I’m not sure how I’d make the distinction, tbh. What’s the second one look like, beyond just saying, “You’re a cunt, Karen”?
Well, the way I’ve heard it described, which is not a 100% reliable discriminator, is that if the insult would still make contextual sense if you replaced the word “cunt” with “diseased prostitute”, you’re using “cunt” in the American sense. If it wouldn’t, then that’s the British sense.
“My boss can really be a dictatorial diseased prostitute sometimes”: not meaningful, hence British sense.
“That dumb diseased prostitute acts like she’s worth anything”: still meaningful, American sense.
I’ve always taken the uglier, American usage as implying that a woman is trashy and worthless simply by virtue of HAVING one; no implication of promiscuity necessary.
So, just to be on the safe side, I’d personally steer clear of finding it (marginally) acceptable when applied to any woman; it’s distasteful to me, but as a bog-standard vulgarism it strikes me as being in a class with “son of a bitch” and “bastard,” neither of which is commonly deployed against the fairer sex.
The difference between these two things is that “motherfucker” is generally understood to be nothing more than a simple insult - it’s not a serious claim that someone fucks his mom. Calling someone a pedophile, though, is generally much more of a specific, serious, actual accusation, and more defamatory for that reason.
This one might be impractical to enforce, but:
How about we can call a poster a troll, a bigot, a racist, a mysogynist, a liar, willfully ignorant, a creep, a pedophile, or whatever –
as long as it’s relevant to the behavior we’re calling out the poster for.
If somebody posts that they like hiring prostitutes who look as young as possible, in circumstances in which they can’t be sure of actual age: pit them and call them a pedophile. If somebody persistently or glaringly says something racist: pit them and call them a racist. If somebody keeps derailing threads: call them a troll or a jerk. If somebody keeps posting what you think is obviously untrue: pit them and call them a liar, or willfully ignorant, or, if you must, stupid.
But if they’re being pitted for possibly lying, you can call them a liar or a troll or willfully ignorant – any of which may be relevant – but don’t call them a pedophile, barring some actual reason to think that they might be one. If they’re being pitted for mysogyny, calling them a mysogynist or a general bigot or willfully ignorant can be relevant – but don’t call them a racist unless there’s some reason to think they may also be a racist. If they’re being pitted for saying they’d throw out their kid if the kid were trans, accuse them of bad parenting all you want, as well as of bigotry in the form of transphobia; but if whatever they’re being pitted for has nothing to do with parenting, then don’t call them child abusers. And so on.
As far as calling people fuckheads and so on: I don’t really see that it serves a useful purpose; but I don’t see that it does much harm as long as the terms used are on the level of casual insult, rather than screamingly over the line, for everybody. Problem is, that a number of them fall on one side of the line in some social groups and on the other in other groups; and there are people from a lot of places and a lot of cultures on this board. How badly do people want to be even inadvertent jerks?
I like **Dropo’s **suggestion here. The Pit should serve mainly as a WWE-style cage for Dopers to go against each other. The other things, like rants about Trump, mass shootings, healthcare or the treatment of migrants should go elsewhere.
I wanna take it sideways.
Fewer rules, but more enforcement of “don’t be a jerk,” with a new standard being, “Goddamn, you suck.”
People can post whatever they want here. But if it becomes clear to you that they’re just a terrible person, you ban them. Maybe they’re being terrible by poking people right in the trauma. Maybe they’re being terrible by being supercilious trolls. Maybe they’re being terrible by insisting on pedantic rules-parsing down to the individual electron. Whatever: in the Pit, they’re revealing themselves to be awful posters, and they got to go.
Instead of the lawful neutral modding elsewhere, moderate the pit chaotic good.
The mandatory Pit uniform should include flame-retardant big-boy pants.
At the very LEAST, we’d need to have “rounds,” as it were, so people could keep up with the thousands of posts that would accumulate. Maybe start a new one each week.
On the whole, I don’t much think of the idea.
I don’t see them as one more serious than the other either, but from anybody other than an American it would be a “you don’t repeat that outside”-level insult. Or in my case “I’m not talking to you again, ever” insult, as the last time I voluntarily got into a fistfight I was 10yo. Then again there’s musicians to whom I never listen live because they pepper their addresses to the public with equivalent language and that makes me want to answer back “motherfucker your inbred nonworking dick, you and I have never shared so much as a bag of potato chips so fuck off with the ‘we’re all pals here’ insults”, so it’s possible I’m the one being a prude.
From my point of view it’s never kosher to insult a private person who can’t defend themselves, whether poster’s minor child or adult anything. At the same time, the right to whine is universal, a diagnostic is not an insult and as for public figures and when it’s for their public behavior, go at them. Calling Mel Gibson an anti-semite (diagnosis), Trump a sexual abuser (self-reported), or your boss a controlling jerk/your subordinate a lazy good for nothing/your coworker a thieving imbecile (mini-rants, work rants) are fine.
Yeah, I don’t see how it would work, given that it would basically excise context from the insults. It’s after some period of back-and-forth on a particular topic that the urge to post an insult would arise, after all. If there are twenty posts back-and-forth in a thread on (say) ‘super-fans of various Dem candidates,’ and then one person posts a link to the Insult Thread…
…well, I guess it would work in some fashion. But I can’t see how it would be an improvement on just calling one’s opponent a self-absorbed parochial fool (or whatever) in the original thread.
I think family members should be off limits, other than that don’t really care.
This. (And what Left Hand of Dorkness said while I was slowly typing this.)
If,
GD is philosophical discussions over cigars and brandy in the study where all fights are limited to ‘Marquess of Queensberry Rules’.
Then,
The Pit is (often is) philosophical discussions at the pub with occasional fist fights and bloodied noses . . . but when someone busts a bottle to ‘cut a bitch’ everyone wants that person banned from the pub.
Miller, as Giraffe before him, ‘gets’ this part of the board and their moderation is/was exemplary.
CMC fnord!
There should be no sanction for using the Pit more effectively than another. Nobody is forced to read it as I’ve been told multiple times.
I see how insulting other posters is different from losing your temper about some external thing, but I haven’t had any trouble with them both being in the same forum. If we are rearranging forum content, I’d prefer to have “elections” renamed “politics” since I am genuinely confused as to how political topics are supposed to be handled here.
I think the standard should be - if a cross-section of other people, not just the insulted poster or their political fellow travellers, are posting or reporting that something crossed the line, that should suffice.
Absolutely agree.
Calling someone a motherfucker is just swearing at them, it is not saying they literally fuck their own mother. I don’t think it’s the same thing. I see it this way: People have been banned from the site for paedophilia, no-one’s been banned for incest. Having said that, you’re right about retaining the calling out of skeevy posting.
Overall, I think you’re the best Mod left here, and think you are on the right track.
I thought the moderator asked us not to re-litigate previous issues? :dubious:
And I’m sure you’re aware of the rule against junior modding, yet here we are.
I like it the way it is.
“More effectively”? What does that mean?