Jonathan Chance: So What is the Official List of Things You Want Me to Remain Silent About

About This Message Board
1

Because ever since you became a moderator, you’ve given me more Warnings than I’ve received in all the rest of the time I’ve been on this board, and all for criticizing some group or cause you evidently feel protective of.

It’s OK on this board a poster to talk about how Muslims are evil or black people are stupid without the poster being warned about bashing them. But three times now I’ve been Warned by you for speaking my honest beliefs about respectively Republicans, the anti-abortion movement and America’s behavior towards foreigners; apparently because they are off limits. You tell me “don’t do that again”, when it’s not obvious what “that” is unless you mean “criticize anything held sacred by the American Right.”

This isn’t about me “being a jerk”; it’s about your political bias. That’s the only explanation I see for why so many far more jerkish opinions go unwarned, while I do get warned for saying things that aren’t nearly as extreme. The idea that it’s OK to call black people genetically subhuman, but not OK to call the Republicans “intransigent” is ridiculous.

2

Der Trihs,

I am not a moderator so I probably shouldn’t even be commenting. I actually even sort of agree with many of your positions, especially on abortion. But I’ve been posting here for almost a decade so I am familiar with you thoughts so I’ll risk it. Honestly? I really wish you’d tone it down sometimes. I understand your anger. Hell, on certain issues (vaccines in particular) I want to eviscerate people. But you nearly always come across as always so incredibly angry I think it often drowns out my ability to listen to what you have to say.

Just a thought from a fellow poster.

3

You’re on the ban-train Der. How can I put this? The subset of your posts that are vitriolic could have received the mod-hammer in the past, but each individual GD mod decided they fell on one side of the line. JC thinks they fall on the other. I think either view is defensible: I see it as almost a matter of taste.

Bottom line though, your vitriol is rarely substantiated, so it is little more than hot air. Stating the motivations of various groups without evidence is pretty weak and doesn’t fight ignorance. Hey your opinion may be correct, or not. It’s sort of like witnessing really, except that it involves flames. Seriously. John Mace has made this point repeatedly in GD.

Speaking generally and to all posters, unsubstantiated arguments are useless in GD. News flash: the only people interested in your opinions are your Mom, your psychologist and your parole officer. Whether your claims happen to be correct are not is irrelevant: they are only actionable if you can demonstrate their accuracy with evidence. And as it happens evidence usually cuts both ways and must be weighed, though ideologues pretend otherwise.
Besides, what the heck is the basis of your claims about the motivations of fundis, Republicans, gun enthusiasts, whomever? People you know? Please. That’s a pretty thin reed to base a blanket statement upon.

4

If Jonathan Chance can hold me to a special standard and the other mods go along with it then yes of course I am; and there’s not a thing I can do about it short of not posting at all which is just self-banning anyway. That doesn’t make it any less ridiculous to bend over backwards to protect racists like the mods have done for years, then Warning me for calling Republicans intransigent. If a comment that mild gets a Warning, what won’t?

5

Der Trihs, there isn’t any special standard that’s being applied to you. If anything, the moderators have given you a great deal of leeway and tolerated behavior from you that they wouldn’t have from other people. My suggestion to you, one poster to another, is that you should dial it back several notches and stop pushing the limits of their patience.

6

No one is holding you to special standards.

You mean other than not posting vitriolic screeds?

7

While, I’ll certainly agree that I think the mods on this board often give way too much leeway to our resident witnesses for scientific racism, since in the thread where you claim most Americans believed in killing Muslims and brown people, JC specifically in his note compared your post to claiming that “black people like to steal” so I strongly suspect that if someone makes similar claims about blacks or Muslims on his watch they’ll be in for a rather rude surprise.

I’m not sure he’s ever revealed his political views, but he doesn’t come across as terribly right-wing. In fact, I’m not sure how many mods we have who strike me as being terribly right-wing. I have no reason to believe that right-wing posters who made similar comments would be treated differently.

Modifying your posting is hardly the same as “not posting at all”. I’ve done it as have plenty of others.

