The funny thing is, they’re much closer to racists and creationists that insist on creative euphemisms for their positions–euphemisms that beg for some amount of credibility and deference to a position that cuts so strongly against rational thought.
[ul]
[li]Someone who denies the Holocaust is at the root of the term ‘denialist’, and it is both accurate and fair to call them that in a discussion. [/li]
[li]A conspiracy theorist who embraces the idea that the CIA/mafia/French Canadians killed Kennedy is … a conspiracy theorist. [/li]
[li]A creationist who insists that creationism be referred to as an intelligent design is still a creationist. The link between ID and creationism is now so strong that it is a matter of time before another pseudo-scientific sounding word is made up. [/li]
[li]A birther by any other name still questions the citizenship of Barak Obama, and a truther by any other name still engages in flights of fancy to define 9/11 as an inside job.[/li][/ul]
People engaged in denying climate change belong on this list. As noted, using the term ‘denier’ (or birther, or creationst, etc.) can be used merely as an insult, but in general, using the term to refer to a person or their positions is relatively benign; it’s a pronoun that aptly fits.
Granting the type of legitimacy that works against using words like ‘gyp’ and the like is in an entirely different category. Treating ‘denialist’ as such plays denier’s game of ignorance.
Want to debate these issues in the Great Debates forum? You are invited to do so.
Debate. Hit them with the facts.
Keep your opinions – which are not facts and not germane to the debate – keep your opinions to yourself. This includes your opinion as to the fitness of your opponent.
There are other forum areas where your opinions on most everything are sought, including an area where you can call them poopyheads all day long if you so choose. Great Debates is not one of those areas.
Sorry, but I’m having trouble assimilating both Marley’s and Tuba’s comments. Tuba, are your comments primarily related to the interactions in that thread or with regards to using the term in GD in general? That is, if you substitute ‘climate change’ and ‘denial’ with ‘evolution’ and ‘creationist’, would you be suggesting that their in-thread interactions were crossing the line but not commenting on the use of the term ‘creationist’?
Cool! So since “denier” is off the table, stuff like “tighty righty” and “Repugnican” is also verboten as well? Because, I’d firmly support that. If so, it’ll drop a number o poster’s output (like Elucidator) by a large amount given the signal to noise ratio, that can only be seen as an improvement.
But leave us not delude ourselves that the rules have ever forbidden comments like those two and “denier”.
This is Tomndebb making up a brand new rule on the spur of the moment. And it’s a rule I support. I just don’t like the disingenuous “Gawrsh! It’s always been that way” crap.
So irrespective of someone’s position, terms such as creationist, racist, truther, birther, conspiracy theorist, and denier (Holocaust or climate change) are off the table?
That strikes me as a fairly significant shift. I recognize that the terms can be used as a cudgel when not necessarily related to someone’s position (e.g. calling someone a racist merely for wanting to end an affirmative action programme would be inappropriate), but when someone self-identifies as a member of a group it fits well within the scope of GD and debate in general.
I also recognize that it can be incorrectly applied. I do a lot of work in the field, and frequently excise large sections of text that over-predict, make unsubstantiated claims, are analytically faulty, etc. Most of the time my reputation precedes me, but occasionally I get into a significant back-and-forth. Calling me a denier at that point would be absurd.
Yet there are large numbers of people who, similar to creationists, flatly deny the preponderance of scientific evidence–and self-identify as such. They are not skeptics in the sense that they take issue with a particular set of predictions or dispute a particular model, they almost completely out of hand reject–deny–basic science.
Sorry to be pedantic about this; the chronic persistence of ignorance has decimated much of my interest in participating in climate change threads, but I do post to them. I’d hate to catch a warning over such a major shift without being thoroughly aware.
I think calling every attempt by the mods to stop the deterioration of Great Debates into just another BBQ Pit a “new rule” is somewhat like calling every steering correction to stay in the the designated lane a “new law”.
What new rule are you imagining? Telling various feuding posters to stop pursuing a specific line of abuse for the duration of a specific thread has been a standard practice for years.
It isn’t prohibited in Great Debates. It was prohibited as a direct epithet for a specific thread. With a negated major, your conclusion fails to follow.
On the other hand, referring to other posters with epithets such as “Repugnicans” or “Dumbocrats” is prohibited in Great Debates.
Now that is a relief because it was beginning to look like if indeed the ignorant groups were going to get to dictate how this message board that fights ignorance was going to deal with them.
I have to report here that while it is not a huge burden, I already had to censor several quotes in the related thread as the statisticians and climate change academics do use the term, so I do have to report that if there is any idea to make this a general rule please be advised that you will be giving the other side a very convenient tool to delay answers or trip warnings if one is in a hurry and misses an “offensive” word.
As always, I’m just another opinionated Doper. I don’t make the rules here, so I wonder who you are referring to when you say “if there is any idea to make this a general rule please be advised that you will be giving the other side a very convenient tool to delay answers or trip warnings if one is in a hurry and misses an “offensive” word.”
The “other side” are the ones opposing science and rejecting evidence in general. The “you” are the mods here.
IMHO it is like this: Intelligent Designers were found to be in practice creationists in the US courts, and many sources that deal with them like say Pandasthumb.org use the term also when they do articles dealing with ID in schools, it would be as if many intelligent designers complained and got the mods to declare that the creationist term is offensive, and therefore also the cites that have the term are forbidden. An annoyance in the thread that has the ban now, but it leads to censorship when citations are needed.
