I guess you didnt read my post carefully.
So you think we should have kept around the pedophile enthusiast Cesario around? You really want to advocate for pedophilia?
This is the tagline of the people who want to keep the pedophile enthusiasts around so we can all be enlightened from the pedophiles.
So you want this board to be the board of misogyny and pedophilia?
Yeah.
That will definitely attract new eager members who want to give money to this board.
And since we all know this is about money.
Definitely keeping the pedophiles and misogynists around is the best way to get money from people.
Are the big wigs even listening?
Tuba are you even listening to this?
So?
You would have to wait a couple days to enlighten us this some nugget of timeless wisdom, while the mods review your suspension, at the end of which a couple of trolls that got you suspended get banned.
You think that would happen more often than once?
Educational?
You poor thing.
You think you are convincing any of the usual suspects? There is no interaction, they don’t read others post further than is needed to frame their bullshit. Stop convincing yourself there is a fruitful debate.
This is not like the the Supreme Court censoring free speech of a protected group, it is like mom telling Timmy at the dinner table to stop saying “this chocolate looks like shit” to his grossed out sister.
Drunky, I wasn’t wanting to name names in my post for fear of resurrecting evil fuckers like Cesario, but that was ONE that my asterix was intended for. You might want to read my post again.
Yeah, maybe. And maybe just ONE person reading the boards who might have agreed with SA in the past might now be seeing things in a different light. Who knows? Not every member of this board posts to the board. And maybe just one person might have a different take on things now.
I live in hope 
^This, including the asterisk. The internet is a public place. This board, by dint of an open invitation to anyone (over a certain age) to join, is as well - to a certain extent. It is not, and IMHO should not be, a “safe place” where only “palatable” issues can be discussed and only with “tasteful” language. OTOH, because it is owned by a private company, it’s not 'anything goes", either - hence the asterisk. The board gives us ways to deals with those posters we don’t wish to interact with. I personally choose to not use the ignore feature because, as has been previously stated, I want to know what “the other side” thinks. It’s quite useful in combatting those views on a macro level. While I don’t kid myself that we (I) can change the views of anyone on an anonymous message board, I do use what I learn here to reason with people IRL. In any case, mob rule (complaint=auto-suspend) is never the answer.
I know the board’s reluctance to stamp out ideas entirely. That’s why I went directly for a compromise position. I can sum it up like this:
Instead of stamping misogyny out entirely, kick it out of all the forums but GD, where it can be contained in a specific thread about the specific issue. The exceptions are misgendering trans people and advocating rape, which should just not be allowed, period.
There, you guys get to read the "other side’ and have them argue for it, but it doesn’t pollute all the other threads. And it’s similar to the Skald solution, where one must warn before describing disturbing sexual imagery: it doesn’t ban it outright, just limits it.
And, yes, if people repeatedly fall afoul of this, a topic ban fits, too.
It’s not about convincing the usual suspects, it’s about the silent lurkers. If you look at the list of threads in any of the forums, there is usually an order of magnitude more views than there are replies.
Also, for the record, I am far less of a misogynistic jerk specifically due to this message board. After getting royally fucked over in my divorce, I started going down a dark road. One of the biggest things that stopped me from going full MRA was me watching one of those “usual suspects” repeatedly getting his ass handed to him in the feminism threads he kept starting in GD. It wasn’t instant or quick, but it did change my mind.
This board needs to decide whether it wants to be a safe place for it’s members to hang out, or a place where people (even the Cesario’s of the world) can speak freely. I honestly don’t think that you can have both, and the current attempts to have it both ways don’t seem to be working very well.
In a broad sense, we’re just advocating moving the line. There are already limits (pretty small, but still existing) on hate speech, even in the Pit. Some of us are just advocating moving that line a big so the rampant misogyny would be more mod-able.
I think there is an other way:
Limit how many posts some people are allowed per thread. (~10 per 1000 sounds about right)
In some cases some of the boards misogynists are getting their asses handed to them comprehensively but they still give a thread a bad aftertaste through shear volume.
It is already in the rules: “this is not your personal blog”.
People can believe what they want. When they post in trolly ways, it’s reasonable to enforce the board’s trolling rules.
And the “Don’t be a jerk” rules.
