I agree I should have given the statement a warning, and not a “note” and I’m sorry I didn’t get back in time to make the change, after the staff talked about it. It was clearly an out-of-line thing to say, but at the time I thought it was mitigated by an attempt at a joke. But that’s really no excuse.
What is correct is subjective and reasonable people can disagree, as you are well aware.
I wasn’t looking for vindication and I don’t feel vindicated in any way. I did understand the joke, it wasn’t exactly subtle, and I don’t feel that the offense was unwarranted, obviously. I thought that it crossed a line and your line is further away, if it exists at all. But, yeah, meh.
FWIW, I agree.
He clearly misinterpreted what I was asking and was clearly trying to express disgust with what he thought was an anti-Semitic question.
I understand Tuba’s decision but I’d ask his warning he dialed back to a mod note.
A few years back there were concerns that the moderation at this board was too tight. Now it seems the SDMB mob believes that it is, on the whole, too lenient. This characterization is based upon multiple ATMB dramas, and not just this one.
Interesting.
chacoguy: Two faux anti-Semitic one liners in one thread is really too many. And the first one (gasser) wasn’t that funny though it made its point. IMO only.
I enjoyed reading this thread.
I meant it as a joke. But perhaps it cuts too close to the bone. My apologies.
For making a bad joke? No one seems to think he’s antisemitic, so all he is guilty of is failing at humor. So the explanation doesn’t make sense.
BPC may or may not be a jerk, but there was a specific item at issue: the joke that is the reason for this thread.
Chance gave me a Official Warning for “Appropriate user name, tho.” (He said it was a “Personal Insult” due the the posters Posting ID.) in Great debates, so apparently they changed the policy about “it was only a joke”. I wish they had mentioned it.
The problem isn’t that the joke was just not funny, it’s that it was a really crude and offensive thing to say and he didn’t even really indicate it was a joke. We might tolerate offensive humor in a thread where the OP asks for crude jokes, but that thread wasn’t one of those. Budget Player Cadet just popped into a thread about pests and called Jews vermin. I accept that he didn’t mean that personally, but that doesn’t change the words he wrote or the reaction some people had when they saw them.
It also, for right or wrong (pragmatically speaking), involved one of the many ‘protected’ classes on the SDMB. Had he said ‘Gypsies’, a similar reaction may have arose from a much smaller subset of people. ‘Fat people’, perhaps a larger cross-section. Had he said ‘short people’, the so-called joke would have been the same, but since short people got nobody, the uproar would have been minimum.
I think the original mod note giving stern direction was correct. A warning with the follow-up “you’re about to get banned if you offend anyone again” was unnecessary and reactionary, especially as we have (for good reasons) a fairly vague line and consistency of moderation of such transgressions.
I find that offensive!
Fine. But after he explained it was a bad joke, AND that he was Jewish, that should have mitigated any concern you might have had. And as another poster pointed out, he had zero history of any antis emetic statements on the board in all his time.
Question for you: do YOU think he is antisemitic?
And if not, what was gained by issuing him a Warning that would not have been accomplished by a note?
Why? It didn’t change the fact that the comment was off-topic, crude, and generally vile and that we don’t want posters to do what he did there. His sincerity was not the issue.
I neither know nor care.
It sends a firmer message that posts like that are not welcome.
Vermin has a particular context relating to Jews that short people or liberals doesn’t have. So just dropping “Jews”, even with the yuck-yuck tag, was beyond the pale. Sometimes making an offensive joke that goes beyond the pale is being a jerk, even if it doesn’t reflect your personal beliefs.
For me, seeing that comment in an innocuous thread was like a slap in the face, given my personal background I mentioned in the pit thread. Literally, I felt sick to my stomach. Once I saw it had been modded I didn’t report it, but I wasn’t upset when I saw the issue was brought up.
Then you did exactly the right thing: nothing!
We all get offended. Even by jokes, even ethnic jokes—even really, really bad edgy ones that fail. Not every time we are offended does that mean Mod action is warranted.
You misunderstand. Had no one else reported it I would have. I didn’t need to.
This is not an anything goes board. It’s not 4Chan. I read here because I can generally expect to not come face to face with ethnic slurs, insults and nasty comments. However, I don’t have to censor myself- if I’m offended I can tell the mods and let them decide what to do. If I don’t agree, I can speak up, but ultimately I personally can’t force a consequence, nor should I. However, that doesn’t mean my opinion isn’t worth being considered or at least expressed.
Sure it was. On the one hand, he could have been a Jew-hating member of the Nazi party planning violence on the next synagogue. On the other, he could have been a young Jewish guy who attempted a dumb inappropriate joke that fell flat and made him look bad and he realized at and apologized. Those things should be viewed through VERY different spectrums. Not doing so brings to mind the zero-tolerance stupidity we see in our schools.
Well, that’s really, really too bad, because you should. Because it matters. See above. You really shouldn’t be so proud of not caring about the particulars of the situation. Again, think zero-tolerance policies. Do you really want to be on the side of that nonsense?
He had already explained himself, explained he was Jewish, and apologized. What “firmer” message was needed? Answer: none. And by that time, it had become enough of a discussion that the message was delivered to spectators, as well.
We don’t want people to do either one. I think that’s a pretty reasonable position: whatever your personal background is, we don’t want people to say things that come across as deeply hateful to people of other races or religions (or related groups etc.). We shouldn’t have to start doing research to figure out a poster’s sincerity if he calls a group of people vermin. He should know not to say it.
We gave the guy a warning, not a death sentence or even a ban. That being said, I think I’m OK with being zero tolerance on statements like “Jews are vermin.”
And I wouldn’t even fault you for reporting it. And if the Mods had simply issued him a little note—especially in light of his apologizing, his lack of anything like that in the past, and him being Jewish—I wouldn’t be faulting them either.
But given the facts, it really does bring to mind those asinine suspend-your-brain zero tolerance policies that treats the same an Eagle scout kid with a small pocketknife and a gang member with a switchblade.
Yes, it can bring those policies to mind, but I think once you scratch the surface it’s more than that. People brought up similar comments that were modded differently, people indicated the degree to which it was offensive and the context which may not have been immediately apparent etc. The final mod action came after responses from the community and discussions by the mods. It’s not a knee jerk zero tolerance reaction, but in response to and after community discussion.