Moderators seem biased [Moved to the Pit for continued inter-poster bickering]

The BBQ Pit
1

I was told this is the proper forum to complain about bad moderating.

In post 743 of this thread. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=564574&page=15

I have noticed in several threads that mods moderate posters and tell them to drop some style of argument but Finn Again engages in similar behaviour and he either doesn’t get moderated or he gets moderated along with the person he is responding to. Moderators consistently let Finn Again get away with bullshit tactics and arguments while telling others to knock it off (or telling both people to knock it off when Finn Again is obviously the one that should be told to knock it off).

For example, earlier in the thread, Capt. said that Israel flattened Lebanon. Finn Again quibbles with the poster by saying that the claim is patently false because there are still buildings that are standing in teh area that was suppsoedly “flattened”. The original poster says they were using an idiomatic phrase when they talk about how bombing flattened a city, he even links to a news article that describes the after effects of the bombing using those exact same words. Finn Again won’t let it drop and keeps bringing it up. The original poster keeps responding because Finn Again implies that being wrong about the “flattening of Lebanon” says something about Capt’s credibility or knowledge. Capt. points out where Finn Again says that the north of Lebanon was not even touched when in fact there was significant bombing of towns in teh north of Lebanon. Finn Againclaims that despite evidence to the contrary (wikipedia maps aren’t really bulletproof but they are subject to some form of peer review) the maps showing bombs being dropped in North Lebnanon are not reliable because the maps are produced by people who hate Jews (or soemthing like that). This goes on for several pages.

Instead of telling Finn Again to knock off the semantic bullshit (which is irrelevant to the debate but only being used to try and impeach Capt.), the moderators tell them BOTH to knock it off and when I point out that Finn Again is pupling some bullshit tactics, I am also told to knock it off.

Later on in the thread he does the same thing with teh word starvation (he claims Amanset must be wrong about there being starvation in Gaza because people are not dying of starvation (lets put aside whether or not there is starvation in Gaza)) amanset links to a definition of starvation that shows that you don’t have to die to be suffering from starvation, Finn Again just won’t admit he was wrong. This goes on for pages and the mdoerators again tell Finn Agfain and amanset to knock if off.

In the same thread, Finn Again puts words in my mouth and says that I had said “Israel does not have the right to defend itself” When I ask him when I said that he quotes a post where I said “Israel should drop the blockade” I take issue with that in post 739 and I get moderated in post 744.

This sort of thing is repeated in thread after thread dealing with Israel.

Why don’t the moderators moderate Finn Again before things spin out of control? And when things do spin out of comtrol, why do they ignore the fact taht Finn Again is precipitating all the shitstorms?

2

I know, if only posters could make claims without the bother of having someone disagree with them or point out their implications, it’d be much better!

3

Get ready for a shitload of semantics and rules lawyering. You have my sympathy.

4

[Reposted to correct thread]

The issue is this - that ‘arguing in a nasty manner’, such as (example purely picked out of my ass) endlessly quibbling over the meaning of the word “is”, won’t get you warned by the mods - unless it is derailing the thread/off topic; in which case, you’ll be told to stop doing it.

OTOH, ‘stating that the person you are arguing with is a jerk’ will get you warned by the mods if it’s ouside the Pit - particularly if you keep doing it after being told not to.

This may feel totally unfair, but that’s the way it has to be. Persons have to be (more or less) kept from abuse, but not arguments.

5

By the way, should you now be "moderated’, Damuri?

Specifically he said that Israel flattened “the whole of” Lebanon, That was false. And it was tellingly false, as he was exaggerating the bombing campaign in Lebanon while downplaying Hezbollah’s attacks. Israel’s bombing “flattened the whole of Lebanon” and “completely flattened” the entire south. Hezbollah didn’t “flatten” anything, even that by his own standards it did.
You’re now quibbling, should you get moderated?

I cleared this up in the original thread when I pointed out that, in context, I was responding to the claim that the entire country had been reduced to rubble which is what I reasonably understood “the whole of Lebanon was flattened” to mean. I pointed out that when I was talking about the north “not being touched” I was responding to my honest understanding that Captain was conflating the bombing campaign that actually did reduce large swaths of some neighborhoods to ruins, and those bombing campaigns did not touch the north. I even specifically clarified that if the claim was, instead, that several bridges and a few military targets were hit in the north, then of course that was true. You saw all of this.

Should you now be “moderated” since you’re trying to quibble over what my words meant in context?

Again, should you be moderated for this?
I pointed out that the map was uncited and unsourced and produced by a group whose bias was obvious as they referred to Israel proper as “occupied Palestine”. Your claim that it was because they “hate Jews” is a strange way to misunderstand the that rather straight forward statement. Should you be “moderated” for that?

I also pointed out that the map was not based on researched, let alone cited claims, but a blog that said it simply collected headlines from two identified news services and the amorphous claim of “other news services”, without citing anything.

Are you the only one who’s allowed to disagree with claims?

Yep, because as I pointed out it was being used for dramatic effect and political rhetoric. For the same reason that Amanset claimed that the people of Gaza were “starving” but when faced with the fact that his exact metric would apply to America, and “millions of fat Americans are staving!” would sound silly, he switched it to the less inflammatory “obese Americans may be malnourished.”

Again, are you the only one who’s allowed to disagree with things in GD?

