:: sigh :: Let it GO, dude!
I didn’t suggest that you take a valium because I disagreed with your judgement. I was just suggesting that you find a way to calm down a bit because, as others have tried to show you here, you have gotten WAY too oversensitive about this whole thing.
What whining? I think those are very valid points. If you disagree with them, provide a rationale.
That goes for all of you: address the problems and concerns if you disagree with them. Don’t just write cheap insults. I thought we were supposed to be fighting ignorance, not being ignorant.
If anyone would like to discuss what the boundaries of political and off-topic around here are for GQ, especially in the context of the examples I gave, that’s all I’ve been trying to do the whole time.
For all the bluster and cheap shots, no one wants to do that.
Bluster and cheap shots are fun, though, and you’re giving us plenty of ammunition. The main reason not to spend the time and effort discussing this fully is simple: there is nothing to be gained from it. Imagine if you will two possible outcomes:
[ul][li]Discussion at length on the subject. Finally, after much analysis and compromise, a formal list of “political” subjects to be avoided in GQ is written. Your original comment is judged political and thus the decision to call you on it is sustained. You, predicatbly, either continue to bitch and moan about this, or leave the board in a huff. Net gain to the moderators: zero.[/li][li]Same discussion, but this time your comment is judged to be not political. You promptly bask in the glory of your righteous righteousness. Then someone else comes along and posts something political and is called on it. He objects and a new round of discussion and analysis and list-writing commences. Net gain to the moderators: zero.[/ul][/li]
In short, your whining is not sufficient currency to pay for the administrative effort you are demanding. This message board does not operate under the rule of law, where you have unbreakable civil rights as a poster and the state/mods have constitutional limitations imposed upon them. Don’t like it? Go form your own board where you can do all the thumb-sucking you like. This board is not for children, so don’t act like one.
That’s the right idea, Crandolph; write one more post about how we’re not taking this seriously enough, and maybe it will sink in. Or maybe the next one after that will do the trick. But do keep going on about it; I mean really, it’s a big enough issue for a five-page thread, at least.
It’s not that they’re invalid so much as they’re pathetic. Picayune. Penny-ante. Not worth complaining about. Your off-topic post got slapped down because that is the sort of comment that tends to hijack the entire thread. The other off-topic posts didn’t get slapped because they’re the type of posts that don’t tend to hijack the thread. It’s as simple as that. No one is targetting you for persecution, no one has actually insulted you yet, even. Not by the standards of this board, anyway. Although with the way you’re behaving, I doubt that will last long. You’re coming across as real anal, stuffed-shirt kind of guy. If this were an '80s comedy, Bill Murray would be flying your underwear from the flagpole by the beginning of the second act. You savvy?
People always assume that being insulting and fighting ignorance are somehow mutually exclusive. I can only assume that these people have not only never read any of Cecil Adams’ columns, but have never actually heard of the man, either.
I suggest you check out the archives of his columns available through this site, and consider the extent to which the boards borrow their tone from him.
Well, in fairness to the rest of us, it does sound excruciatingly dull.
Look, there’s two things that will get you respect around here. One is the ability to offer coherent, insightful analysis on a wide array of topics, or qualified expert advice on a specific issue. The other is the ability to take an insult in good humor and respond in kind. You haven’t really demonstrated an ability in the former, from what I’ve seen, and you’re blowing it big time with the latter.
You’re coming across as humorless and oversensitive. And that’s like blood in the water to the people who frequent the pit. You keep on like this, and they’re going to keep poking at you and poking at you 'til you pop. Because right now, winding you up looks like a lot more fun than whatever issue it is you think desperately needs to be hashed out between you and the moderators on this board. Trust me on this, you’re not going to come out ahead by the time this thread ends. Just walk away from it.
Crandolph, I don’t mean to insult you, but why in the world are you sinking your teeth into this and shaking it like a terrier with a rat? I was in the original thread, I read your other Pit thread, and this one, but heaven help me if I can find where you were smacked down by a mod. Even in this thread, they’ve been more than patient. In the judgement of the people who are trusted with the administration of this board, you were wrong. They quite civilly told you so, in clear terms. What’s the misunderstanding? What’s to question? Why the unending sackcloth and ashes routine? It isn’t that big a deal.
If the issue of collateral deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq is that important to you, you are free to start a GD thread about it; in fact, you were invited to. The fact that you didn’t seems to indicate you are more concerned with being proved “correct” and validated by the rest of the board. The deafening lack of validation seems to have only inflamed you even more. Maybe you should instead see that lack of support as an indication that maybe, just maybe, there might be the slightest shred of a glimmer of a possibility that you were, excuse me for broaching this, I really don’t mean to insult, but perhaps, just perhaps, your posts in the original thread were, well, misplaced.
Walk away from this – no more good can come of it. You’ll just piss yourself off even more, and I don’t think anyone here wants to see you flame out.
