Does anyone know anything about this?
If I am in danger of a ban I am just going to stay away from the thread. As I don’t know right now if I am or am not I am just staying away.
The answer is “no”. You can get banned after a single warning, or keep posting for years stacking up warnings with no ban. There is no set limit.
Unless someone else posted under your name last night, YOU brought up the subject of political leanings. No one had framed this as a liberal or conservative issue until you said the mods hold liberals and conservatives to different standards.
That’s not comparable to what happened here. Some posters were moderated for personal insults, others - sometimes in pairs, but not always - were moderated for various hijacks. If someone calls you an asshole, you’re not going to get a mod note for it. On the other hand if you get involved in a hijack with someone, you both trade barbs, and you get called an asshole, we might warn the other poster and also note that you need to tone it down. I think that’s fair.
:rolleyes: I’ve done both when it’s called for. Since it’s not called for here, I’m not doing it.
That Finn Again would take the comment “your words are like an assassin’s blade” as a compliment, tells us all we need to know about this poster.
Or does the word “assassin” have a positive context in FA’s dictionary?
Come on, FA, tell us all why you like being thought of as having an assassin’s qualities.
I can imagine taking it as a compliment. You can’t? I’d put it in the same category as ‘sharp wit,’ etc.
I agree FA basically trolls any thread involving Israel.
He is not interested in the truth, just defending his ‘side’ while ironically doing it considerable harm.
Yes, but FA is the person for whom words and their meaning are *really, really, really * significant, and an “assassin’s blade” can only be interpreted as a device used to carry out a sneaky attack on an unsuspecting person.
Hee…
So…you’re saying Amanta backs down and admits he’s wrong when he’s wrong and that’s good. But Finn backs down and admits that he’s wrong when…he’s wrong and that’s bad. (You want he should admit he was wrong without presented with facts?)
Just give up. You’re just embarrassing yourself.
Weird. That all seems a bit random.
Well you damned well better start.
According to whoever it was in post #68, you’re R-O-N-G wrong if you don’t back down when someone wants you to, you’re a bad person. Waiting for “facts” is for lusers and crackheads.
I demand you admit you were wrong and apologize right now! Facts are irrelevant to any argument Second Stone makes.
Count me as someone else who suspects some bias at work on the board as concerns this poster. This is an opinion formed over years rather than a single thread. This is particularly surprising to me because I tend to have high opinions of the mods here.
**FinnAgain **demonstrates bad faith on many discussions that do not agree with his conclusions. My favourite example -and a case of the thread writ small- remains the “logic” he employed to “demonstrate” that the UN is wrong in claiming that only a quarter of the necessary aid gets through to Gaza. Finn does not leave alone claims that make Israel look bad, so he tried to discredit the aid shortage by arguing that if it were really the case, then 75% of people affected would have to be dead. Since 75% of Gaza did not die off, case dismissed.
When his stunning errors were pointed out, rather than admitting his “logic” was wrong he defended it strenuously and mockingly over thousands of words. All this while he harassed another poster who described Lebanon as “flattened” by Israeli bombing.
That other poster readily admitted he was using hyperbole and idiom to describe the extensive damage caused by Israel in Lebanon, but Finn wouldn’t let it go and kept pressing his original point no matter what the poster said. Just like he wouldn’t let go his colossal 75% dead Gazans logical blunder. He had to prove himself the mighty victor to everyone, with frequent self-patting on the back.
Another glaring problem with his responses is that he isolates snippets of an argument or fragments of a sentence and then worries them to death while often avoiding or glossing over points more relevant to the discussion.
Finally, he has a tendency to put words in people’s mouths, trying to portray them as holding positions or putting forth arguments that were not originally stated or intended. A popular one involves the “Israel’s right to exist” meme, which (to be fair) he is hardly alone in abusing.
The fact that he has more free time than anyone else on the boards does not help. He will always have time to nitpick, start hijacks, mock posters trying to debate a serious point, and generally cause disruptions wherever he disagrees with an argument or a position, typically (in my experience) involving Israel. He may well be a model poster on other topics; I am not blessed with enough free time to read more than a couple threads at a time. He is certainly capable of making a valid point and providing useful information, but rarely does so in good faith.
