RTFirefly:
Am I missing something here, John ? You’re usually the epitome of clarity, but I’m not following you at all.
How does this leave it up to the mods to decide whether there’s only one side to the debate? It’s a call we, as individual posters, make every damn time we open a thread in the Pit that has to do with politics, religion, and other GD topics. Or every time we think, “close, but not quite - I’ll put this in GD.”
How does that create any political orthodoxy? We’ve been doing this since 1999, after all. Sometimes those Pit threads turn into decent debates, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes people take advantage of the fact that such a thread is in the Pit to slam their fellow posters in the way they can’t in GD, sometimes they don’t.
So you’re saying I should just post 'em in GD, even if everyone’s going to ask, “WTF is the debate, here?”? Should I ‘Pit’ Blago in GD, in the absence of a debate? And if I Pit him in the Pit, what’s the connection between concluding in advance that Blago’s not going to have any defenders, and creating a thread where people can attack each other in ways they can’t in other fora? If an actual debate breaks out, why not create the thread in such a way that it can be moved to GD?
I don’t see why a judgment call about which side of the line an issue’s on should determine whether people get to Pit each other in the thread or not. It makes no sense at all to me - never has.
:smack: My bad. I hadn’t noticed that you were talking about posters using that in their titles themselves-- not Moderators making that decision after the fact. Still, if you want to flame at some offboard, you can do that in GD (or one of the other fora). There’s nothing in the rules that prevents you from calling Anita Bryant a stuck up bitch with a broom up her ass in GD, is there?