In favour of Ed's new policies

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1

I may well be the only one, but I am in favour of Ed’s new policy re The Pit. Those who dislike the new policy have been very loud, but it seems to me they are persistently prone to dragging in irrelevant issues.

In essence, Ed is saying that adults are and should be capable of expressing themselves without resorting to gutter language, crude sexual epithets and juvenile insults. I agree.

This is not about curtailing free speech or free thought. You can express any views you like. Ed is just suggesting that we all do so without resorting to a string of swear words and sexual slang. This seems to me to be a good idea, and I think it would greatly improve the Straight Dope environment.

Nor is this about being either of a delicate nature or being strong and robust. I can feel as much anger and disdain as anyone else, and no-one who knows me in real life would suggest there’s anything faint of heart about me or how I express my views. But when I express myself on a public message board, I don’t feel that I want or need to express myself using swear words and juvenile insults of the kind scribbled on toilet walls by school kids who think there’s something excitingly naughty about using ‘bad’ words.

Nor it is about need. Anything that can be expressed using a string of swear words and sexual slang can be expressed just as well, if not better, using alternatives. Coarse expression demeans the speaker and the spoken to alike. When you resort to strings of swear words and sexual slang you convey the idea that you are incapable of any wording that is more accurate, more thoughtful or more original. I would prefer to think better of you, and credit you with greater ability. You also convey the fact that I don’t deserve even the respect of being addressed without swearing. I think I do.

Someone wrote, “in situations like this, it is a simple statement of objective fact—“hoax arguer” is a stupid motherfucker. // instead, we need to exercise our thesaurian muscles, and create some other way of expressing the same sentiment, in hopes that more creative epithets // But why? Why go to these lengths?”

The part about ‘objective fact’ suggests the writer does not understand what ‘objective fact’ means. As to the question, ‘why go to these lengths’, I would reply because we can; because we are not confined to the language of the gutter; because we are thinking human beings and not grunting, gibbering chimpanzees; because well-considered expression is preferable to the alternative; because this is a public message board where people with minds can benefit from the exchange of information and opinion, not a playground for those incapable of expressing even mild disdain without resorting time and again to the same repetitive swear words; because vulgar and coarse expression may be your limits, but they do not have to be mine.

2

Obviously, it is.

3

Whilst I agree with the op to some extent - you shouldn’t overuse swear words if other words will do the job - there are occasions when a swear word is actually the best word for the job. They were invented for a reason after all, just like any other word.

4

It’s not the attempt to lessen the swearing that I object to. I am not a casual user of vulgarities, mostly because using them casually diminishes their rhetorical impact, and I prefer to keep them in reserve for when I truly need them. What distresses me is the undefined nature of abuse versus creative insult; leaving the policy so vague is ripe for abuse.

5

Fine. Now write a coherent definition of your personal limits that can be easily comprehended by a newcomer to the boards, and implemented by volunteer mods with a minimum of necessary personal interpretation. It’s all right, we’ll wait.

…

Tricky, eh? Quite so. You’re clearly not the only one that believes there’s a need for a bit of censorship in the Pit, but if you can honestly say that you understand precisely the standard that Ed’s original rule articulated, then I think you are very much alone. And further, if you really think you can construct an easily communicated policy that will allow some elements of invective while maintaining some illusory standard of discourse among thousands of disparate and completely anonymous posters, then you possess the Philosopher’s Stone of moderation, and are truly uniquely blessed.

All of your arguments seem to me to miss the point. If you were arguing in favour of the complete removal of the Pit, then fine; I’d disagree, but at least your points would be relevant. What none of them address is the inherent contradiction in wanting to maintain decorum in a forum that is explicitly indecorous. How can we have a forum for disputes too vigorous for the other fora, yet then ban incivility? It’s inherently contradictory.

Either we have this outlet for frustration, or we don’t. It would be marvellous if everyone were as high-minded as you or I, but the fact is that we’re not (oops, did I say “we” there? I mean “they”. Or do I?). On any messageboard with even double-figure members, some people will simply not be the sort of cognac-swishing sophisticates we all imagine ourselves to be. And whisper it, but sometimes even we’re not as Wildean as we’d like, and sometimes we say things in anger that we might not after a night’s sleep and a cup of tea. This is a fact of human nature, and not only is trying to get rid of it really really difficult, it’s fundamentally misguided. These flare-ups will happen somewhere, and even if you find the very concept distasteful, having a place specifically for them is, to my mind, an extremely mature way of dealing with the problem. To then try and sanitise this place is to completely miss the point.

In short, I think you’re suffering from “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone were nice” syndrome. Yes, it would. But they’re not, and we have to deal with that fact, not wish it into the cornfields.

6

I have no problem being asked to speak in an elevated or professional manner, if that is what someone wishes. I do have a problem with being told that I must, without good reason. In a family setting such as an amusement park or shopping mall, there is an obvious reason - many families wish to avoid vulgar language and they should be able to go shopping or ride Space Mountain without vulgarities. If a bartender told me I must not swear, I’d think it exceedingly odd and imposing upon me, since there are no families to protect and colorful language is part of the atmosphere people expect when patronizing a bar.

