I’m not sure what the relevance of that tired and inaccurate analogy is. There are written instructions and clarifications of the rules and if you have an issue with a post you can report it. Attacking the character of the poster is more of a violation of the rules than the post being attacked typically.
That’s a strawman. Who has proposed no rules? Being opposed to attacking a poster with disingenuous assertions is not equivalent to being in favor of anarchy.
In the debate type forums evidence, reason, some decent rhetoric should be the tools. Not who can bring the largest contingent of aggressive posters.
Why? If someone doesn’t have evidence or reason, you can just scroll on by. Potty mouth? Scroll on by. And no rules would meet you most important demand of uniformity and consistency.
The rules being insufficient to keep this board alive is exactly the point of this thread, and the analogy is relevant and accurate because of all the douchebags who have figured out how to abide by the rules while still contributing nothing but trolling, sealioning, and other anti-social board behavior. Getting past the strict content of their posts and understanding why they’re doing what they’re doing is going to be a key element of fixing this place.
Communication is about mutual understanding of intended meaning. Always. It may be that what someone says is on first blush hostile or offensive but upon consideration and clarification such was not the intent. Or the initial take could be correct. I tend to err towards assuming no ill intent. And sometimes patterns of behavior make it clear that doing such is erring.
No mind reading involved. Just the way human communication works.
Seems alive to me. Posts like yours seem to be a call for explicit double standards. I’m not sure how that’s a good thing for a board that claims to want actual debates.
As has been said for decades now, disagreement is not trolling, sealionification, etc.
Yes, and when dad turns around to scold little Billy for playing the “I’m not touching you game,” only Billy would say, “What? We’re just having a disagreement! Why are you trying to stifle debate?”
Congratulations, you’ve figured out the MO of the posters that we’re trying to quash.
Again, why is irrelevant. Another’s subjective interpretation of someone’s motives is at best useless. When one is having a debate or other form of dispute what matters are the actual details of the position being advocated. In this very thread we have people stating that holding a particular political view is equivalent to advocating mass murder and as such should be forbidden. That’s a nonsensical way of running things if actual debate is desired. Now if the de facto goal is an echo chamber, by all means, implement moderation by heckler’s veto and have at it.
You realize you can’t be touched in an on-line debate? The truth is that we have a contingent of agitators who are unhappy with the existence of contrary points of view. This contingent actually crosses the line repeatedly that’s more troubling than a tiny minority that approach a so-called line.
And who care if a line is approached? If a website is based on allowing posters to post if they follow the rules then there should be zero issues if they actually follow the rules. Your argument is similar to a cop pulling someone over and giving them a ticket do driving 44.5 MPH in a 45 MPH zone out of spite for being ‘close to the line.’
Yes. That is your job and if done with integrity and without bias that’s to be expected. But if the mods took the above stated view that all trump supporters were de-facto mass murder advocates and had to be banned that would be a subjective interpretation that lacked integrity and was objectively wrong. However, nothing’s stopping you folks from making such a decree. We posters can only go by what has been said…
A better analogy would be a guy driving along at 24.5mph through your neighborhood with his feet hanging out the window, blasting Cantonese opera out the windows with dead buffalo tied to the roof, just to get a rise out of people. But when he gets pulled over he says, “What? Nothing I’m doing is against the rules, I’m just a normal guy driving on public roads minding my own business!”
I think you understand this point already, but the board rules prohibit me from going any further.
Seriously though, this is a thread on how disputes should be handled. Put simply I like clear rules and referees that are neutral. Others want a political safe space. Those two points of view aren’t really reconcilable.
And like 20 people have told you that nobody is asking for a political safe space. What we’ve said is that when we tell a poster 20 times that we don’t want a political safe space, and yet they keep saying we must want a political safe space, that maybe their intentions are less than noble and the mods should do something about it.
Because it never really stops at figuring out what they mean. It almost always inevitably defaults to misattributing, misunderstanding, or deliberate re-wording someone’s words so that they can be twisted around to fit into your own preconceived bias and then some form of argumentation based upon the twisted meaning.
This results in NO civil discourse and many pages of blank paper wasted (won’t you think of the environment!!)
“But Dad, if you start assuming my motivations just to maintain order in the car, where does it stop? How long before jack booted thugs rip me from the back seat to appease your whims?”
I’d like to offer a slight realignment of this statement.
The issue isn’t keeping the board alive. The issue is really how do we keep Great Debates and Elections alive as worthwhile fora?
The others are doing just fine. GQ, IMHO, CS and MPSIMS are all carrying their weight with no great level of acrimony and a great deal of socializing and fun. Which is where we should be. This should be fun, after all. That GD and Elections are increasingly not is both a symptom of our times and our national declining political environment. With a bit of exogamous Internet culture thrown in.
Yeah, that explains why Donald “All Mexicans are rapists and Muslims danced at 9/11” Trump got elected. Turns out those gamergators and various MRA-lite subsets were feeder groups into white supremacy and “fine people.” It’s just that those subsets attacked women. And here on the dope we STILL cannot get certain persuasions to agree that terms like “hysterical” and “harpy” are blatantly, viciously sexist and have been for thousands of years. That’s what drives off the non-trolls-----the fact that the rightwingers fight to keep from accepting basic facts, so the needle never gets moved. The JAQing off, the requests for cites that will never be read, the SAME arguments year after year-----we are always fighting for our basic humanity.
It’s exhausting and it’s deliberate. It’s bad faith. Look at the “political gatherings” thread in the Pit. There are trolls there arguing that a guy in a truck who bumped a pedestrian (by driving the truck into him) was the real, true victim, and that the truck was not a weapon. Oh, and that the pedestrian was the real aggressor. Just…come on.
Actually, the moderation staff here is one of the least biased I’ve seen anywhere on the Internet. That you can’t see that is, perhaps, more indicative of your own point of view than reality.
If we were truly biased as you say we wouldn’t get such cries of bias from both sides, I’d think. You’ll note that the earlier statement about Trump supporters and death came from a poster and not from a moderator and has not been endorsed or adopted by any moderator and certainly not by me.
That said, I doubt that will convince you that we’re not biased, nor that our policy of ‘fuzzy lines’ - which come from hard-learned lessons - is not somehow designed to allow for the bias you seem to want to perceive. If that’s really the case, that you perceive a deep bias where none exists, then I’m not sure you’ll ever be happy here. And if you can’t be happy here perhaps some thought could be put into why, indeed, you are here at all?
