If that were the case there would be no reason for anyone to augment their behaviour as the bannings would be… well… arbitrary 
Naw. Totally random bannings would fall evenly, totally arbitrary bannings? Better try to get on the Mods’ good side… like cosying up to Stalin.
“Random Bannings” – band name!
Yeh, yeh, I know, but I’ve never done that before, can’t I just this once…?
Piffle.
It’d be a license to keep everybody nervous as hell. Posters would be augmenting or surgically altering behvaior all over the damned landscape outta pure confusion and paranoia. Nobody would have the faintest idea what to do or not do because the whole shebang would depend on moderator whims.
It’d be beautiful!
I say we go for it.
Veb
Who is whimsical, opinionated and possibly open to bribes…though the cost is going up
“I am not happy with how Hell’s Angel turned out, especially its sensationalist approach, such as Mr Hitchens’s calling Mother Teresa ‘a presumed virgin’.” — The Final Verdict, “Introduction”, Aroup Chatterjee
Deliberately? I do not know how to determine the deliberations of a man. Perhaps This Year’s Model can give me some pointers.
To follow up on this, did the poster who quoted Wikipedia’s criticisms of Mother Teresa *deliberately * fail to report Wikipedia’s disclaimer: “This is a controversial topic, which may be disputed.”? How is it determined whether he merely read carelessly or left the truth to be discovered by someone else so that he could later claim he didn’t see the other page?
You dont?!
Gee, coulda fooled everybody who’s been on the receiving end of your various–and variable–condemnations.
DNFTTwit.
Pretty much what I’ve been saying all along – just not as well. And again, the paucity of specific examples of exactly what it is they are complaining about, is, IMHO, quite telling.
And you’re offering what with that — encouragement? Praise? Affirmation? Physician, please…
Be happy to. Take what people post at face value. Assume that they are posting what they believe to be true, and backing it up with evidence they believe to be true, unless you have specific and good reason to believe they are not. That reason should be backed up with evidence, not knee-jerk reaction. Hope that helps.
As shown by the thread in GD, it is a controversial topic - why should the poster be required to make special note of that? Assume the poster believes the side of the controversy he/she is supporting, and assume that the supporting evidence is being presented in good faith. Why assume that everyone who disagrees with you is acting in bad faith?
Then what demon possessed you to declare that I cannot be reasoned with when I am in a mode that you declare to be a religious persecution complex? Are you a psychiatrist? Have you interviewed me or prescribed me whatever medication that you’ve determined I need? Was there some reason you did not simply take my post at face value as per your own advice, rather than butt into a direct question to someone else in order to show off your sniping skills?
I did assume that until I read it, and saw the disclaimer that I quoted. Your bias borders on unbelievable. I mean, here you are questioning my motives and reading my mind about questions I’m asking Tom, and you are not bothered in the least that a post in Great Debates cited a source that did not even trust itself to be accurate.
Why assume that I assume that? If you were fair-minded, you would point out how many times (including just a few hours ago) that I’ve praised people who disagree with me, like SentientMeat, Other-wise, Spiritus Mundi, and others. I’ve changed my mind on dozens of issues this year alone based on the compelling arguments made by people with whom I disagreed. It is clear that you, on the other hand, believe that my every utterence is in bad faith as you never fail to butt in and tell me so. Maybe Tom is capable enough of answering questions directed to him without you and Veb running interference.
Because I’ve been reading you for almost four years now, and I’ve seen more than enough evidence to convince me that that is indeed the case. You also cannot be reasoned with when you go into semantic nit-pick mode. The rest of time you can be.
You want privacy, take it to email.
And thus a Doper catchphrase is born.
How about, if a poster cites a work that has never existed? (The July, 1977 edition of Omni Magazine, Stephen J. Gould’s A Systematic Rebuttal to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Scientifically Demonstrating the Literal Truth of the First Two Chapters of Genesis) How about if a poster cites a reference providing the quote “A has stated that R is clearly X” when the complete quote is “If Q is to be believed (despite the known antipathy Q has shown toward A and the fact that Q was forced to retract numerous claims made about both Q and R following a successful libel suit brought by A against Q), A has stated that R is clearly X”? My recommendation was that deliberate falsehoods be reported.
Clearly, many sources are, themselves, subject to debate. I pointed out two ways to challenge lies: 1) provide better sources or point out the failings of the sources used if they are questionable or 2) report them if the poster has deliberately submitted a false reference. Those are two separate actions for two types of event.
Okay then. Let us give you that by reading me for almost four years, you have come to know my thoughts and intentions. And let us give you the widest possible leeway for the meanings of words (although if you use “flat rock” to mean “Crepe Myrtle” or something, a heads up would be nice.) Present me a compelling rebuttal to this post that surpasses the rebuttal offered here.
Indeed I would have. But what I wanted was a public answer to a public question addressed to a specific moderator about a matter in his forum, which I asked here where “discussion regarding administration of the SDMB” is supposed to take place. You want a new forum description, take to Tuba.
I did exactly that.
Again, I do not know how to determine the deliberations inside a man’s head. If you do, please explain how.
???