Oh, I do. I wasted a whole five minutes writing my (relatively) civil post of 10:57. I’ve done my duty as a civilized human being. Now I want to see entrails and suffering and the OP writhing in the hellfire of his own creation.
[nitpick]
Use the damned post numbers Bryan; in this case #43. The timestamp changes depending on the timezone of the user viewing the post.
[/nitpick]
I liked the part about entrails and writhing in hellfire though.
I am.
Illuminati Squad Beta and the orbital mind control lasers are in position.
First, I’m going to turn the mods against him…
It’s not dead. It’s just pining for the fijords. 
I think he’s working on turning the mods against him. Don’t waste your time…
Couple of things -
I definitely agree that what constitutes a political statement is open for debate. However, GQ isn’t the place for it. Furthermore, if you felt that your admonishment was misplaced, why didn’t you email a mod first for clarification? Afterwards, if you felt that explanation wasn’t sufficient, you could have started a debate in Great Debates (or more likely the Pit where mod issues are placed) and couched your concerns in such a way that may have generated some debate as to what constitutes something as political in GQ.
One major problem I have with message boards it that it’s sometimes difficult to gauge the tone of a response. A comment or statement made by someone can sometimes be taken the wrong way. Maybe you felt you were being unfairly single-out - which is possible; but it’s best if you err on the side of caution. By emailing a mod for clarification first, you could have saved the trouble of having to post your concern in the Pit. Which, as you know, the Pit can get quite nasty (in many cases intentionally).
In any event, I wouldn’t be overly concerned with the admonishment. I don’t think the mods are out to “get you.” It’s more a case of trying to manage the GQ forum in such a way as to minimize problems for themselves. If it seemed initially that they were unduly harsh, just realize that it isn’t necessarily personal. After all, it’s just a message board.
OK. I’ll give it a try.
Hijacks (to some extent) and humor (to some extent) and topic drift (to a greater extent) are allowed in GQ. What is prohibited is the sort of material that will lead directly to a debate and the special case of political debate has been explicitly forbidden in GQ because it has a 99.99999% chance of turning into acrimonious debate.
The references to Jewish lives lost play into the notion of both topic drift and humor. Since no sane person doubts that Jews were among the casualties at the WTC, the notions of “no Jews” and “no children” were tied together with one poster implying that the reason that no children died was that the children (and not the Jews) were responsible for the attack. (The fastest way to kill humor is to explain it, but the humor presented was the form known as dark humor , touched with irony.) From that point, no one was silly enough to begin an argument/debate that the children actually were or were not responsible for the attack. All (but one) of the posters recognized that the substitution of “children” for “Jews” was merely an ironic comment on the silly conspiracy stories that have followed the attacks. (And that poster was not left wondering for long.) No political statement (i.e., no statement addressing government policy or action) arose from that humorous byplay.
On the other hand, your insertion of the point that children died in another place at another time in a war that was begun in response to the WTC attack had a very strong flavor of “Why don’t we discuss this tragedy in the same way?” However, the children in Afghanistan were not killed in the WTC attack. Any discussion of their deaths leads pretty much inexorably to a discussion of the policies of the government of the United States in pursuing the purported agents of the WTC attack. Discussions of government polices are neary always political unless they have rolled back into the mists of history. Given that we still have political debates about WWII and the U.S. Civil War, it is nearly impossible for a discussion of the current administration’s policy in Afghanistan to be free of politics.
Politics are not allowed in GQ. Hence, the interjection of an event that is politically associated with the WTC attack was not deemed appropriate to that thread.
It did not help your case that your reply to the Moderator was a tartly sarcastic observation about threads not “straying”; your interjection could not be considered a “stray” in any sense. You then went on to acknowledge, yourself, that the issue was “arguable”–the very essence of debate.
I hope your question has been answered.
Well, thank you for at least acknowledging that we haven’t defined here what “political” means and it is open to debate.
GQ isn’t the place for what. politics itself or discussion of what ‘politics’ means in GQ?
I didn’t attempt to discuss this in GQ, I attempted to discuss it in About These Boards. It got moved here, where people suggesting that I “get a life” curiously seem to have plenty of time to flame me without discussing the issues I raised. (This is also why I hoped to keep this out of the Pit; I never read the Pit and it seems a waste of time to me. Haven’t posted there otherwise. I was hoping to have a rational discussion of this in a forum where it’s not officially considered OK to call someone an idiot and worse).
As far as political content in GQ: it happens necessarily all of the time. And that’s not always a bad thing. Hell, it happens in Cecil’s column - anybody remember the reference to George W. Bush’s “damn fool war?”
I don’t understand how anyone thinks that you can discuss things like economics and social problems as we do in GQ without people showing political tendencies in the facts that they choose to highlight or shy away from. Jumping on some of those and letting others slide without an explicable rationale for it doesn’t seem a good way to moderate.
