Does "Deliberately Distorted" = "Lied"

[jimbuff314]

Love the italics.

[BigT]

@Shodan

And my take is not so much the “disingenuous” which is the problem, but the “deliberate”. It’s an accusation of bad faith and an attack on the other poster’s motivations, which is almost unfalsifiable.

In the thread in question, it was lazy debating. The poster in question did nothing to refute anything - simply denied the OP and began making accusations of bad faith and deliberate deception. That ought not, IMO, to be the go-to tactic in GD if one is not going to offer any substance to counter.

FWIW I reported the post, but given who made it I neither expected or received a response. Which leaves the usual options - respond in kind in the same thread, in which case he puts on his mod hat, calls the response a hijack and starts mod noting. Or I can Pit him, and have the thread shut down with a mod note that it should be in ATMB. Or I can respond here, and be stonewalled and/or ignored.

Maybe I’m wrong, and he will defend his post and explain how it furthered the discussion. It could happen.

Regards,
Shodan

And that’s why it’s important for mods to have rules they follow and not constantly be falling back on personal judgment. Judgment of course has merit, but it cannot be used when you are yourself involved. Because it’s the very nature of personal judgment to make excuses for yourself but not for others.

Deliberate disingenuousness is an accusation of lying. A lie is an attempt to mislead. If an accusation of lying is forbidden, then, by it’s nature, so must be accusations of deliberate disingenuousness. If one is attacking the poster instead of the post, so is the other.

This needs to be a hard rule, or else it will always be open to letting mods get away with things that others cannot.

The alternative, of course, would be to treat the word “lie” itself as sacrosanct, but then people will just do what they do in the Pit and come up with other ways to say the exact same thing. As, in effect, the mod in question did.

He accused a guy of lying because that guy didn’t think he was mistaken.

[Shodan]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

Officially, you can pit moderators for things that they do in their capacity as posters (as Tom was acting here).

I’m curious as to whether that has ever happened (since the rule forbidding pitting them as moderators was put into effect).

The only reference I can find in the last two years is this thread which isn’t anything like that for the poster in question.

@Grotonian

“A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;”
-Ernest Lawrence Thayer, “Casey at the Bat”

Or Charlie Brown and the football.

Regards,
Shodan

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Grotonian

Now you’re just making things up. This is just another one of your whoppers. Stop telling fibs. I’m tiring of your deliberate falsehoods. Your mendaciousness is showing. You post like a rug. Your nose is growing. Stop with the tall tales.

Do you see a problem with the above assertions?

1. If you presented such assertions in that way you know you would get a warning, right?

2. A lie is an inaccuracy presented knowingly with an intent to deceive. That’s 3 components. Disingenuousness often lacks the intent to deceive. I’ve been accused of it here in that manner. Correctly. It happens when I inject humor into my argument, something which is also in the tradition of Cecil.

2b. (I am sometimes unclear whether my correspondent got wooshed (one possibility) or whether he was clarifying and disentangling my legitimate points from my overblown rhetoric (another).)

3. There’s something known as diplomacy. Certain words automatically derail threads. Others do not. Hypothetically consider two exact synonyms. One derails threads, the other doesn’t. Nobody knows why. In such a case it would be appropriate to mod the thread derailer.

This isn’t about super-sensitive dispositions. It’s about fighting ignorance and keeping the conversation on track. We have many bad behaviors here. Insults are one. But so is intentional distortion of off-site articles and the convenient fun-house mirror misrepresentation of what posters wrote on a previous page. So the rules and guidelines will necessarily be the result of some compromise among competing considerations.

[Bone]

You’re using the word “disingenuous” in a way that is similar to sarcastic which is not how I think most people use that word. Most times it carries an implication of maliciousness iny mind, a synonym would be lying.
That’s how I interpret it.

[John_Mace]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

I can’t speak to the rules of this board, but from the perspective of the ordinary connotations of words and phrases, “you made that up” is not the same thing as “you are lying”. The former just means that you have no basis for your statement, and is not necessarily a definitive assertion that the statement was incorrect, let alone that it’s a “lie”.

Well, I didn’t think so either, which is why I often used it. But the ruling has been made, and it is deemed to be equivalent to “you are lying”, so that’s the way it is.

[Shodan]

@Measure for Measure

A lie is an inaccuracy presented knowingly with an intent to deceive. That’s 3 components. Disingenuousness often lacks the intent to deceive.

Saying someone is being deliberately disingenuous seems to me to include an accusation of intent.

Regards,
Shodan

[Miller]

@Shodan

Saying someone is being deliberately disingenuous seems to me to include an accusation of intent.

Regards,
Shodan

Although the original phrase in question was “deliberately distorted,” not “deliberately disingenuous.”

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Exapno_Mapcase

I have to agree. In modern American English, disingenuous is a fancy lie. The suggestion is that the statement is more nuanced than simply saying black is white - although that often happens here. It is still knowingly saying something that is opposite of the truth with the intention that the listener believe the statement.

It’s possible that the English usage is different from and milder than the American usage:

That’s merely an interesting possibility, though. It doesn’t change our problem.

Well… Saying somebody is lying is prohibited by the rules of the House of Representatives I think. So the word disingenuous gets thrown around a lot. It’s a fig leaf. As time as gone on, it’s been interpreted as a thin fig leaf.

I would argue that the term has some plausible deniability to it.

