# Mr. Arafat, Context, and Board Rules

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mr-arafat-context-and-board-rules/678696>\
**Category:** About This Message Board\
**Created:** [January 13, 2014, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mr-arafat-context-and-board-rules/678696 "2014-01-13T19:43:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 87

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2014, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mr-arafat-context-and-board-rules/678696/87 "2014-01-20T21:57:17Z")

</div>

> [@Honesty](#):
>
> So, in other words “No, you do not have the right to argue you’ve been misquoted”.

You do have the right to challenge someone for misquoting you. You were not misquoted. No one changed or added or subtracted any word from the sentence that was quoted.

> [@Honesty](#):
>
> I don’t even know what you’re getting “setting up on your rules.”

I am not surprised, as you continue to demonstrate your lack of understanding of the point.

It is not misquoting someone to selectively post a sentence if nothing is changed within it. Your insistence that a quote must include an entire paragraph is simply a rule that you have made up. It is not part of the typical rules of editing in journalism. THAT is what I mean by “setting up your own rules.”

And in this thread, you are repeating your accusation of trolling (a violation of board rules that I will overlook for the moment). To support your claim, you link to an article by Cecil, but nothing in his article supports your accusation without you giving some special interpretation to his words that do not actually bear on the thread in question.

> [@Stink Fish Pot](#):
>
> **Tomndebb** ,
> 
> Your moderation in that thread was heavy-handed, and IMO showed favoritism. I read that entire trainwreck, and I was amazed at the decision you made to jump in and make your first mod appearance (and your first appearance at all, if I remember correctly) on page 8 (the last page) of that thread.

Well, that would be due to the fact that the thread was not particularly interesting and I did not spend my days reading it until I received several Reports regarding accusations of trolling. Few posters in that thread covered themselves in glory with their behavior, but it tended to remain the sort of wrangling that is common in Great Debates until the last couple of pages.

> [@Stink Fish Pot](#):
>
> The moderation struck me as odd for two reasons. One, it was completely out of line to be as heavy handed as you were with **Honesty** , while leaving everyone else (except **Terr’s** slap on the wrist) off the hook.

One statement to refrain from falsely accusing another poster of misquoting one and another statement to tell a poster to stop accusing another of lying is “heavy handed”? That is one way to look at it.

> [@Stink Fish Pot](#):
>
> If you spent the time to read that thread, you would have seen all sorts of what i would consider inappropriate comments and remarks, not the least of which is this one by jackmanii, post #88, directed at **Honesty** :

If Post #88 was a violation of the rules, then you should have Reported it. I see no such Reported Post in my in-box.  
You are right that I did not read the entire thread. For six and a half pages, no poster felt the need to report any other’s actions and, after reading the first page of the thread, I had not found it sufficiently interesting to keep reading. When a post was Reported, I read back over several preceding posts to see what had prompted the post in question. I found the typical bickering that frequently stands in for debate in that forum. I found only two accusations of dishonesty and one accusation of trolling. I addressed the two accusations of dishonesty (leaving the trolling report to Jonathan Chance who had responded a few minutes, previously).

If there were other rules violations, you should have reported them, then, rather than waiting weeks and weeks to report them from a totally different thread. (At least, you seem to have backed away from the odd claim that Honesty actually had been misquoted.)

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mr-arafat-context-and-board-rules/678696)._