There are no families with small children here. One must be 13 years old to post, and we have an explicitly adult (in the best sense of the word) leaning here. No one has to read the Pit, there is nothing in the Pit that can’t be found in other forums here, and the freedom in expressing hot feelings is part of the atmosphere people go to the Pit to experience. Furthermore, no one, AFAIK, has complained about the atmosphere in the Pit (at least no one who wouldn’t prefer it to just disappear - and few of those). So the imposition being placed on us appears to be to satisfy the peculiar tastes of one individual who until recently seldom darkened the post box of the Pit. That individual is the proprietor, which gives him the right, but it no less of an imposition and no less odd for that.

I relatively seldom curse in my posts, and almost never direct venom at others, but one of the things that has always attracted me to this place is the fact that no language filter was enforced or seemed to be needed. To me, that was a huge and obvious difference between this place and Yahoo or AOL MBs, and in fact the rest of the web, where cursing left unchecked would drown out more mature voices. Here it was more or less unregulated, and free and adult discussion still reigned! Enforcing an unneeded restriction on speech is treating us like children, and it makes me feel less welcome and less respected, even though I think less swearing is almost always preferable to more.

I respect Ed Zotti’s right to do with the boards as he wishes, and I respect his desire for a higher tone, but I question his wisdom and his desire to do as he pleases customers be damned. One has every right to own a cowboy bar and to declare after years of successful business that one never much liked cowboy hats or country music and that both are henceforth banned from the establishment. However, anyone who would actually do such a thing is a pompous fool who is unable to separate his personal tastes from the needs of the business, and were he the manager and I the proprietor, I would most certainly fire him on the spot!

7

Meh. I see the pit as mostly a safety valve anyway, and tangential to the board’s core mission.

I am highly inclined to cut Zotti some slack with his decisions, given that the underlying business model of the board is problematic as it is. Try everything, I say. To do nothing may be riskiest of all.

8

Actually, he is only asking for this restraint with regard to other posters. You can be as crude and low brow as you want toward any off board persons or entities. So, to those who claim the high ground that this action is about raising the tone of the board and a new high in civility and raising the bar, I call foul.

9

Yeah, I don’t see this as a big deal, but let’s not pretend, as the OP seems to, that we’re not the poorer for these restrictions on our language. Judiciously used, curse words can lend a unique emphasis and force. In this role they are quite irreplaceable.

To be honest I would never have expected to see a Bad Words list on this board. It seems at odds with that openness and frankness I have always associated with Cecil and the Straight Dope. I can understand Ed’s wish to deal with especially vicious postings, I certainly don’t think censoring all of us for the misdeeds of a tiny minority is the way to go about it.

10

Unfortunately, that’s the way life works, not just on the Message Boards. We get the abuses of an Enron, and we put in place more stringent accounting rules. We had CEOs robbing pension plans back in the 1960s, so we put in new rules preventing that. And on and on. We’ve got a stop sign basically in the middle of our block because a small number of people were speeding on a long, uninterrupted residential street. It’s fairly common that rules are put in place on account of the misbehaviors of a small but visible minority.

I confess that I’m puzzled by this desire to have the rules all defined down to the last semicolon. If Ed came up with a rule that “posters should not murder each other,” I suspect there would be outcry over the lack of precision in the definition of “murder”: what about self-defense? what about accident? and so forth. There are volumes of legislation and case study defining something as self-evident as “murder.” My understanding is that there is still no real definition of pornography. How many volumes do you think it would take to define “abuse” and “vicious” as in “Don’t be abusive or vicious toward other posters”? And yet, the fact is, we usually know it when we see it – at least 95% of the cases.

11

aldiboronti: A consensus about what “judiciously used” means is unlikely. That’s one problem. Ed’s meaning will prevail, but people think it’s too vague. Ed wants a certain vagueness so people can’t dance right up to the line.

I agree with the point that people can express themselves without being obscene or referring to bodily functions.

I really don’t see that this is a big problem. Of course it restricts our language, but freedom of speech is not absolute anywhere. Perhaps the objectors’ should consider responsibility, respect, and judgment.

12

As long as Dex has used other events for comparison, I should explain my last sentence was taken from comments by Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac about the Mohammed cartoons, for which almost every media outlet worldwide censored themselves by not publishing them.

13

My issue with this is that I haven’t seen any evidence of this small but visible minority. Even if you can find a couple of posts that crossed the line (and so far the only one I’ve seen discussed was the telemarketer rant that everyone except Ed seems to think was a high point of the board) they certainly weren’t bothering most of us.

Would you accept the stop sign in your neighborhood if you had only seen a handfull of speeders over ten years of living on the street? What if all your neighbors agreed that speeding wasn’t a problem and that the long uninterrupted street with no traffic problems was a key factor contributing to their enjoyment of the neighborhood? Me, I’d find out what jackass on the homeowners’ association wanted the stop sign put up and do everything I could to get the petty tyrant taken down.