The problem is, they don’t seem to SEE they get their asses handed to them. They seem to enjoy causing a ruckus, poisoning a thread, and --wait a minute. Isn’t that the definition of trolling?
There IS a “don’t be a jerk” rule.
I’m thinking many of the misogynistic comments I’ve read lately go way past “jerk”. Granted, they aren’t directed at the women who post here, but the posts hurt them anyway.
It has often been said (especially by our vocal conservative members) that this board skews left and even that it is a bit of an echo chamber of liberal / progressive attitudes.
If so, that does not and has never included much of an enthusiastic embrace of feminist thought. Invoke the search engine and search for threads with “feminism” in the thread title, starting from the beginning and sorted ascending. Read for awhile. You’ll see that liberal or not, the general attitude in here has been that feminism is considered questionable, that its claims and viewpoints are thought to be unreasonable and “out there”, and that it’s extreme and anti-male. I don’t mean everyone says so and thinks so but you’ll see a lot of it, and it sure as hell isn’t all from our self-labeled “conservatives”. It’s a part of the board culture. We have a relatively macho leftist slant in here.
While it is possible for someone to be quite concerned about women’s experiences on this board and to want them to feel equally treated, while holding a negative opinion of feminism as a political enterprise, I think it’s more likely that people who are dismissive of feminism are going to be similarly dismissive of feminism’s individual political-social observations. Like the indictment of rape culture, objectification, and so on.
If I understand some recent posts by senior administration, the board is in need of $$. I pay for all sorts of things on the internet - I’m a knitty.com patron, I play stupid facebook games (don’t judge), I shop online weekly, I’m a Slate Plus member, etc. Basically, I throw money at the internet. I used to pay for a membership here.
However, despite my willingness to spend money on basically anything if I find it amusing (Township, I’m looking at you), when posters are allowed to be misogynist jerks without getting modded for it and meanwhile posters complaining about the gross behaviour get heavy handed after the fact warnings, I will keep my wallet tightly closed. There are lots of places I can go and spend my money - why would I drop even one thin dime on a place that clearly cares so little for my input or experience?
And seeing as how a mod asked for suggestions, how about throwing out a few topic bans as has been done before, and how about actually modding gross behaviour once and a while? I get that it’s nice to keep an open mind to other ideas - perhaps not so open that your brains fall out, yah?
There need to be limits, sure. They also need to be such that they don’t stifle discussion, and allow for a wide range of thoughts being expressed on this board. Kinda like exactly what we have now. I think between the modding and the pileups the truly unpalatable tend to invite, we handle things just fine. Sure, thoughts are expressed which are unpleasant, reprehensible or outright vile. And then they are addressed.
Actually, I was agreeing with you…but it didn’t come right, I guess.
I blame everybody else.
Problem with this so-called misogyny or racism or rape apology or jerk is noone wants to define it. It’s all my feelings are hurt and people shouldn’t be able to post in a way where my feelings are hurt. Well, that’s not how this board is run or should be run.
How about defining what’s off limits instead of using ridiculously broad labels that people who are engaged in sincere and productive conversation are going to run afoul of? By using undefined broad labels all that will be accomplished is that a vocal and somewhat organized subset of posters will be able to pester the mods into silencing topics or posters they disagree with.
Would discussing men vs women in sport or academia be misogyny? Would discussing reasons for wage gap be misogyny or misandry? Would discussing differences in crime rates be bigotry? Would advocating sensible precautions in life be considered crime apologizing? Would criticizing how a woman politician looked or sounded be misogyny? What about gendered insults in the pit?
It’s easy to say the mods should do better or that the admin should write better rules as an abstract and general complaint. But actually writing rules that govern behavior while not unnecessarily or unfairly chilling real discussion is much more difficult and I haven’t seen a single good suggestion on how to do that.
I don’t think it’s possible to reconcile those two issues and I think we see it in society as a whole. Which is why we see nutty protesters on college campuses who equate free speech with hate speech and want all sorts of arbitrary and targeted speech codes. We even get debates in society about microagressions like “manhole” or “brown bag.” Is that the end goal for this long game? A forum where there are no clear guidelines and it’s just whoever can bring the most grief to the mods gets to dictate the terms of conversation? :dubious: