It is true as far as it was an opinion of a CIA man with no experience in SERE. But as the SERE experts and doctors reported, a tool used out of context and a point made in a very insulting way also.
You two will not revisit your argument in this thread.
Damuri, Tom didn’t warn you. I did. And I did it for ‘Failure to Follow a Moderator’s Instructions’. Tom told you to knock it off, you didn’t, you got warned. I don’t give a damn about your position on the matter but I do care that you didn’t follow instruction. Continue to do so will result in further sanction.
I have successfully avoided that thread until today.
It’s not clear to me what Tom was telling Damuri to knock off from his instruction. It’s either the denigrating sarcastic adjectives, or the implication that SEALs wouldn’t give their best effort all the time, or both.
It may not be “fair,” but if you’re going to argue an unpopular position here, you must take care to be exceptionally polite, proper, and correct.
We will engage in debate with flat-earthers. But rude flat-earthers can go to blazes. The combination of an unpopular viewpoint with rudeness is worse than either pedcadillo, alone, would be.
This means that someone arguing an unpopular opinion has to accept rudeness, without descending into its use himself. Again, patently unfair, but it’s a social reality.
I agree that tomndeb’s instruction is not clear. Yet another possible reading is to stop straw manning (especially since the pussy ass SEALs line seems clearly ironic to emphasize that they are in fact really tough folks).
I think tom often assumes the poster is knowingly doing something wrong or annoying such that “knock it off” is helpful. Often it is not. Here, I’m not sure what aspect of the argument he considers a straw man.
Aside from the lack of clarity (which might very well be my inability to understand what was written, I don’t think I’m alone in this though), I hadn’t seen the moderator note when I posted the offending post. I mean there was like a 5 minute gap, I would assert that my offense was inadvertent.
The time window is a separate issue, but in that I also think leeway is warranted. The post likely took more than 5 minutes to compose, and given Damuri’s penchant for replying to posts one at a time in sequence, I believe he would not have seen the instruction prior to posting. This is different than instruction given during the course of a thread and not following instruction at a later time and a poster being responsible to read the thread before posting.
If Tom posted his mod note and Damuri posted at the same time, it would be hard to argue that the post wasn’t following instruction because none was yet given. At 1 minute, this is likely still true. At 5 minutes, given the history, I think this is still true.
Could I suggest it might be unwise for a moderator to act officially in a thead that he or she is participating in? There seems to be an appearance of impropriety there, even if there’s no real impropriety. It looks like, “Well, the other poster has responded to me and I don’t like the answer, so I’m going to use my official moderator powers to declare it a straw man argument and disallow it.” Putting aside the fact that people set up strawmen all the time in GD, it looks bad.
As noted in the other thread, I think Tom’s instruction was - and still is - very unclear. In addition, as CA noted here, the fact that Tom was himself participating in that thread, and that the guy he was moderating was taking a position that he particularly opposed, makes it even more dubious. (Note: the first issue also relates to JC’s warning, while the second is just about Tom.)
And a reason for this is that people who argue unpopular positions with rudeness raise the suspicion that they are doing so “just to be confrontational or to raise hackles,” which is the definition of trolling.
I’m not saying that everyone who rudely espouses unpopular positions is a troll. Some are sincere, and either naturally abrasive or made tetchy from having to defend their unpopular opinions. But it is the kind of thing that trolls do.
Tom and I have spent some time discussing it and he agrees that he was not clear in his guidance. Because of that, I am reversing the warning for Damuri Ajashi.
This does not mean that we wish posters to consider ‘I didn’t understand it so it shouldn’t count’ as an overall viable approach to getting around moderation. Such has a low probability of having a positive outcome and I’d advise against it.
