This is why we have mods. If those things are against the rules, mod them. If you are talking about stuff that isn’t against the rules… too bad, it’s allowed. Screaming at someone in the Pit, where they don’t even have to see it, may make you feel better, but it isn’t making the board any more pleasant or welcoming. Rather the reverse as it spills over into other forums. If someone is saying objectionable things, showing they are wrong is a hell of a lot more effective than calling them names.
If you can’t beat bigotry with facts and argument, something is wrong with your argument - or if the facts don’t support you, maybe you are just defining bigotry wrong. (Like the idiot on Twitter who called me a misogynist for saying men are stronger than women on average.)
On the contrary - bigotry tends to be an irrational position, and as famously noted you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. You can’t “beat bigotry with facts and argument” because actual bigots will simply ignore them and continue to assert their original position nonetheless.
The question is if people are persuaded of anything by facts and logic. Not often and not quickly, I’d say. It can influence onlookers, however.
AFAIK the best way to make actual bigots less bigoted is getting to know people from other groups. Personal experience is much more influential than anything else. But calling people names when the facts are not on your side is going to do the exact opposite of convince anyone. Similarly calling someone a bigot not because they are prejudiced against a group, but because they don’t agree 100% with this week’s extremist left-wing philosophy. It’s effectively desensitisation therapy against being called a bigot.
Conversely, just because someone calls someone else a name doesn’t mean the facts aren’t on their side. It may simply be that they’ve grown tired of attempting to reason with someone who just keeps repeating the same long-debunked talking points, and have decided that ridicule is the only remaining response to the ridiculous.
Very frequently these days there are just two sides repeating their pre-used talking points, not listening to each other at all. It’s an unedifying way to debate.
Or, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and positions like “the mean scary trans people are gonna corrupt my kids” or “I am happy with the status quo and any attempt to change it is reverse racism against me” are not positions based on reason.
You should know @Babale. You can show someone the evidence that very plainly demonstrates they are wrong, and all you get is a torrent of abuse for your trouble.
I’ve said this before, but on boards that don’t allow posters to confront each other, abhorrent posts are just quietly deleted by the mods. And if a poster makes too many of them, that poster is quietly deleted.
This board’s standard of not deleting offensive posts means that it needs some way to publicly address them. Otherwise the board appears to endorse them.
The same argument roughly applies to the board’s historical opposition to an upvote/downvote feature. The post stands on its own merits, versus the merits of the post(s) arguing against it.
Slight miscommunication there I believe, I wasn’t talking about responding in the pit, I was responding to @UltraVires comment that when reading offensive/dishonest/etc material that people could just skip past it and ignore it. Which leaves the other forums full of uncontested dishonesty and other poor behavior leading back to the issue of having anyone visiting our forums seeing that as representative.
The way most message boards deal with that is by deleting the offending material. We don’t do that. And do we need other method to indicate that the board doesn’t endorse those statements. If every poster who disagreed just ignored them, weed have a lot of nastiness sitting uncontested out there.
Heaven forbid anyone should be angry about racism…
I’d settle for a good old fashioned shunning, myself. Which you can only achieve if people are informed.
That or just a good old fashioned charivari.
Up until it’s not. Rules can change. Or existing rules can be properly enforced once pointed out and discussed publicly, when they possibly weren’t modded even though reported. The rules here aren’t as clear-cut as you seem to think, and the mods can be convinced they were wrong sometimes. That’s a feature, not a bug.
No one here thinks you can beat sense into the actual bigot, not even with facts. It is the waverers, the ones that think that perhaps the bigots arguments make sense, that have to be convinced. And name calling just does the opposite. They then tend to sympathize with the bigot for being ganged up on.
The difference is that we don’t have to actually convince someone for the Pit to be effective. We just have to make it more trouble than it’s worth to keep saying that shit.
Yes, there is a major flaw in that the person can just ignore the Pit. That seems hard for most posters to do if they know they’ve been Pitted, but it can be done.
That’s why, as I have always said, the better solution is for bigotry to be moderated. And, as I said earlier in the thread, we’ve already started doing that, and the board is much better because of it.
The problem is that, even with the best moderation, the mods won’t ever completely align with what every poster thinks is not okay. And, as long as that’s the case, those people will want a place to be able to tell that person off for being an asshole.
(That, by the way, is the perspective I see missing in anti-Pit arguments. They always assume the Pitter is the asshole. But they believe it is the PIttee. And you can’t really tell without them hashing it out. Getting rid of one side but not the other is not a good idea.)
Sure, sometimes you can convince people with logic and argument. But then those aren’t the cases when people get Pitted. Pitting is what you do when facts don’t work, and it’s not bad enough to be moderated.
Faux civility has too long been a hamper on being able to deal with racism. The Pit provides “Real Talk.”
The goal of the name-calling isn’t to stomp out bigotry, it’s to make us feel better about the fact that some people’s reptilian brains are too stubborn to allow them to move past their tribal ways.
I’ve definitely read pit threads where I thought the pitter was the asshole. And I’ve definitely read pit threads where it rapidly became obvious that the pittee was the asshole. And sometimes they both are.
Let’s also not forget that one reason why these things are discussed in the Pit is that this is a message board and the whole point of this place is to talk about things that interest us and what we care about.