14

Yet again you miss the point; the new rules were more like saying “here is a forum in which you can beat each other up. But no assault. Get it?”

I don’t wish to have the rules defined down to the last semicolon. I want to have an easily expressible principle that can be applied by a poster to obey the rules without having to know the mind of every admin. It was plain that this was not the case with the original rule, and this is something Ed appears to agree with. I don’t believe the term “vicious abuse” can possibly distinguish between “ignorant asshole” (which was fine) and “dick” (which was not). And if you really sit down and think about it, I don’t believe you will either.

Simple rules are fine if they articulate distinctions that are already clear. GD’s “no personal insults” is very clear, and requires very little further clarification; you are either insulting someone, or you are not. The line between insults and abuse is incredibly muddy and incredibly subjective, and thus requires rather more particular definition if it’s going to be fair at all.

15

As an afterthought - you can also get away with vaguer definitions of abuse if you have a mod who is both light of touch and is generally active within the community (i.e. has the users’ day-to-day trust). For all their undoubted efforts in keeping this place running over the last 10 years, this does not describe Ed and Lynn; they are neither present particularly often, nor do their mod actions tend to the placatory. The tendency is to dispense warnings in a tone not unlike Cecil talking down to a particularly dim correspondent, and this does not lend itself to the happy application of rules not well understood by the members. People are willing to be guided towards better behaviour if it’s done by suggestion; when admonishments are the order of the day, then people get upset if they couldn’t clearly see what rule they broke before they broke it.

“Tough,” you might say. “Our board, our rules.” Well, fine; but if you really want relations between staff and posters to improve, then you pretty much have to take some of these human realities into account. Moderating a board of thousands of users with just a few part-time volunteers requires the cooperation of the users, and this is impossible to achieve if they don’t understand the rules. We really, really didn’t, and we’re not just saying so to piss you off.

16

Ianzin much as I usually respect your wisdom, you are missing the point here for exactly this reason:

If vulgarity is unnecessary etc as you opine (and it is not necessary for present purposes to either disagree or agree with you about that) so what, if that’s what Pit denizens want? No one is making anyone go there.

I can’t see what the point is in having a Pit in which one places weird, unworkable, vague limits on vulgarity.

17

What Princhester said.

Basically, the whole thing just doesn’t make a lick of sense, and everyone who cares about the Pit and the ‘heritage’ if that’s not too strong a word of the place over the past 10 or so years is thoroughly baffled by it all. Dead Badger’s posts in all these ATMB threads (not just this one) have hit the nail on the head and then some.
[ul]
[li]If Ed wants to stop posters abusing mods, why not say so? Rule #1 should take care of the vast majority of that anyway.[/li][li]If Ed wants to make the place more attractive to advertisers, or shield the eyes of the Pit mods from vulgarity by reducing the Pit’s sweariness quotient, why allow vulgar, sweary rants against targets other than posters, such as politicians?[/li][li]If Ed wants to encourage posters be more civil towards one another, why explicitly specify that ‘creative insults’ are welcome, and why Rule #5?[/li][li]If Ed wants to piss off a large proportion of the SDMB’s best content generators, he’s going the right way about it…[/li][/ul]

It doesn’t make any damn sense!

18

Amen to that. This is what keeps me scratching my head. I’ve said it before, he has never made the “why” clear enough. The why has always been very vague.

19

There are two ways I can think of it making sense:

The first is if Ed wants to stop posters abusing staff, not only when they’re posting in an official capacity (which rule # 1 covers) but also when posting as a poster.

The second is if he actually does want to raise the tone, but feels that a blanket ban on abusive language would cause a proper massive uproar. In that case, bringing in a ban on abusing other posters will cause quite a bit of fuss, but once that’s died down and the membership has got used to not calling other posters bad names it should be easier to then tell 'em not to use abusive language at all.

20

Thank you for the kind reference to ‘wisdom’, but I am sure I am no wiser than you or anyone else. That having been said, I don’t think I am ‘missing the point’. I understand the various points at least as well as you do.

The argument that says ‘it’s what people want therefore it should be permitted’ is not a good one, and I suspect you are just as aware of this as I am. There are people who want the ‘freedom’ to express racist hatred. This doesn’t mean it should be permitted.

The ‘no-one is making anyone go there’ argument is also a weak way to present your own case, since it applies as much to the new regime as it does to the old, doesn’t it? I could say that if you don’t like the Pit in its new incarnation, no-one is forcing you to go there. But I would not, because it’s a weak argument.

Everyone on this board can express strong views, strong disagreements and flame all they like without using a single swear word or sexual epithet. I have already listed my own opinions as to why I think it would be a good idea if people did so. My own opinion is just that - my own opinion, and nothing more. I don’t expect it to carry any weight with anyone, or to be considered ‘wise’ in any way.

The fact that you can’t see the point doesn’t mean there isn’t one, or that others can’t see it.