Moderating
Let’s not hijack this into a discussion about Trump himself.
With all due respect I think Quartz’s motivations are also not germane. I happen to agree he is wrong about his complaint, but putting him on the defensive by probing his political allegiances seems to be outside the scope AtMB.
I think it becomes germane when a poster makes repeated ill-founded complaints that evidently have a political basis. In fact, Quartz has made these other recent complaints in ATMB about anti-Trump comments on the board.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=821619
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=819322
That’s four threads in six months.
I haven’t been able to find any other thread he has started in ATMB to complain about posts about any other politician (or any other figure).
Since the second example was from me I will respond even though it’s been pretty much covered. Yes it was a quote from the president’s statement. I made the post without comment as to how elequent a statement it is simply because just before that someone had said that Trump had been silent. I thought it was pretty evident that it was a quote because I used these things " ". Since they are called quotation marks I figured it would be clear that they were marking a quotation. It also seemed to me that the context of the quote made it clear who was making the statement. We don’t have any hard and fast rule as to the format of how quotations must be posted. Possibly I could have made it clearer but in my opinion I broke no rule. Everyone seemed understand it as well. I’m not modding myself I’ll leave it to the other mods to decide. We have not discussed it but since no one chose to act on your report I’m going to assume for now they see it the same.
As for the first one as others have said it’s not a bright line rule to misquote a non-poster. That’s not to say in all instances it would be ok. If someone presented a fake quote as fact from a famous person to make their argument stronger I would say that would be against the jerk or trolling rule. I saw no intent to deceive. In the case of your first example it is clearly meant as a joke and not against the rules of MPSIMS. Since I didn’t post that one this is my opinion as a mod.
While this is true, the question about whether it is permissible to modify quotes from off board public figures is the issue at hand. Whether it is Trump, Sanders, McCain, Taylor Swift, etc. is really not relevant to the rule. There is no rule against modifying quotes for satirical purposes of off board folks, therefore the complaint is without merit.
So when Taylor Swift said, “Bone is really awesome and I’d love to do a private concert but our schedules didn’t line up.” that is totally not true and also totally not a SDMB rule violation.
The issue at hand having been resolved, I’m just chiming in to agree that it should be germane to discuss a poster’s motivation when a pattern has emerged in his complaints such as the one Colibri illustrated.
Besides Colibri, I’m hearing a lot of people talking about this.
I don’t believe I’ve started any such threads about other figures. Trump is a special case: he is POTUS, and the SDMB is an American board. I am not going to go through all umpteen thousand of my posts to find my defences of others, so I will just point out that I have both defended and attacked Thatcher in the thread about British Prime Ministers.
One of the hardest things to do is to defend those with whom you disagree, but it’s necessary in a democracy. The Dope needs to put its generally pro-Democrat political allegiance and realise the harm it is doing to itself.
You can fight ignorance or you can promote it. It’s your choice.
I find it interesting that the OP thought a mod was unaware of the quote rules.
Errare humanum est.
I don’t know which is worse, that the OP doesn’t get satire (instead calling it a lie and a slur) or that he expects all quotes everywhere on the board to be attributed (or maybe just Trump quotes/jokes?)
For what it’s worth - and certainly not in support of Quartz’ campaign to stand up for Donald, which is basic and blatant - I had to stop and think before I realized you were offering an actual quote rather than a paraphrase of something or failed effort at solitaire. May I suggest that, at a minimum, including a link to the quote source would be best practice.
Appointed Gorsuch. It’s the only major thing Trump’s done that I endorse.
Of course, december was sanctioned for posting a quote from a President that was “false,” in that it turned out to be from another President. Neither President (on information and belief) were posters at the time.
But that was totally different. Because of reasons.
I’ll give him credit: He did personally kill the most evil man of the 20th century.
“Reasons” being that he was doing his level best to deceive people at the time, right?
Keep hunting that snark.
While we are discussing rules, isn’t there one that requires posts be in English?
I think we can consider that de minimis non curat lex.
Can we agree on a definition of “trifle”, though?
ETA: Here’s the rule!!
Fair enough. As with just about everything I post I could have done it better. That’s not the same as breaking a rule or needing to be modderated.
december was warned for being a jerk, not for abusing the quote function.
If I call you a racial slur in a quote box, that doesn’t implicate the quote editing rule, does it?