This is your 2nd solid post in ATMB in the last few months. You are on a roll.
(I am not joking, meaning, I agree with you, this was just a local corrective action by the mods)
This is great, and well understood by most of us, even if not fully practiced by a few. But while a great general rule, you seem to be applying it in a confusing way.
It is a standard human practice to group people, and give labels to the groups. This is a necessary component for efficient discourse. So if there were a group of ardent believers in the Easter Bunny*, for example, then people who advocate a belief in the Easter Bunny might be conveniently labeled “Bunniests”, or perhaps “EBs”, or something. There is nothing inherently derogatory in those labels, they are simply shortened abbreviations for the term “Easter Bunny Advocates” (EBAs). But I guarantee you that, because most people feel the EBAs are ridiculous, many uses of EBA in discussions are going to be filled with derision. That’s not the label that is at fault, it is the attitudes of those addressing the EBAs and the positions advocated by the EBAs that lead to that derision.
Your statements appear to be saying that any use of EBA or equivalent value neutral labels would be disallowed, because by labeling them we are inherently arguing against the person, not the idea. That’s preposterous, but that is what I am getting from your repeated comments.
If you mean something otherwise, it would be helpful for you to either make your comments more specific to the actual situation, thus to make the applicability clear, or else refrain from posting generic statements that people already know and are not disputing.
No one is disputing the need to avoid throwing insults. They are disputing that specific terms are inherently insults or intended to be insults.
With regards to the nature of the word “denier”, this is slightly more gray. Inherent in the concept of “denying” is the willingly refusing to believe said thing.
For example, a Christian might define an atheist as “someone who denies belief in God”, or “a God denier”. Many atheists would feel uncomfortable with that label, because the use of the word “denier” conveys the impression that the existence of God is something that is fairly reliably known and/or provable, and the lack of acceptance of that knowledge/evidence is questionable. A more neutral description would be “a person who does not believe in God/gods”, or possibly “a person without a god belief”**. Those do not convey the same appearance of favoritism to God belief.
Thus, the word “denier” inherently carries a sense of favoritism to the positive position advocates. That can be why the AGW “deniers” might find that term a bit off-putting or insulting. It says not only what their position is, but does it in a way that gives the appearance of favoritism to the opposition.
In the same way that in the Abortion debate, there are two camps that define the issue differently, and frame the issue differently by their own choice of labels. One group is Pro-Choice, the other is Anti-Abortion. It would be somewhat pejorative and thus offputting to label the respective camps as “Pro-Abortion” or “Anti-Choice”. The shift in the term cedes precedence to the framing the opposition provides, giving them the rhetorical advantage.
From the standpoint of moderation, I don’t know that I would expect or require the mods to intervene just because someone continually referred to their opponent as an Anti-choice advocate. However, if a specific thread did become heated, and that term was one of the escalating words, I could see the mods making it off-limits in that thread.
This is how I interpret tomndebb’s intent in the situation in the OP.
From a broader context, I would wonder if using the term “denier” could be avoided, not because it isn’t accurate, but because of the inherent nature of the term being a bit slanted. Not to say anything about mandates, simpley suggesting people could individually consider what they are trying to accomplish with their comments, and how their comments are perceived.
Ridiculous example chosen to avoid stirring up debates of specific topics to focus on the meta-issue. Not intended to equate belief in the Easter Bunny with any other topic mentioned in this thread.
**Let’s not argue here about the difference between atheist vs agnostic, or the terms “soft atheist” and “hard atheist”, etc ad nauseum. Those are some people’s working definitions.
GIGO still doesn’t get that a term can be 100% true and still be offensive ot at least not conducent to debate.
I’ll repeat (again), I think that the term “denier” is a stupid term, sayin more about the person using it (repeated uses tell you he’s tun out of arguments), but I’ll always respond to it with “deluded”, just to show I can use stupid terms too.
Indeed, hard to explain when the current dictionaries do not report what they want it to be.
When one looks at a word like nigger, right away one can see the difference: Usually there is always a note that it is an offensive word with a long etymology or history.
Not so on the case of denier or deny, and I see that my opponent did not check the fine example used in the Oxford Dictionary for the word denier in post #39.
If my skimming is accurate, Gigobuster did not refer to posters as denialist or deniers, but rather to organizations and groups of off-board individuals.
IMHO:
If the term “Denier” and “Denialist” is accurate, I don’t have a problem with it. I can see the reasons for tommndeb steering one particular thread on track. But those two terms seem pretty neutral to me.
A climate change skeptic might be one who takes issue with the dose-response relationship of CO2 and temperature, while not denying that anthropogenic climate change exists. To fix the term “Skeptic” to somebody who denies global warming altogether or emphasizes scientific uncertainty while turning their attention away from risk assessment seems highly misleading.
Yes, it’s amazing–that two people on the Dope can be so ignorant of what a rule is. When someone in authority says “You are not allowed to do X” that is by definition a rule.
And tomndebb is the king of making up new rules to suit his fancy. The weird thing is, no other moderator works that way. In the past, when people have complained about his moderation style, the response has been that he’s the only mod willing to take on Great Debates, but this is obviously untrue now.
The real answer is that mods only leave when they quit, and, unlike others who have either retired or mostly stopped moderating, tomndebb has shown no signs of getting fed up with the opposition to his broken moderation style. And I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him reverse a decision, so these threads are entirely pointless.