Richard_Parker:
The upside of tolerating that shit is that exposing hateful ideas to logic and ridicule can be a good way of combating them. It’s part of the mission of fighting ignorance. It’s also fun!
The other reason you tolerate that shit is because there is no bright line separating the KKK from Donald Trump or Jerry Falwell. Without a clear line, you risk discouraging speech on other controversial subjects.
Obviously, the Board is free to do whatever the fuck it wants. People who think they’re clever for pointing that out are missing the point. If you think the Board is better when we get to pile on Nazis and when people with unpopular political opinions feel free to express them, then we should proceed cautiously when insta-banning someone based in part on their views. That’s all. That’s not a “make-believe world of absolute free speech.” It’s how humans actually work in real life.
Yes, it truly takes extreme patience to, uh, start a thread inviting comment and then leave that thread open for comment and debate?
You say it’s fun, I say it’s fucking boring as hell. And I say that there is a bright line between the KKK and Donald Trump. Giving Nazis and racists a platform is a win for trolls, no matter how hard they’re slapped down in “debates.”
That’s nice. I think discussing reality TV is boring as hell. Let’s ban 'em both. Otherwise, the Kardashians win, right?
As far as I know, the Kardashians haven’t put Jews in ovens or lynched blacks.
I wouldn’t know. I haven’t watched the shows.
Come to think of it, if someone starts a thread like “Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.” or “9/11 was a controlled demolition”, just fuck them too. Ban.
DrDeth
April 29, 2016, 6:31pm
267
Or perhaps posters who start threads: "The Negro Community Frowns Upon Your Shenanigans "?:rolleyes:
What exactly, according to you, do they owe you? And where do you think they agreed to owe this to you?
Overdue, although I do appreciate the long deliberation given it’s one of the longest-term members.
His dogged defense-by-say-so of the JFK conspiracies might be missed.
Or not.
No, no, no. As long as they’re willing to try to discuss it, they’re fun!
Oy! You messageboard lawyers are driving me meshuge!
“Don’t be a jerk.” This is the whole of the Law; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.
Richard_Parker:
The upside of tolerating that shit is that exposing hateful ideas to logic and ridicule can be a good way of combating them. It’s part of the mission of fighting ignorance. It’s also fun!
The other reason you tolerate that shit is because there is no bright line separating the KKK from Donald Trump or Jerry Falwell. Without a clear line, you risk discouraging speech on other controversial subjects.
Obviously, the Board is free to do whatever the fuck it wants. People who think they’re clever for pointing that out are missing the point. If you think the Board is better when we get to pile on Nazis and when people with unpopular political opinions feel free to express them, then we should proceed cautiously when insta-banning someone based in part on their views.
Have you read Miller ’s post 246? That addresses your concerns and until you specifically discuss his points the conversation simply won’t move forward.
BigT
April 30, 2016, 2:39pm
274
That’s just the continuum fallacy. You can distinguish between these two things without a bright line. In fact, there’s almost never a bright line.
I can distinguish between pink and red, even though there’s no bright line where pink becomes red. Heck, none of the colors actually have bright lines, but we can distinguish them.
I will also point out that these are not “controversial subjects,” and I’ve never appreciated that euphemism. There’s nothing controversial about Nazism and the KKK–we agree they’re wrong.
Miller:
There’s certainly precedence for insta-banning long term posters. Starting a sock account is an insta-ban. So is threatening to sue or hack or otherwise attempt to damage the boards. There isn’t any precedent for insta-banning a long term poster for trolling as far as I’m aware, but then, there isn’t really any precedent for a long-term poster to start trolling the boards as hard as handsomeharry did.
(emphasis mine)
See, this is what I keep coming back to, whenever someone continues to say something about precedent: where is the counterfactual? Who was the long-term* poster who suddenly and unexpectedly went off his nut, and wasn’t insta-banned? How can you have precedent for something that’s rather unprecedented, in and of itself?
*For the purposes of this post, let’s just define “long-term” as registered for 5+ years?
Bone
April 30, 2016, 9:31pm
276
BigT:
That’s just the continuum fallacy. You can distinguish between these two things without a bright line. In fact, there’s almost never a bright line.
I can distinguish between pink and red, even though there’s no bright line where pink becomes red. Heck, none of the colors actually have bright lines, but we can distinguish them.
This is a poor example. Red is #FF0000 , or 255,0,0. Pink is #FFC0CB , or 255,192,203.
Yeah! I thought you had some tech savvy, BigT , but I guess not. Though I prefer a bit more blue in my pinks.
I sometimes wish I still had my Pantone book so I could get a bit more specific.
Miller:
The sincerity in question isn’t about whether he’s really a Nazi, it’s about his intentions in revealing himself as a Nazi on the board. If he’d shown up here with the idea of identifying as a Nazi, and demonstrating the dangerous of Jewish Banking Cabals, that wouldn’t have been trolling. If he’d shown up here to identify as a Nazi, and rail at us filthy liberals for letting so many Muslims into the country, that wouldn’t have been trolling. Instead, he showed up here with the idea of identifying as a Nazi, and then giving out only enough insults and information to keep people engaged and enraged with him. Like I said back on page 2 (?), his intent here was to deliberately become a pariah on the board.
It’s that deliberate part that’s important. There are a lot of posters who are widely unpopular on this board, who we don’t ban, because it’s not obvious that their intent was to become disliked. A good example (and I hope he doesn’t mind me using it here) was Starving Artist and paper towel tubes. SA got a lot of people angry with his posts in the Joe Paterno thread, and that spilled out all over the board for a while, to the point where it was disrupting entirely unrelated threads. It was a huge headache for the mods, one we could have solved pretty easily just by banning SA . But it was clear that SA wasn’t trolling - he was legitimately trying to convince people that his position was correct. So we made a bunch of special rules and rapped a lot of knuckles to get people to stop taunting his with posts about paper towel tubes in other threads, and to get him to stop replying to them.
So, to handsomeharry . It was clear that handsomeharry wanted the sort of board-wide anger that Starving Artist attracted for a while. It seems impossible to me that harry ’s admission in that Pit thread would not be brought up frequently against him in inappropriate threads. We’d probably end up having to note or warn otherwise good posters who understandably lost their temper with an honest-to-God Nazi - and probably lost a poster or two permanently, because we’re “protecting” him. And what are we protecting? A troll. Why? Why go to the effort to keep around someone who’s deliberately trying to fuck up the boards?
Even assuming that all this represents sound and wise thinking, it does not explain why the a long term poster wouldn’t have first received a Warning. The fact that he didn’t points to something else at play.
Miller
May 1, 2016, 7:17pm
280
Well, I can give you the explanations I’ve already provided in this thread, but if you didn’t believe me then, you’re probably not going to believe me now.
What would that be, exactly?
Actually, we found out he wasn’t that handsome.
