I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this. As Dex points out above, we’re simply echoing U.S. antidiscrimination laws, which cite national origin. That said, since this is a comment in the Pit we’re talking about, I can see it would be simpler to ignore passing comments about nationalities if the term isn’t a slur on its face. Does that address your concern?
Again, I don’t want to get into a discussion of hypotheticals, but to answer your question in broad terms, we wouldn’t object to a thread about a subset of blacks, Jews, or Poles who in your opinion behaved in an undesirable way. Naturally we’d watch such a thread closely, since it would be easy for someone to make the leap from some blacks/Jews/Poles to all. In contrast, it’s hard to imagine a thread about the bad habits of white people who live in trailers degenerating into a pile-on about white people in general.
It’s a freaking internet message board. As Ed Zotti pointed out in post #2, it was “just a mod note”. Describing anything a mod says to a poster as a “ruling” just smacks of, well, I don’t know what exactly. But it’s unpleasant.
As I understand it, one would substitute “speak against” for “discriminate against” in echoing US discrimination laws. But my understanding might be dim.
Your comment, and this entire discussion, makes me think (a) “hate speech” isn’t as well understood as we thought, and (b) maybe we are (or at least I am) casting too wide a net here. Let me run it past the staff.
We haven’t discussed hate speech in the Pit in a while. Here are comments I made the last time:
I still agree with this basic philosophy, namely that we should avoid letting “no hate speech” turn into “no offensive speech”, and fluiddruid and I have always been very sparing with the hate speech rule (in that we’ve never invoked it as far as I can remember.)
Ed’s request to Rand Rover to cool it with the French-bashing was thus more strict than we’ve been in the past. While we try to be consistent, I don’t think anyone would benefit from us cracking down on similar types of comments, simply on the grounds of maintaining consistency. Ed in the Pit is essentially a new mod, and new mods aren’t always perfectly consistent with the old rules. Since there wasn’t even a warning involved, I don’t think we need to make a big deal out of this.
That’s not to say we can’t reexamine how we treat racial, national, or even generally offensive speech in the Pit. However, I’d argue that people proposing rule changes would do well to dig up links to threads or posts containing examples of speech they feel should be curtailed / not curtailed so we’re not simply arguing about hypotheticals.
I think the problem, Frylock, is that there may be as many perceptions of intent as there are readers.
Suppose the mod sees one intent while some of the readers see another. When that happens, we usually end up with a thread about the ruling. Here, for example, I did not at all read Rand Rover’s comments as an insult to any ethnic group. Once Ed cleared up that he meant “nationality” rather than “ethnicity” the point of the ruling became more clear, but its scope become less clear. There is copious bashing of Americans, for example, even in Great Debates. (Select almost any random post from, say, Der Trihs, for instance.) The sub-group thing muddles it even more, when we can bash based on a state or province within the nation but not the nation as a whole. It really is murky, and Giraffe has handled it all splendidly mostly, I think, by giving the widest possible latitude until the intent of the poster becomes clear to a majority of readers including himself.
Incidentally, I don’t think everything is based on intent, though. People are (and should be) banned for being jerks whether they intend to be or just can’t help themselves.
Mark Twain expressed some famous, satirical remarks about how low the French are. Would he be allowed to post them here? Heck, after Ed’s comment, I’m not sure I should.
OK, after some discussion, I was clearly construing “hate speech” more broadly than we normally mean it in the Pit. While a racist diatribe would likely a earn a warning at minimum, we don’t have a problem with (say) disparaging remarks about the French. Accordingly I withdraw my mod note to Rand Rover on this point and extend my apologies.