Look, in past threads you have implicitly confessed to having a formula whereby you make extreme statements and as soon as you get your knuckles rapped by a mod, dropping out of the thread and a few days later, started the same thing all over in a different thread with almost word for word the same type of posts because mod notes only apply to the threads and in your opinion the only people who get banned are “those who get in mods faces” and argue with them. In doing so, you felt you could rack up tons of mod notes while avoiding warnings or have to worry about getting banned.

You even went so far as to at one point essentially confess to using some of your comments to get around rules against insulting other posters by saying that many times you made such statements because you couldn’t accuse others of lying.

Well, that was then this is now and either you adapt your style or you’re not long for this message board.

Just do so. In the long run it’ll make you happier and garner you more respect as a poster.

8

That is obviously incorrect. As I’ve already pointed out repeatedly, posters can and do engage in such things as open racism and not only get away with it, but posters are told in those threads to not even call them racists. And calling Republicans “intransigent” is a ridiculously mild thing to get Warned over.

Nor do I buy the “Der Trihs gets special treatment” theory. Why would I get any?

9

Except you specifically complained that you were receiving special treatment.

I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for this statement because you’re completely correct about poster getting away with “open racism” and yes, I do disagree that referring to other posters as racists should be considered an automatic insult.

However, as noted, I wouldn’t assume that JC is going to simply give people who engage in rather extreme racism. Moreover, not all the mods happen to feel that referring to other posters is automatically an insult and JC noted it as such in the thread you’re alluding to.

Finally, I’m not really sure you want the mods to get quite so tough on people expressing openly racist views since you’re the guy who’s insisted that “the typical American woman” views “men as monsters” and that women are so prone to falsely accusing men of rape that it would be prudent for men to videotape all their sexual encounters without letting the women know of this.

I’m not really sure you want the mods to start cracking down too much on racism since that would mean to similar crackdowns on people who engage in sexism and your own claims have been about as sexist as they get.

10

Ahem, it wouldn’t be the first time it’s been theorized.
That said, I hope you can get your emotions in check. I’d hate to see you get banned from this board.

11

I’ve certainly heard the idea before; I just find it ridiculous.

12

JC has some journalistic background and instinctively gravitates towards the American center. That’s going to make him feel protective of those aligning with the political party that is supported by half the nation. IIRC he is a registered pro-business Democrat, though he considered registering as a Republican and even running for local public office under that banner not all that long ago.

I guess I’ll be blunt: you are suppose to converse with those who make up 1/2 of the nation’s power in a constructive manner. Hate speech against minorities is unacceptable. But racist and pseudo-scientific discussion of IQ and the like falls under free expression guidelines. I’m not making normative claims here: I’m just characterizing US mores. It’s also true that pushing that particular line of discussion will make you look like a thinly veiled bigot in the US. Anyway, that’s where we are. I believe we’ve had holocaust denial threads as well, though thankfully few of them.

Der was warned for this post, where he characterized the Republicans as intransigent in his usual uncompromising and unsubstantiated manner. It struck JC as “pointless bashing”. According to the analysis of this observer, and respected political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein (one of whom happens to be conservative) Der’s post was largely accurate (setting aside his strategic suggestion, which is a matter of conjecture- one that I agree with though). But again since Der offered no evidence, it gave the appearance of ranting in GD.

Anyway it’s pretty simple. Der has sufficient discipline that he can follow moderator instructions, unlike most problem posters. Following a campaign against him in ATMB, the bar is being raised. He can adapt to it. Or not. Part of the difficulty is that he is in the habit of making blanket characterizations of the motivations of conservatives et al. And motivation is not directly observable. Substantiating such claims tends to be hard and it’s rare for Der to even try.

The difficulty of fairly judging the motivations of individuals, never mind groups, results in most analysts shying away from such evaluations. Which in turn opens the door for all manner of disingenuous and bad faith argumentation. What to do, what to do.

13

Not that anyone asked, but in my opinion Der Trihs is a welcome counterweight for the more nutty right wing voices often heard on the web. If Dopers with more moderate conservative viewpoints feel insulted by Der Trihs, they would do better to feel insulted by the extremists that give them a bad name, then by Der Trihs calling them out on their nonsense.