He reminds me of December, who was famously polite (not to say FinnAgain is polite). December seldom **overtly **broke the rules, but that did not stop him from driving everyone to distraction with methods very similar to FInn’s. Even the mods eventually had enough of this behaviour and issued warnings then eventually banned him, so perhaps there is hope that Finn can eventually be convinced to drop the obnoxious style and argue in good faith. I’ll be among the first to cheer him on in this, regardless of differences of politics.
Capt. Riddley’s Shooting Party is right. If you continue getting warnings in that thread there’s a chance you’ll get a short suspension. You can keep participating but if you keep postings insults, our response will escalate.
I stand by what I said before. His style contributes to some of these problems and he’s been told that. Even if a poster has an abrasive style and irritates some people, those people don’t have a license to insult him. FinnAgain frustrates some posters, but he’s not some kind of attractive nuisance who robs people of their self-control. If you feel another poster is breaking the rules or just being a pain in the ass who could cause a problem, you are still expected to be the bigger man. Just report the post.
Posters in GD are not allowed to call each other liars. Saying someone has interpreted a source or a situation incorrectly isn’t an accusation of lying; saying they’re distorting a source is closer to the line but we’ve always allowed that historically. I think it would be too restrictive if we took that out. I’ve only reviewed the first few pages of the thread but comments like “you don’t think Israel should be allowed to defend itself” do not strike me as inherently antisemitic.
Basically then, he can be a jerk, but it is on everybody else to step carefully around him to avoid losing control. Fair enough.
Rather than, as the OP was getting at, the mods use that old “dont be a jerk” rule?
The point is that he’s not breaking the ‘don’t be a jerk’ rule simply by being abrasive.
Right. I don’t know how many people would be left here if we enforced the rule that way.
So FinnAgain’s insults are OK, and other people’s are not, because he’s “abrasive” and the rest of us aren’t supposed to be.
OK, how I obtain this “abrasive” label? I covet it.
It’d be great to be able to respond in kind[sup]*[/sup] without Marley23 or some other mod coming in and tweeting around with their freaking mod whistle.
[sup]*[/sup]Not even escalating, simply in kind.
If FinnAgain insults you, report the post in which he does so.
Edit: Apologies for the Jr Modding. :smack:
To which insults are you referring? In that thread, FinnAgain was called a “'tard” who “categorically could not tell the truth if [his] life depended on it,” a liar, “sad,” “someone who [can’t] think, you know, logically and with a little imagination,” “disingenuous to the point of mental oblivion,” a shill, was accused of “just randomly [typing] shit out” and posting “pure stupidity and ignorance,” and a liar who didn’t read English and couldn’t have an adult conversation. That’s the stuff we warned people for, anyway. I think some other insults were just noted and I’m not going to go back and transcribe them all.
Some of his arguing tactics can be abrasive and annoying to deal with. Yes, the “flattened” thing was a lot of absurd nitpicking, and some of the starvation stuff was, too. But if you can find some insults comparable to the ones I just quoted, please go ahead and post them.
The counter-point would be that people dont have a problem with abrasive, the problem is dishonest debating.
To clarify where I am coming from, as someone who wasnt participating in the linked thread.
When I first joined this board, I thought “Great debates” would be a forum where posters would be looking to answer the unanswered questions, by throwing ideas around, taking ideas to their logical conclusions, taking other peoples ideas and using different viewpoints. The goal would have been enlightenment (pretentious eh:D) through discussion.
Instead what the SDMB has is a nasty fucking place full of people who are more interested in scoring points and “winning”, than they are in finding answers. There is a reason many posters avoid GD, and it isnt because they arent smart enough to understand the concepts, its because many of the frequent posters are assholes.
I think what the OP was asking, and what I also would be curious about, is why the mods are happy with this state of affairs? You really want the same people spinning the same petty nitpicking for the rest of time? You dont want different posters with fresh ideas coming in to explore those ideas?
Even in this very thread, a mod has indicated that they do not believe Finnagains “tactics” are very good for debates. Another agrees about “absurd nitpicking”. And he was right, they arent good for debates. So why not do something about it? Not against the rules you say, but what about the “dont be a jerk” rule?
I couldnt give a flying fuck about Gaza, or Finnagain. But I would be interested in a Great debates forum that allowed people to explore concepts, rather than driving people away due to pedantic and dishonest “debating”.
Just my honest opinion as always.