The debate isn’t whether saying “calm down” works. It’s your extension that it means it’s calling someone a bad person that went too far.
Whether it works or not isn’t the point. If the person means it as a sincere (if possibly misguided approach) that must be taken into account.
Plus, studies and stats fall apart at the individual. Sometimes an individual person does need to be asked to calm down or dial it back. I experienced this last week on a plane in which a passenger was swearing and berating people. Finally I turned around and told his he needed to dial it down. He glared at me but didn’t make a peep for the rest of the flight.
Im not in favor of banning Hurricane Ditka but I’m tired of him crapping all over Great Debates with endless variations of “Let’s have a calm and reasoned debate on why liberals hate America”. It should be obvious to the mods that he only posts this crap to try to piss everyone off so he can report them.
And I’m bet I’m right, aren’t I? I bet he pushes that “report” button more than everyone else on the board put together. I’m frustrated that the mods still let him get away with it - and not only that- they give him special privileges and don’t warn him if someone turns it back on him and goads him into an outburst. Like he’s the only poster with extenuating life circumstances.
Please Please Please start moving these threads to The BBQ Pit so I can respond appropriately. How can you NOT see that he’s trolling?
Unless you’ve got a mouse in your pocket, “we” didn’t ban anyone. The mods do.
And similarly, why should it matter that there are certain posters where you can track a thread going to shit pretty well by the number of posts they make in it? So what if their opinions are painfully stupid and they refuse to have anything resembling an honest debate about it for years at a time? That’s their opinion, and they should have it.
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A large part of the thread going to shit is the half-dozen snowflakes who are frightened by a pov (often, I’ll grant you, an obnoxious, stupid or stupidly obnoxious POV) that differs from theirs and feel the need to swarm to protect their safe, cozy worldview.
I’m 100% behind the banning of Clothy, but not because he wouldn’t engage, but because he would regularly use actual, real hate speech (I can’t think of the examples here, but over on the Giraffeboards, he got in trouble for calling a black poster “Buckwheat”. That’s not a micro-aggression or one of those BigT “If you squint juuuuuuuuuuust right you can see that “Calm Down” or “Chill Out” is hate speech” things.
I was fine with Sevastopool being banned for wishing that Tel Aviv got nuked because that would get rid of those damned Jews (pardon me…“Zionists” as he kept saying). I’m not fine with banning a stoopid but civil holocaust denier, however dumb he is.
Look, one of the defining moments in my life was when I was much younger. The Nazis were rallying in Skokie and despite it being kind of a joke now, at the time, it was SERIOUS BUSINESS. I made some typical dumbass teen comment about wishing I was there with a high powered rifle and scope. My dad (who was an actual Holocaust survivor) turned off the TV and gave me like a 20 minute dressing down/lecture on how we, as Americans had to let them march. He quoted someone who said “The remedy to bad speech isn’t banning it, it’s better speech”.
It took me weeks to wrap my head around the idea that a freakin’ Holocaust survivor was ok with Nazis marching. And it really affected me.
I see a half dozen or so posters on this board, who would go hide in their safe room, wrap themselves in a fuzzy security blanket and suck their thumbs* while crying for the mods to help protect them from scary ideas. And it’s making the board worse.
*You’re not one–I disagree with you on every issue, but you, at least, have the balls to argue back.
Does anyone recognize the simple fact that intolerance is the driving force behind this discussion and in fact, the plethora of divisive issues in society at large? Some things certainly should not be tolerated by anyone anywhere, but I believe far too many people have very distorted views of where they draw those lines.
No I don’t see it that way at all. I see it as an attempt to weaponize specific language, which is a very common tactic around here, in order to intimidate, demonize, and silence any non majority view or even majority held views that are not advocated strenuously enough. BPC even tips his hand slightly by saying that he sends lots of reports to establish a pattern.
You know the only one responsible for the emotions running through one’s head is the person having those emotions. Aren’t we adults with agency here?
No, that’s a big part of the problem, here and elsewhere. This conflict only gets resolved by vetting participant’s ideological, intellectual and political opinions, resulting in… Censorship.
You don’t get to walk into an ER for example, and start posting flyers about homeopathic medicine. You don’t get to hang out in a church and solicit people’s opinions on devil worship. And similarly, you cannot expect to be treated fairly and respectfully posting on SDMB with a conservative POV.
I remember seeing post that popped up on a search striking me very odd when I first joined here. I’m not going to look it up and I don’t remember the names involved, but a mod was warning a poster that they could not technically be given a warning because of the specific way the discussion was being worded, but they would get banned anyway if they kept it up. I thought to myself hmmmm…
I’d take that bet, but I wouldn’t be surprise if the mods declined to give the answer. But if you think he’s really a troll (and not someone who just sometimes post trollishly), why wouldn’t you want him banned? Or are you against banning trolls in general?
Can you give an example of this?
I’d rather not take a position in this forum about someone being a troll or not, so don’t take this as agreeing or disagreeing with you assessment, but I do agree that threads like “why do liberals/conservative hate <insert whatever here>” don’t belong in GD or Elections. Nor do threads that are just an invite to dump on one political side or one politician. Like this recent thread (that I suspect will get moved oi IMHO if not the Pit). As was done to this thread,
Actually, you can, and and conservatives are. But it’s become kind of a tradition to hear your claim once in a while from right-wingers, either claiming that the mods here hate conservatives and/or that posters treat conservatives unfairly. Neither is true. Or if it’s true, no one has ever been able to present evidence of it. Indeed this very thread is evidence of the contrary.
What IS true is that this board tends toward fact-based discourse and most posters here have little tolerance for idiocy, ignorance, or conspiracy theories. If such things equate to “conservatism” in your mind, that is frankly your problem, not the board’s. And since, as the saying goes, reality has a liberal bias, there tend to be more liberals here than conservatives, although the mods themselves are commendably even-handed. If you disagree, perhaps you’d care to start a thread (so as not to disrupt this one) where you present the evidence.
I would add to Wolfpup’s invitation the reminder that “unfair treatment” would have to come from the authorities, i.e. the moderators or administrators. That would be a pretty high bar, and I agree with Wolfpup that the moderators here are as even-handed as it is probably possible for mere mortals to be.
“Treated disrespectfully” is a different matter. There are certainly some “liberal” posters who howl with outrage at conservative posts and seem to rush to cover them up with as much mud as possible. There are some “liberal” posters who can’t seem to acknowledge a good argument from any conservative poster, no matter how polite and well-reasoned they are.
These are, I think, the exception in numbers of posters, if not in numbers of posts. That is, I think the howling posters are in the minority among liberals, but they do make a lot of noise. So while conservative posters may sometimes be treated disrespectfully, it is not true that they can’t ever get a decent hearing.
This thread is supposedly about posters who are trolls or exhibit trollish behavior. I’m in agreement with those posters above who believe that the charges amount to “they won’t admit it when I’m right and they’re wrong.”
No, this is not a new protocol. Accusations of trolling are not permitted in ATMB.
Since this is a thread about trolling, I am going to allow a certain amount of leeway just so people can question whether something specific is trolling or not, but let’s take the actual accusations of trolling to the Pit where they belong.
There are so many people arguing backwards from a pre-defined conclusion around here it’s just ridiculous. Then you have the gratuitous insulters, the single-issue obsessives and the few simply dishonest trolls jumping in to wave their flag every chance they get. It’s normal, I get it, accept it and couldn’t possibly care less. Jut know that people view things from a personal perspective and that is what conservatives see here.
I’m going to declare the ‘conservatives see things X and liberals Y’ subject a hijack. That’s not what we’re doing here and it would be far to easy to see the thread derailed that way.