You know who ELSE was “different”?
Not at all. “Untrue” merely means it’s factually incorrect, “lie” means it is deliberately so.
In GD, back when race realist threads were allowed? Not as far as i can recall, at least as far as “racist” goes.
And if they’re shown to not be, the right thing to do is apologize to them. You can ask @Ann_Hedonia how that works, because that’s what I did once. I don’t think she bears too much of a grudge…
Actual posters have said different.
That’s nice, but there is no calling out the bigotry that is racism with name calling, in your world.
No. Which comports with me not being a vile, horrible person.
Let me be more explicit. What you said was wrong, and false. But it was not a lie. There are many kinds of untruths that are not lies:
Fiction is not true, but is not intended to deceive. It is not a lie. Same with jokes, poetry, etc.
Saying something that you believe to be true is not a lie, even if you are mistaken.
- You might be mistaken because of an error on your part. You misunderstood your source, or misremembered it, or did a calculation wrong, or otherwise started with a true thing but made an innocent mistake in passing it along.
- You might be mistaken because your source was wrong. Maybe a news article was written by a reporter who got some important details wrong, or maybe a friend whom you trust lied to you, but you believe him. It could be innocent mistakes all the way down, or there could be a lie buried in there, but if you honestly believe it, you are not lying.
- It’s also possible that you said something true, or intended to say something true, but you said it in a garbled way, so readers interpret it to be false, because they misunderstand what you intended to say.
It’s actually unusual on a message board like this for “that’s not true” to mean “you are lying”. If you interpret “that’s not true” to be an accusation of lying, you are setting yourself up to be angry a lot of the time, usually for no good reason.
This is a joke, right? 
Clearly you’re only saying that because s/he believes something different from you.
Sort of? I and several other people were having a friendly conversation about our geeky interest. We disagreed, but we were keeping it civil. DrDeth’s contributions, in my opinion, were not remotely civil: they were sneering and mocking and supercilious. And they were repeated.
If this happened, say, at a gaming con, I might ignore the person doing it. But if they kept doing it–if someone kept jumping into an interesting conversation to take sneering potshots–I might lose my cool enough to laugh and say, “Jesus, wouldja shut up?” or “What is your problem, man?” or “Nobody’s talking to you.”
That ain’t allowed here. But the Pit is. So when I lost patience here, that’s where the Pit came in handy.
It seems fairly obvious that this whole conversation about the Pit runs along this summarized fault line:
- Those who think the pitting of posters is toxic and leads to increased hostility among posters and/or bullying of posters
vs - Those who think the Pit is necessary for the calling out of racists, bigots, homophobes, sealions, etc., particularly those who exhibit patterns of such behavior
There is also a lot of static, but I posit that the above is the signal. It also seems self-evident to me that both of these things can be simultaneously true. Some think that the (alleged) damage of #1 outweighs the (alleged) benefits of #2, and some think the opposite.
So then the simple (ha!) question for those who want to change the status quo is: is there a meaningful way to allow the calling out of racists, bigots, homophobes, sealions, etc. - including patterns of such behavior - that does not involve the pitting of posters?
You left out,
- Those who think the pitting of posters is toxic and leads to increased hostility among posters and/or bullying of posters who, purely by coincidence, are posters that have been Pitted for their racism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, sealioning, etc. and would prefer a board where such patterns of behavior can’t be called out.
No, I didn’t leave that out, because it is manifestly not true. Some, possibly even the majority, of posters who side with #1 might fit that profile, but definitely not all, as is clearly evidenced by just reading this thread.
Apart from sealioning, which I still don’t understand even after looking at the cartoon, aren’t all those things banned outside the Pit anyway?
Not sure about this.
There are a significant number of regulars in the Pit (whether starting threads or participating) who come too the Pit simply for recreational purposes. Basically, they can be horrible people under cover of “calling out” racism or homophobia and so on. But they’d be horrible people anyway. The racism (even real racism) and the like are just the beard. And that causes massive distortion of the signal.
It’s hard to separate the horrible people from those who, for good reason, genuinely want to “call out” the bad stuff.
That’s what moderation is, or should be, for. I can’t say I think the moderation of the Pit accomplishes that (or is unbiased). Others, of course, will disagree.
Ironically, the guy who you said crossed the line in the Pit (and I would agree that if his insults didn’t cross the line they definitely toed up to it) is on the record in this thread talking about how the Pit is a bad idea that makes no sense.
Of course they are, but the issue is not with blatant examples of bigotry or hate speech - certainly those are easily reported and modded. Rather, the issue is with more nuanced examples that are close to the line or with repeated patterns of such behavior, which are less simple to report. You’ve been reading this thread, I think, so I’m a little surprised you’d ask this, though.
Back to my question, then:
What on earth gives you the idea racism is banned?
Racism isn’t. You can no longer start a scientific racism/race realism thread in GD, specifically, but racism itself has never been banned.
There are a couple of egregious variants of racism that are banned.
A person who believes that these two examples of “thrice told tales” comprise the totality of racism might think that racism is banned in GD. If that’s their position, it tells us about their perspective, and that’s all I’m gonna say on that.
Reporting them to the moderators? Of course this means that people won’t get public credit for pointing out the baddies, but it seems like a a more than fair trade-off to me.
Sure, but that’s not the same as “racism is banned”. The fact that no-one was banned for cheering on First Nations genocide is my cite.
It can be argued that a place is needed to point out stuff like that, but it’s not clear that personal insults are essential to make that happen. If you were complaining about a coworker to HR, you would likely say something like “Bob is saying racist things like …” instead of “That human-shaped pile of shit in accounting that goes by the name of Bob is spewing racist diarrhea from the void where a mouth would typically be.” I can certainly agree that, in some cases, unbridled profanity and insults may be the best tool for what you are trying to accomplish, but that’s not the only way to get your point across. If there were consequences for personal insults, the pitters would still be able to get their points across for whatever injustices or problematic behaviors were being reported.
If there were consequences for subtle racism*, the Pitters wouldn’t need to get their points across!
*Of course, there is . . . we call it being Pitted.