Nope, I discussed the implication of your claims amount to an argument that after “one bite of the apple”, Israel would not longer have the right to invoke Article 51 to justify self defense via blockade and it wouldn’t get a second chance at a “bite of the apple”.

Again, are you the only one who gets to disagree with the implications of a statement?

6

But accepting this as true, is the issue not that mods are failing to uphold the “dont be a jerk” rule, with regards to arguing in a dishonest manner?

7

The back-and-forth over the *true *meaning of the word “flattened” was almost surreally stupid, added nothing to the discussion, and absolutely deserved to be snuffed. There was nothing to be gained by a moderator determining who was “correct” because it was a thoroughly pointless argument. “Everybody knock it off” was a perfectly acceptable manner of ending it. Similarly with the “starvation” farce and any other rhetorical dead-end. The Argument Clinic was a funny sketch, but makes for a really boring thread.

8

Who is the common factor in all these stupid arguments?

When it is obvious that Finn Again is the source of the problem why are moderators acting like things have just gotten heated and everyone is equaly at fault. If Finn Again is creating these problems time and again why doesn’t it make sense to tell Finn Again to knock it off instad of telling everyone else to knock it off?

9

My take is that OP is suggesting that it is difficult to debate if the other person has no intellectual decency to admit: (1) argument does not stand, (2) line of argument is irrelevant, (3) line of argument is exhausted and (4) misquoting is being selectively warned by mods.

I would add, it’s also difficult to debate when posters are stating obvious truths that are not being raised as an issue.

10

I don’t mind honest debate. I’ve debated all sorts of things in the past including abortion and other hot topics and I have not experienced this with any other poster on any other topic.

11

Its not nasty it is bad faith.

Even dishonest argument?

12

No, you’re simply wrong and making those claims anyways.
Of course I believe what I’m posting, that why I post it. Disagreeing with you is, in fact, not dishonesty, nor is it in bad faith.

Speaking of which, recently you made some claims about the facts surrounding the implementation of the partition in '48 and the date of the Arab invasion. I pointed out that you were wrong on the facts and off by a matter of months. You admitted you were wrong. Then you made the same claim again.
Does that mean that the mods should have figured you were incorrect but honest, or should they have Warned you?

That’s a heck of a lot more blatant than simply disagreeing with you and not accepting your interpretation even if you really, really want me to.

13

The issue is not whether poster X is difficult to debate with, but whether someone whom one finds difficult to debate with should be therefore subject to moderator action.

To my mind, the obvious answer is “no”. The mods are not there to police that sort of thing, and moreover should not be there to police that sort of thing.

14

Moreover, it is not quite kosher ( :smiley: ) to come into a thread on page 11, without having read it, pick up a hijack that the mods have already warned people to drop, and then complain about derailing the thread.

There were several exaggerated claims made - that the IDF was engaging in piracy, that all of Lebanon was flattened, that Gazans were being starved, et al. At least one of the participants in the thread admitted that he was engaging in hyperbole. Well and good, but it shouldn’t take six pages before we get to that point.

Yes, FinnAgain can get carried away, but he knoweth his shit about Israel.

If you don’t want to debate hi8m, you don’t have to, but “he made me look bad” is not being a jerk.

Regards,
Shodan

15

Without my having to read a really long thread, it seems to me that there’s difficulty in what Damuri Ajashi is proposing, because someone who is challenged over a seriously-intended but wrong-headed remark could just claim “I was indulging in obvious hyperbole,” and sic the moderators on the challenger.

16

I had been following the thread in my own lurker-like fashion: the mods, imho, did a fine job.

Also, FinnAgain is tenacious…but his arguments seemed very logical to me. I simply did not see him arguing in bad faith. shrug

17

He repeatedly claimed that Israel viewed itself as an occupying power in Gaza. This was shown to be the exact opposite of reality.

Rather than manning up and moving on he ended up claiming that we had been discussing the entire Palestine territory instead of just Gaza. Which (a) we clearly hadn’t and (b) clearly wasn’t the way people actually discuss (see my example of WMDs in the thread).

So, he didn’t actually know his shit about Israel and decided to hijack the thread instead of accepting it and moving on.

18

Including refusing to accept the dictionary definition of the verb “starve”, his lack of knowledge of what malnutrition is (see his comments about obesity in the US - obesity is arguably malnutrition) and his sudden decision that we were discussing Gaza AND the West Bank instead of accepting his error and moving on?

19

Yes, it’s false if you parse “they were flattened” literally. However, as I specifically referenced in that thread, “flattened” is an informal expression meaning bombstruck. Taking your literalness to its sorry conclusion, there has been no city ever to exist on earth that has literally been “flattened”. Even Hiroshima and Nagasaki still had structures standing, post blast.

As I’ve repeated numerous times, it was pretty obvious in context, to anybody with a brain more developed than an amoeba, what was being implied. Nobody who actually speaks English thought I was implying Lebanon or Manchester were literally flattened as if God had rolled over on them.

The true meaning of the sentence was nevertheless almost immediately explained in baby steps to you. Yet you somehow managed to string the bullshit along for a good day and a half, completely derailing the thread, and obfuscating the issue at hand.

20

It didn’t take six pages. It took literally two or three more posts (can’t be bothered counting, to be honest) to point out the obvious hyperbole. Yet Yahweh’s Hammer managed to drag an irrelevance out for six pages.