Your argument and your examples are stupid and do not support what you’re trying to say. The whole point of the Pit is that it’s an outlet for extreme interactions. A librarian slapping my hand is not an extreme interaction and obviously, obviously, there’s no call for invective.
But if some walnut-brained yahoo comes up to my desk at work and tries to browbeat me into voting for Lyndon LaRouche, or if a stranger approaches me at a party and begins arguing that the Nazis were misunderstood and the ovens were just ordinary showers and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a factual exposé, you’re goddamn right I’m gonna call the cunt a cunt and tell him to fuck the fuck off.
The rule change solves a problem that doesn’t exist. We aren’t leaping at one another’s throats over nothing. The moon-hoax thing mentioned earlier in the thread was a straw man, because it doesn’t actually go the way it was represented. It actually goes like this:
Hoax Arguer: The moon landings were faked because (blah blah blah).
First SDMBer: No, because (counterblah).
Second SDMBer: (Tangential mockery of the idea, not the arguer.)
Hoax Arguer: I disagree, because (repeat of blah blah blah).
Third SDMBer: Rolleyes.
First SDMBer: Presuming you’re serious, (more counterblah).
Hoax Arguer: Listen, can’t you see that (repeat of blah blah blah).
Fourth SDMBer: Okay, look. (Long, detailed recapitulation of past debates.)
Hoax Arguer: I don’t buy it, because (repeat of blah blah blah).
First SDMBer, in the Pit: Hoax Arguer is a stupid motherfucker.
That, according to the new rule, would be abusive. But: I’d assert that it’s not abusive, because in situations like this, it is a simple statement of objective fact — “hoax arguer” is a stupid motherfucker. Now, though, arbitrarily, we are not allowed to observe the stupid-motherfuckerness of the stupid motherfuckers, because it’s not “civil.” No, instead, we need to exercise our thesaurian muscles, and create some other way of expressing the same sentiment, in hopes that more creative epithets will generate amusement in the curtained cabal, and preclude chastisement for the uncivility.
But why? Why go to these lengths? The standard Hoax Arguer, or any other classical dumb-argument dead-horse-flogger — Stormfronters, anti-vaxxers, Obama-not-a-citizen bozos, ad nauseum: any of the quickly-recognizable agenda-driven numbskulls who park their rhetorically-leaky muscle cars in our flowerbeds on a weekly basis — is, simply and obviously, a stupid goddamn motherfucker. It adds nothing to the board’s culture to disallow a flat statement of that inarguable fact, and, I would argue, harms the board’s culture and its ostensible purpose, inherited from Signior Adams, of mocking the stupid back into its cave.
This is ridiculous nonsense, and it’s astonishing that the administration is being so stubborn. Unless StinkFishPot is right, and this is a boot callously swung into the anthill for some misdirected purpose. One way or another, it sucks.