressful, yes, but to me that is the trade-off.

~Max

304

I can’t speak for others, and I don’t have the experience here to make a guess. I have tried really hard to jump on the anti-misogyny vibe here but I just can’t seem to make the right connections.

And I do think it is worthwhile, possibly because I do not share, and cannot comprehend, the frustration. I might agree that individual instances are hijacks or advocate violence, but I would not go so far as to outlaw sincere and non-malicious positions that border on transphobia, mysogyny, racism, etc. In threads about kittens or sports? Sure, leave that stuff at the door. But in threads about those very subjects?

~Max

308

History is chock full of them. Consider Emmanuel Kant, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle even. Or as you claim to live in France, Charles Fourier.

~Max

309

What you describe does not fit my idea of civil debate. Using unwarranted slurs, holding double standards, refusing to read citations, attacking other participants in the debate, these do not conform to my idea of civil debate. If someone pulled that on me, I would report them.

I will agree with you on that.

(are you serious about slut-shaming an eleven year old member who shared a rape story? Here? what the fuck?)

~Max

310

Right, that’s what I was saying to nelliby.

Maybe this makes me a bigot or something, but if I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it. I don’t want this to be a safe space for me and my cherished ideas, nor for you and yours. That doesn’t mean I’ll participate in threads that I don’t like, but I don’t take it personally if someone makes a thread questioning the intelligence or worth of my race or religion. I might not even read the thread. I put up with that stuff all the time, not nearly as much as my parents but still I think I have pretty thick skin. Seeing some random internet person open a thread to debate such topics just doesn’t bother me.

The most stressful threads for me are political threads. Sometimes, I just can’t wade into a political thread. Politics isn’t a core interest for me and I tend to get piled on anyways. In that sense, I can sort of understand why people don’t like participating in political threads, or racist threads, or sexist or transphobic or what have you. But what prompts the leap to, let’s ban these topics entirely?

~Max

324

I think the 2000 and 2006 threads are excellent additions to the archive. The 2006 thread included insults, but it was a pit thread and those were to be expected. Nobody insulted the eleven year old, or at least no such insults stand out to me after reading the whole thing through.

The 2011 thread made for an interesting read. I found Jragon’s position to be closest to mine, especially the exchange midway through between Jragon and SpiceWeasel. I’m sorry margin, but I just don’t agree with your level of outrage in that thread from eight years ago. Especially given the mindset from the 2006 pit thread, I think you came across as throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Contempt for the actual rapists is implied and obvious. I am not outraged that the discussion was mostly about the community and the victim, and I don’t think anybody in that thread blamed the victim.

Also the victim wasn’t a member here. I must have misread your previous post, but I was thinking you meant an eleven year old posted a gang rape story here on the SDMB and was subsequently slut-shamed. That would be way, way out of line - even more out of line than slut-shaming an eleven year old from some news story (which is also out of line).

~Max

328

I disagree, and I’m fine if we agree to disagree. Or we can talk about it.

If you are referring to Thomas MacAulay Millar’s “Meet The Predators” article, I have read that particular article in the past. It is a great article. I don’t think it supports your position. It certainly doesn’t put a dint in mine.

~Max

330

With all due respect, I am not about to jump between you and Shodan. He can defend himself, and if you have a problem with my opinion, you can address me and my opinion.

I don’t think a curfew would have helped in that particular situation, and two, I do not believe that women generally fail to protect themselves or should even be responsible for doing so.

~Max

332

I think it would be a better approach if we addressed the bad faith directly. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

~Max

335

Why not? That’s how infectious diseases work. They spread.

~Max

336

Upon reflection I think we have a misunderstanding of my analogy here. The disease would be bad faith posters, and the symptoms would be offensive threads. If you want to bring a “subject” into this, meaning a patient, the patient would be the message board as a whole.

In this construction your comment makes no sense.

(I had previously interpreted you as writing “That doesn’t work too well if the [disease] in question wants to spread the disease and not treat it.”)

~Max

340

Yes, calling out a victim’s clothing can be used to blame the victim. But I think this is like the square and the rectangle. I think it is possible to see a problem with the victim’s clothing or behavior, without blaming the victim. Specifically, when we are talking about children.

The Telegraph piece isn’t surprising to me although, as I said above, I don’t think it’s necessarily victim blaming to think that wearing a short skirt is “asking for it”. I haven’t seen the X-Files so the reference is lost on me entirely. Asking to be raped? assaulted? harassed? That’s victim blaming. Asking for people to look at your legs? Not victim blaming. Somehow leveraging this into removing culpability from the rapist? Victim blaming. Saying it statistically affects your chance of being raped? Not victim blaming, at least not until you leverage it to remove culpability from the rapist. That’s my opinion, but I’ll admit in an instant that I’m unqualified to hold a strong opinion.

I have no idea what you brought up the reddit link for, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the purpose of that site. I am entirely unfamiliar with Dr. Peterson and couldn’t immediately make heads or tails of his views.

I think I’ve addressed the Mic/Polymic cite above as to when it crosses the line, in my eyes. ETA: If it somehow shifts culpability away from the rapist, it’s victim blaming.

~Max

348

Perhaps you are about eight years wiser than I.

This doesn’t change my opinion today, but I am sorry for digging up old bones.

~Max

350

I don’t understand how their very existence is offensive.

No, really.

I’ve brought this up before, but if someone made a thread claiming that they are the only person who exists (a form of solipsism), I would not be offended. If someone told me to my face that they think I and those of my religion are going to hell, I don’t become irate, I just think that they are misguided. When someone tells me, to my face, that my race is inferior and deserves to be rid from the face of the earth, the primary emotion I feel is one of pity for the person in front of me.

If someone were to say they wish harm to me or my loved ones personally, or if there is an actual threat, then I get angry.

~Max

355

This came up during the misogyny issue a couple months ago. I do have to understand, or I won’t be on board.

~Max