One does not need to know what went on in a poster’s head to recognize that a truncated quote from a linked citation changes the meaning of the quotation. One does not need to know the deliberations in a poster’s head to know that magazines that only began publication at the end of 1978 could not have an issue 15 months earlier. One does not need to know the deliberations in a posters head to know that an author never published a work that was a complete denial of 25 years of all his other publications, particularly when a search will demonstrate that no such title can be found in print or out of print.
No one is going to be banned because of a single reported post. The poster will clearly be warned if their citations are fraudulent, but they will still have the opportunity to indicate that they were simply misled by naively relying on a third party’s citations
If I see a man dragging a screaming woman into a car and driving off, I can still report the event to the police, even if it turns out that they were acting out a drama for a film crew that I could not see.
Thanks to your clarifications, I see your point more clearly now, Tom. But if deliberation cannot be determined, then it ought not to be the qualifying adverb for determining a bad submission, as in “if the poster has deliberately submitted a false reference”. How about a qualification that the poster has submitted a reference that a reasonable person might know to be false (or misleading, or what have you)? If that is agreeable to you, then I can completely understand the thought behind the ruling. However, that brings me back to my original question, which was specifically about citing several paragraphs of an article that the poster knew — or should have known by any reasonable standard — was clearly tagged as controversial and disputable as though it lent indisputable academic weight to his argument? What about citing Chatterjee as an advocate of a curmudgeonous critic when the same Chatterjee text that addresses his views on Mother Teresa also addresses his views on the curmudgeon? One cannot know about one without knowing about the other. Isn’t it a truncation to leave out that important disclaimer? All this is setting aside the dubious temerity of citing Hitchens as a reliable critic against Mother Teresa when he has already been roundly condemned as an unreliable critic against Michael Moore. Wouldn’t it be more honest to say that the critic one is citing is more generally a nutcase? I agree with you in principle about your determination of misrepresention or incomplete truth; I just don’t see why the same principle did not apply in the case of the Blessed Mother Teresa?
Fuck it, I’ll give you a different rebuttal:
(As a caveat, I don’t want this thread to be hijacked. If my response isn’t enough for you, please open another thread and we can hash it over there. Heck, start a GD thread if you don’t want it to be on Pit terms)
You’re already discussing the first half with Tom, so he can handle that I’m sure. The second…
First thing’s first, even though you like your religion, there’s not a scrap more justification for it than anything else. “A giant invisible panda controlls and created all of Universe.” “Naw awwww! A giant invisible Yahweh controlls and created all of Universe.” “You’re both wrong. It was Bob Hope. He’s magic.”
If you don’t want your ideas debated forcefully, don’t voice them on the Dope. If you claim something beyond-reality, be prepared for people to call you on the dogmatic nature of your faith. If you make claims about something which no human being could possibly ever know, be prepared for people to challenge you on the nature of your claims. If you believe something which is, for all practicial purposes, no different from any other supersition or delusion, expect to be challenged on it. To someone without your beliefs, your ardent protestations on the importance of your God or your Christ are about as valid as a Viking telling you that you have to die in glorious combat or else you’ll go to Helle’s realm for eternity. Atheists tend to laugh at all the religious supersititions. You, most likely, tend to laugh at all of them but your own.
I remember you, just recently, talking about how superior your superstition is to fire worshipers’. Should we prosecute that as hate speech against fire worshipers or those who use fire in a religious context? Do you secretely have it in for Zoroastrians? Or can you understand that someone without any propensity for believing in myths would view your supersititions as functionally equivelent to a fire worshipin’ True Believer?
Can you perhaps grok that people who don’t have any inclination to believe any ‘supernatural’ dogmas look on your views exactly the same way you look at fire worshipers?
And simply for the record, there’s a huge difference between saying that a belief is irratioanl/dogmatic/superstitious and saying that a poster is. It’s more than possible for a poster to hold one idea which is just dumb, while overall being a pretty smart cookie.
If it only affects your own life? No, I think we’d get back to delusional and not evil. What would you say of someone who refused to ever brush his teeth, letting them rot out of his head, and excused this behavior by telling you that Zeus demanded it and he’d go to the Elysian fields after he dies, so screw proper grooming?
The ‘evil’ claim would be applied when you try to force the consequence of your beliefs on others, although I’ve never seen the word ‘evil’ used in such a way on the Dope, got a cite?
If, for instance, you allowed your child to die from a high fever because medicine is against your dogma, then one can question your moral compass. If, for instance, you try to impose your belief on other people that ‘spirit’ is more important than real honest-to-“Bob” life, then yes, you’ll be called out as a theocrat.
If, for instance, my life suffers because you attempt to impose your superstitions on me by legislation or private action, I think that various moral condemnations would apply to your behavior.
You can not have your dogma enshrined here. You simply can’t. Belief is a choice, not an inborn condition. If you have beliefs which are mocked, ah well. If someone points out, in the correct forum (eg. the Pit) that your ideological construct is irrational, c’est la vie.
This is obfuscatory. And yes, claiming that having your superstition taken to task just like any other supersitition is somehow equal to racism… ~shrugs~ The most effective term for that is as TYM pointed out: hopping up on the cross.
If you don’t want your dogma challenged, go to a Christian message board.