Why didn’t I email a moderator? Primarily because this is a message board, right? Not an email society of some sort. At least not that I’ve seen. I don’t understand why this sort of conversation can’t be had in the open. Secondarily, you’re suggesting something that the mods themselves didn’t suggest to me; they suggested I open another thread if I wanted to discuss this. I did. Thus far only tomndebb has, and the rest of you seem content (smug even) with name-calling.
In re tomndebb’s post: thank you for handling the actual comment and my reponse to it. This is what I was looking for, and it does help clarify things somewhat. I also appreciate that you were able to address the issue without resorting to insult and mockery.
I should say that as someone who has lived in a few Muslim societies and knows quite a few Muslims here and abroad, as well as having encountered quite a few Christian anti-Semites here at home, that I don’t see a discussion of a Jewish plot at the WTC as intrinsically being dark humor. I’ve met too many people who have this in their belief system to take it for granted. The fact of the matter is that the act of accepting discussion (humorous or not) of Zionist plots around the 9/11 attacks as apolitical does itself betray the biases of the beholder. This is still the type of thing that can’t be taken for granted, and which is still very much in political “play” in large parts of the world.
There are several million people or more in the US who believe that sort of thing, and probably several hundred million more abroad who take it quite seriously. This is the internet, and an international message board, and I don’t think that we can run on the assumption that this sort of thing is beyond the pale of rational debate for a lot of people. I’m quite sure there are any number of message boards where this is being seriously debated at this very moment, and not just by Muslims or by non-Americans.
Conversely, I imagine that in large parts of the world no one would expect a firestorm of contraversy to follow my one sentence post on Afghanistan within the context of discussion of the 9/11 attacks. A person has to be immersed in a certain political background to expect that. (Don’t know if anyone noticed, but quite a few people read the thread for about a half hour after my post without any hijack resulting; neither has anyone commented about it in the thread since… and yes, I know, the argument then being made would be that this was only due to mod intervention in the latter case.)
What did happen is that people have started seriously discussing the Jewishness of names in that same thread. This is very clearly off-topic. And I don’t mind. A person might learn something after all. What troubles me is the double standard being applied to my post and these others. (One might add that a discussion of this sort is very possibly offensive to some Jews, and every bit as likely to result in flaming debate.)
No one is willing to explain how a GQ thread with the heavily loaded and subjectively answered question “Is al-Jazeera pro-fundamentalist?” isn’t inherently “political.” I don’t know of anyone who’s had contact with it’s content who would have any reason What would happen if someone posted “Is Fox News pro-fascist?” which is pretty much the western equivalent Q? How long would that stay in GQ? And what, aside from the inherent biases of the observer, are the differences between the two?
Should read “… would have any reason to believe that this is remotely true, unless they had an inherent bias against Arab media and/or Arabs.”
Or unless they don’t know much about the subject and are asking an honest question. An honest and factual answer would probably be pretty short, any further debate would then be inappripriate, same for your Fox analogy.
According to some people, any airing of fund. views or submitted would be inherent support (which is what appears to have triggered that question). If that worldview or terrorist video material is beyond the pale to you, you don’t want it aired. To others that sort of material is just part of a spectrum of valid views of the region which deserve to be aired, and to yet others those would be the only acceptable views and al-Jazeera would be considered *anti-*fundie for airing the views of Americans and Israelis as well as secular Arabs.
Thus I think we could state that the motivation for asking the question and the options for answering it have a lot to do with the political opinions of the participants; what one considers to be pro- and anti- anything can get rather subjective. And the reader coming to the subject cold might have to see a debate between those viewpoints to get some idea as to the nature of debatability of where Jazeera stands from different worldview vantage points.
I think that some of those viewpoints got discussed in the thread, but there was a heavy mixture of opinion and fact, with the fact selected to match the opinion. And I think that give and take helped frame a context for approaching the Q, although some valid viewpoints about the station have not yet been championed. This is both politics (via worldview baseline assumptions) and debate in GQ and I think it’s about the only way the Q could be addressed.
This is hardly a unique thread of this sort but the first that came to mind. Now at what point does that belong in GD? That’s something I’d like to know.
I’d be curious to see how long my Fox example would stay in GQ; that’s also a question loaded with political assumption and that would certainly be handled subjectively. The difference I see is that since most of us on the board are immersed in the political culture of the US, the biases inherent in the question would simply be more obvious. Now, does that fact alone move the thread to GD?
None of which changes the fact that your particular post was politically motivated and highly likely to cause political debate.
Build a bridge.
The problem is that your question was about as straight forward as it could possibly get. You were (initially) looking for a number, and a source for that number. There is no “context for approaching the Q”. In other questions (such as your Stradivarius example), there is a need for a deliberate approach, and a need to consider alternatives and elaborate on the context.
But all you wanted was a number regarding the WTC! What the fuck do children in Afghanistan have to do with that? (Note: That’s a rhetorical question,I don’t really care to discuss it here - it’s not the correct forum.)
I’ve met onions with thicker skins.