Usage “experiment”:
Here’s a sample post from 2013:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16467730&postcount=1

@KarlGauss

At the outset, let me state that this post is not about whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor, or whether what he did was right or wrong. I am only questioning his new status as a human rights defender.

Which human rights is he defending? What human rights have been violated?

Is ‘privacy’ a human right? If so…

It is disingenuous to call Snowden a human rights defender and it is equally contrived to call confidentiality of telephone metadata a human right. Snowden may be a hero, or he may be a traitor, or maybe even nothing but a glory-seeking martyr. But he is no defender of human rights.

Emphasis added. He is criticizing those claiming that Snowden is a human rights defender: he is saying that they are bullshitting or blowing smoke. They are not lying exactly, because this is a matter of definition and privacy plausibly falls in the human rights category. They are engaging in rhetoric and need to be called out as… disingenuous. Karl could have called his opponents liars because it was the OP and he was attacking somebody off this message board. But it would have looked weird.

So yeah, there’s a distinction here and distinctions matter.

(I don’t agree with Karl as it happens, but I’m discussing usage here, not substance.)

[Shodan]

@Miller

Although the original phrase in question was “deliberately distorted,” not “deliberately disingenuous.”

You are correct - my apologies. But I think the point still stands.

Regards,
Shodan

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Shodan

Saying someone is being deliberately disingenuous seems to me to include an accusation of intent.

Sure. But not necessarily an intent to deceive. I was deliberately disingenuous in my post about FIFA. I did not intend to deceive anyone, though admittedly I am aware that some won’t pick up on my antics. But that’s the nature of a message board: not everyone is attuned to irony.

[Bone]

@Shodan

Saying someone is being deliberately disingenuous seems to me to include an accusation of intent.

Regards,
Shodan

Isn’t the deliberate part superfluous? It’s not like some can be unintentionally disingenuous. Look at the first definition and synonyms from google:

not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.
synonyms: insincere, dishonest, untruthful, false, deceitful, duplicitous, lying, mendacious; hypocritical
“that innocent, teary-eyed look is just part of a disingenuous act”

None of that is unintentional.

[Shodan]

@Bone

Isn’t the deliberate part superfluous? It’s not like some can be unintentionally disingenuous. Look at the first definition and synonyms from google:

None of that is unintentional.

I tend to agree that it is superfluous, but it served the function in this case of removing doubt as to the nature of the accusation - the poster made it clear that the distortion was done neither innocently or in error, but with an intent to deceive.

Perhaps he thought he might be misunderstood, and wished to emphasize that it was meant as an accusation of bad faith.

Regards,
Shodan

[John_Mace]

@Miller

Although the original phrase in question was “deliberately distorted,” not “deliberately disingenuous.”

Yeah, I don’t know how we ended up talking about “disingenuous” rather than “distorted”. The latter is in the OP, the former not.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

See Post #5

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Miller

The problem with that is the trouble it would cause in getting new mods to join, and in retaining the old ones. The mods are, every one of us, mods because we really enjoy posting on the boards. We’re not getting paid for any of this, beyond a coffee mug when we sign up. So the board would be in a position of asking mods to take on a significant amount of extra effort and responsibilities, and not only will they not be paid for their work, they’ll actually have to give up (at least a part of) something they enjoy doing. We also try to assign mods to the forums they most enjoy participating in - the familiarity with the rules and expectations of the forum helps keep moderation consistent between different moderators of that forum. Plus, it makes policing the forum less like work. I don’t usually read GQ, but when I was first made a mod, I was put on that forum for a couple weeks while I learned the ropes. It was a pain in the ass, because instead of reading the forum for entertainment, while occasionally moderating something, I was reading the forum out of duty. “Better spend at least twenty minutes reading GQ, whether I want to or not.” I’d make a shitty GQ mod, because I’m just not as invested in that forum. And I wouldn’t be willing to be a Pit mod if I couldn’t participate in the Pit. Not to mention, as a self-selected group of loud-mouth know-it-alls (I’m talking about all of you guys, too, not just the mods) making someone spend a significant amount of time reading these threads, and not allowing them to participate when that guy is clearly wrong is just too cruel.

I said I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

Issues with unpleasant fixes tend to remain unresolved. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still problems.

[John_Mace]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

See Post #5

Yes, I saw it. Why people want to focus on that instead of the actual topic of the OP is what I meant. It’s a different word and means something different.

[Shodan]

ok, but ISTM that accusing someone of deliberately distorting is still accusing them of lying. It has the same elements of dishonesty and conscious intent.

Regards,
Shodan

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Shodan

ok, but ISTM that accusing someone of deliberately distorting is still accusing them of lying. It has the same elements of dishonesty and conscious intent.

Regards,
Shodan

Sorry–I didn’t mean in doing that to change the topic. At the same time, I think both accusations are fairly similar. Even though “disingenuous” can apparently mean “ironic” and not have an element of deception in it, I’ve never seen it used that way in GD. And “distorted” has a similar element of deception.

If you want some irony, even though I’m coming down against the use of “distorted” and “disingenuous,” I made what’s tantamount to an accusation of similar behavior, when I quoted a passage from the OP and then followed the links contained in the passage and showed how the OP’s description of those links was, while technically accurate, not remotely a fair connotative description of those links. I believe he distorted the content of those links and said as much.

And then I used the word “disingenuous” to describe his actions.

Let me step carefully out of this glass house I find myself in.

[jimbuff314]

“Sir, I believe you have unintentionally distorted the situation.”

“You mean I made a mistake?”

“I’m … not … sure.”