14

I think I have to agree that calling Republicans intransigent (especially in the light of recent events) in a thread entitled Republican Haters: Do you want a one-party state, or what? does not seem to call for what looks like an implicit warning and a closing down of the thread. Der Trihs does have a tendency to state his views in rather over-the-top terms sometimes, but I am having trouble seeing this as one of them. It seems like he is getting punished for his reputation, rather than anything he actually did here.

I also find it a bit disturbing that Jonathan Chance, apparently with his mod hat on, is not only condemning Der Trihs’s position, but singling out and naming two other posters as having said stuff of which he approves.

15

It was relatively mild for one of your posts. You post much worse on a regular basis. And that’s the root of your problem. It’s not that you’ve made one or two questionable posts. It’s that you have an ongoing pattern of posting what is essentially hate-speech.

16

:rolleyes: Because given that their intransigence has been all over the news for years and that it’s their publicly stated policy to oppose Obama at every turn, that’s like providing evidence for the existence of China. It certainly never occurred to me that providing the evidence for something that well known was necessary. And if I had, I’m sure that would have accomplished nothing but make me look ridiculous or paranoid. Especially given that he didn’t mention a thing about “evidence”.

Should I start providing evidence that they sky is blue while I’m at it?

Which is of course the only way to actually talk about any large group of people since it’s humanly impossible to personally get to know millions of people. And demanding that people speaking of religion and the Right (and it’s only religion and the Right that this standard is applied to) is pretty obviously simply a means of shutting critics up by demanding they do the impossible.

17

I think all three of these examples come perilously close to moderating content, rather than moderating its expression; especially regarding the first one, I fail to see how it could be considered ‘pointless bashing’—the opinion it expressed, that the Republican’s lack of compromise and the Democrat’s comparative ease to engage in it lead to the rise of more radical forces within the Republican party, doesn’t seem to be either pointless or bashing; neither of the two parties comes off terribly good. Whether or not it’s correct (I’ve got no idea about this, and no interest in debating it), it does seem like a valid opinion to hold, and it certainly didn’t seem to be expressed in a way I haven’t seen on this board countless times coming from all sides of any given popular discussion (I think I’ve written more strongly worded things myself!), without even a mod note, let alone a warning.

Similar things go for the second example. Jonathan Chance chastises him for painting groups of people with too broad a brush, but in the post cited, he is characterizing acts, not the people themselves—he’s railing against the act of denying women birth control, and people are only characterized by that in so far as they engage in the act. He’s nowhere saying something about a group of people analogously to ‘all jews’ or ‘all blacks’, but rather, ‘all people who engage in the act of denying women abortions’, which to him is morally reprehensible. He doesn’t characterize all blacks as thieves, merely all people who steal. Or at least, that’s a plausible reading of his post, and I think that some benefit of the doubt should be extended in the case of moderating actions.

The final one is more contentious, I grant, but even here, it’s not clear to me that this is a warnable offense. Der Trihs follows a simple train of logic: 1. the US is currently engaged in violent conflict, 2. those who perpetuate this conflict have been voted for by a majority of the American people, thus 3. the majority of Americans support these violent conflicts. Now, you can challenge this logic (easily, I might add), but should you moderate it? I’m not so sure that’s the most productive thing to do.

There’s also a great disanalogy between Republicans and racial/ethnical groups: the latter are united only by genetic/historic happenstance, while the former are banded together expressly because of their aligned views. Painting Republicans (or Democrats) with a broad brush isn’t remotely the same thing as painting all blacks or all women with such a brush, as neither women nor blacks exist as a unified acting entity, but Republicans do. Especially when it comes to issues regarding politics, i.e. those issues that the parties have expressly united with regards to: having a certain set of political beliefs is what makes you a Republican; thus Republicans can be characterized by means of these political beliefs. There is no such unifying trait in the case of women or blacks that goes beyond the merely incidental, skin color and sex.

18

Is this the Der Trihs intervention? I brought cake…

19

You know what the first rule of official lists is?

Alternatively, DT, model your future posts after the ones that don’t get mod notes or warnings.

20

I do sympathize. Likewise I am unfairly prohibited from expressing my honest beliefs about Der Trihs in all but one solitary forum on this board, which for years has been a giant bacon press of oppression weighing heavily upon my lard-streaked shoulders.