New Deal Democrat's (very welcome) banning

I think the mods did a decent job with NDD. A year or so ago when he was hijacking every thread about Africa or any US social problems with the same generic screed, the mods managed to corral him into limiting his racial views in threads specifically about race. That allowed his views to be expressed without over-running the board with the same repetitive argument.
And he more or less kept the race stuff in those threads until lately, when he started pretty clearly just posting to get peoples goat, they banned him.

In any case, I like the general rule of allowing any view to be expressed as long as its done civily. I wouldn’t want a blanket ban on racists, or any other unpopular view, even if I personally don’t think much of the people that subscribe to those views.

Ahh, so he has a history of ruining any attempts to have actual discussion.

I guess it is thankful that the people running this place only gave him another year to continue doing that before dealing with him.

We did deal with him. We warned him several times and got some improvement. That’s what moderating is. And like I said, we try to give people multiple chances to shape up. He’s not the only person to benefit from that.

Of course not. It just illustrates the inexplicable collection of behaviors that are all thrown into the same “forgivable” basket, doesn’t it?

I think I’ve done a semi-decent job at summing up how we treat these kinds of things and why we do it. I’d rather we didn’t have to put up with people who spout this kind of idiotic garbage, but we do think the broader principle of allowing a broad range of discussion is important. That includes allowing some discussion of disagreeable ideas because the alternative - declaring some topics or viewpoints totally off-limits - is somewhat out of sync with the principles of this message board. And it also gives a gift to bigots and nutjobs because it suggests the rest of us don’t know how to argue against their views.

[godwin]You know who else relied on people ignoring him until it was too late?[/godwin]

Personally, I’m glad - hell, I’d have banned him just for his irritating formatting of quote-mined wiki responses :slight_smile:

Let’s be clear: one of the moderators made it explicit that it is totally okay to suggest that another poster is a rapist on the basis of his national origin. Given the weird way this place operates, this apparently is okay. I don’t get why this is accepted here, but it’s obvious that it is.

First they came for the racists…

:stuck_out_tongue:

Meh, your just ranting. My entire post was about how they did deal with him, and that the solution worked, at least until recently.

And now we’ve dealt with him in a more permanent way.

Miller explained his opinion elsewhere. Asking if someone is a rapist is disgusting, but it’s the Pit - you can say a lot of disgusting things there. That’s one of the things it’s for. In this situation, we decided the poster was trolling and handled it that way.

I think his banning was handled fairly. What a creep. It scares the crap out of me to actually know there are wannbe “intellectual” racists who probably think they’re superior even over other racists, all because they bought a racist textbook.

I don’t doubt that NDD was a racist. Most of the posts that I read of his however were not of that subject. (I didn’t read his pit thread for example). So I’d like to clarify that he had many posts that were not drivel.* I’m not objecting to the banning: I’m just clarifying the record.

I can’t remember ever reading something noncrazy by kanicbird, but again that’s just a matter of what threads I visit.
Generally speaking, I am comfortable with the amount of rope that the mods feed to less worthy and necessarily transient participants at this board.

  • That said, I just skimmed his posting history: I think that maybe 48 of his past 50 posts were in racially dubious threads.

I’ll swim against the current here and say that when he wasn’t talking about race, I agreed with NDD quite a lot. Whenver he commented on policy matters not involving race, often I found him to be quite insightful and spot on. Of course he couldn’t keep off his favorite pony, which is quite unfortunate.

I just hope the foal is raised in a good home.

Because, responding to them results in:

Do you really think you’re going to logic the guy into giving up his views? Don’t be this guy.

It’s not worth wasting your time and ruining a decent discussion to respond to a guy who is doing nothing but shitting in the thread.

When he wasn’t strangling women and burying them in the desert, Ted Bundy was a pretty charming guy!

Case in point: here’s an entirely inoffensive post. Of course, I had to go four pages back in his post history to find it.

Here’s my concern: You have hate-speech rules. I think, in general, “hate speech rules” is a dumb idea, and I wouldn’t mind if it went away. But since it’s not, why is it so hard to enforce?

There’s a big, huge, gray area with “hate speech”, and I get that that gray area is hard to moderate. But when you have someone asking a black person if he’d raped white women, or a guy seriously spouting that because black people don’t have neanderthal genes like white folks do so that they’re closer to monkeys than us(???), there’s no gray area at all. If that doesn’t trigger the “hate speech” rules, what does?

I say, either enforce the hate-speech rules and ban the obvious, over-the-top racists, or get rid of the rules. It took you guys years to get rid of Sevastopol, years to get rid of New Deal Democrat, but you all once instabanned Seven (retracted it after some second thoughts and a lot of outrage) for talking about (but not linking to) the Snackpit. Like, within an hour. Even though it’s not against the rules. But you let NDD post for years despite the fact that if the rules mean anything, he was constantly breaking them.

Why is it so hard to moderate the obvious, really obvious extreme cases? Why the incredible reticence to actually moderate on the clear cases of hate-speech?

It’s funny, but NDD has made me realize that I find Neo-Nazi dirtbag racists less boring than scientific racists. This may be because I’m a real scientist.