I’ve been warned on similarly ambiguous posts and replies, and while they irritated me at first - I, too, felt I’d been misunderstood - I was happy to just shrug and move on. The webz is a shitty place for serious continued conversation, and I’ll take a slightly fast draw on the moderating stick over letting the quality of participation degade.
Yes–I addressed that in the second paragraph that you quoted.
And I addressed this in the third paragraph that you quoted.
I also addressed this in the third paragraph that you quoted.
Doesn’t everybody?
OP is correct, the post he was warned for does not imply that his interlocutor is an asshole.
Also, to the Revolutionary Maoist Youth League. Also, Carrot Top.
You, the Klan, the Revolutionary Maoist Youth League, and Carrot Top may read whatever book you like without fear of prosecution.
Are you mad at me?
Not as such. But I defer to Paul Newman here:
While the “and” in the cited post does give the OP wiggle room (and I initially was agreeing with him), I think that explanations by Loach, bucketybuck, Amateur Barbarian and others do justify the warning.
Question for LHOD: If a poster said, "Oh, I’m sure you have a reason. I’m sure you and serial killers and child rapists and scammers of the elderly and pedophiles and KKKers who hung blacks and skinheads that beat gays all have “reasons”.
Would that be in need of Moderation?
Not quite - the emphasis would be a little different, that some inborn urges must not be acted upon and therefore the mere fact that an urge is inborn does not mean it is all right to act upon it. Good luck trying to make that point without being accused of saying that “favourite urge” is the same as “clearly unacceptable urge”, though.
/hijack
Yes, I realize you don’t agree. That’s why you made this thread. I think you are wrong. That’s why I wrote the post.
It’s the “make the concept personal” part that crossed the line as I see it.
One point that’s being lost is what LHoD was actually replying to. The poster was asserting that a Liberal would never defend the right to free speech (from govt interference) of racist/ugly/unpopular opinions.
So his comment, a list of people with racist/ugly/unpopular opinions whose rights he’d defend, was spot on point. That was the point. I think that was unclear initially and got lost.
You’re a lawyer, right?
If the OP’s sentence had been on the LSAT Logical Reasoning test, your conclusion would have been listed as one of the wrong answers. It might look superficially correct to people who aren’t paying attention, but listing a person in the same sentence as the Klan is not the same as comparing them to the Klan.
Everyone who has replied in this thread, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Adam Lanza, Pat Robertson, Richard Speck and the congregation of Westboro Baptist Church have breathed air, you know.
It all boils down to whether Dopers should have to carefully parse a sentence to find out they have not been insulted, or if the sweep of an insulting accusation is enough to warrant mod attention.
I’m behind the mods for looking at the bigger picture and not the microanalytics here. This is neither a courtroom nor the LSATs nor any place where effectively emptying your revolver around someone’s head doesn’t count as an attack.
Right, but you quoted my explanations, and then responded as if you hadn’t read them. It was a little weird of you to do is all.
Again, though, I was directly responding to the Voltaire “quote” about “I disagree with what you say.” The original quote had the “you” in it. That’s the part that made it show up in my list, why it was at the start of my list.
It was not my intention to call aldi an asshole. Do you agree that, although your reading is one possible reading, the reading I intended is another legitimate reading? If you do not agree, how do you account for all the other posters in this thread who read it the way I intended?
Frankly, I am very surprised that before he hit the submit button the OP didn’t look at what he had just written and think “mmm, actually that doesn’t come across well”. Its so clearly treading a fine line and he must have realised it was doing so.
I honestly didn’t realize it–if I had, then I absolutely would have changed it. I don’t call people names in GD, haven’t had a warning in my 14 years here until now because I’m careful about such things.
In hindsight I agree that the wording was ambiguous, but if I’d noticed that at the time, I would have reworded it.
The thing is, i didn’t have to “carefully parse” it. The point he was making was immediately obvious to me. And it was immediately obvious precisely because it’s probably one of the most common rhetorical devices used in the defense of free speech - the argument that even ideas that a person disagrees with vehemently are deserving of free speech protections.
If working it out taxed you a little bit too much, that’s a burden you’ll have to bear on your own, i’m afraid. I guess i can understand reading in haste and missing his point first time around, but continuing to miss it when you know what he meant, and when the language and the context of the debate also make it clear, does you little credit.
If the OP had written something like “and every other asshole,” i’d be agreeing that he deserved a warning, but he didn’t.
If I say that you and Adam Reposa are both entitled to protected free speech that doesn’t mean I’m comparing the two of you.
You really can’t say for sure one way or another. It’s ambiguous and the interpretation tends to be based on patterns of language usage, not logic.
My immediate interpretation was that “you” was included in the asshole group but I can see that it could be the other way also.
It’s kinda ironic that the OP claims that by putting all these in one sentence he was not comparing one to the other, but his post was a response to the incident where Phil Robertson put gays and terrorists in the same sentence and was accused by GLAAD for comparing gays to terrorists. I wonder if the OP agreed with GLAAD at the time.