I think JC missed the tonal cues. Yes, on the face of it, the post could be read as “Somebody fucked your mother.” But it was absurdism, silliness, a quip of opportunity.
Recently, in Cafe Society, I called somebody a “Knucklehead.” But it was in a Three Stooges context, and was a response to a truly magnificent bad pun.
This is why board moderation cannot be left to machine intelligence: you gotta have the human touch.
That said…the moderation here is the best I’ve ever seen. I’ve been on similar general-topic discussion boards with too little…and with too much…control over content. You guys are right in the heart of the Goldilocks Zone.
Does that mean we get eaten at the end of the story in the original, non-Disneyfied version?
Seriously, though, tone is enormously hard to convey. And both Great Debates and Elections are sensitive spots for a lot of posters so I err on the side of ‘keep it straightforward’ instead of saying stuff that could be misinterpreted. That’s why I kept it a note instead of a warning.
To be honest, it annoyed the fuck out of me. I was composing a post that would have drawn me a warning, but decided to report it instead. Insult me all you want, I’m an asshole. But don’t bring my mom into it.
Besides the “surreal” aspect (which, frankly, I didn’t understand), there is a rule about making sexual comments aimed at posters on this MB. I think one can reasonably assume that should apply to comments about a poster’s mother as well.
Not everyone finds “jokes” about their mothers as funny as you might; in fact, I would say that most people don’t. We can’t evaluate remarks purely on the basis of whether you are offended, but whether they might be taken that way. And we don’t necessarily mod posts on the basis of whether we are offended, but whether a post might provoke retaliation.
Excessive snark and bitter insults are generally moderated. As moderators, we prefer to “head fights off at the pass” by mod-noting questionable posts rather than allow things to be misinterpreted and blow up.
