Let me get this clear - you think either :
[ul]
[li]Pedant hasn’t claimed black people (self-described) are less intelligent than white people, or [*]That he doesn’t think the difference is genetic?[/li][/ul]
You don’t think saying “Blacks, as a group, have inferior average intelligence to whites, as a group” is racist?
Animus is not a necessary requirement for racism.
You should recognize that I am addressing the content of your posts and not calling you names. If you.cannot recognize that distinction, you are making my point.
I did not say that you were wrong to take offense. However, his remarks are not a personal attack on you. You are free to refute his errors, but you will not be permitted to respond with personal attacks. When the word racist becomes an adjective bearing no emotional weight, you will be permitted to employ it against another poster.
Ibn Warraq’s point regarding the differences between South African abuse and the philosophical differences over religious belief are irrelevant. To determine which sufferings are sufficiently grievous to allow an exception to the rule simply puts the Mods back into the role of judging who has suffered more.
I doubt that anyone would be happy with our choices, there, either.
I didn’t claim they were. Nevertheless they insult and denigrate me. Especially the latter.
I didn’t do so. I’m familiar with the rule as it currently exists, which is why I’m a frequent linker to this Pit thread.
I’ve not been asking the Mods not to moderate personal attacks. My one warning was for responding to some apartheid-related racist goading with a “Fuck you”, I’ve learned that lesson.
I have been asking you to moderate racist speech under the “Don’t be a jerk” and “no hate speech” rules of engagement. You know, to create " an open environment in which people can’t be insulted nor denigrated" - because apparently personal attacks count, but attacking entire peoples is A-OK. That Jonathan thinks that is compatible with allowing any and all ideas, no matter how repugnant, is a joke. All this does is create an open (and welcoming) environment for those racists who can remain polite. It is in no way an open environment for me.
of course …
Of course not Dibble, there is no personal attack if it is not said with your name that our entire races are inferior. it is only a coincidence.
so this is the standard? no emotional weight the noun and adjective must have. Or is it only the ad hoc justification of the moment, to be changed if it is another term like anti-semite or the sneer of the political?
HE said you were (“approximately”) calling him “logically deficient”, not his posts. Your (snarky and IMO personal) response didn’t change that perspective one little bit. That’s calling him names.
Yeah, for reals. There’s certainly a good reason to focus attacks on arguments and not on posters, but tom offers example after example of how to attack posters while technically staying within the bounds of attacking their posts. Consider this exchange, in which Robert asked for his point to be address by a mod who didn’t say that he:
The conceit that this is anything but a straight-up insult to robert, a way of denigrating his intellect, is ludicrous. This is the sort of thing that should be warned (gimme a minute and I’ll report it).
Compare it to calling someone racist when they straight-up say that one race is biologically inferior to another. In this case, accurately applying a label to the position should be a completely uncontroversial move in the debate; it’s something that’s done all the time with myriad other positions, and having a word for the position enables its discussion without circumlocution. It helps the debate.
Snarkily implying that someone is stupid, as tom clearly did above, does not help the debate at all.
ISTM that this is the same disagreement we have always had - should posters be able to argue in favor of positions that other Dopers find offensive?
Every so often someone will post psychological studies that purport to show that conservatives are fearful, rigid in their thinking, and so forth. I don’t see how that is different from posting studies that hold SES and family background constant but find significant differences in other groups. (And you can just as easily slice up political orientation as you can race, yet I don’t see many people claiming that there is no such thing as political orientation.) The question should be “is this true, and how strong is the evidence?”
The problem, if there is one, is what happens when a group of Dopers have posted what they consider a complete refutation - and the advocate for the unpopular opinion does not consider himself to be refuted. So he persists in posting his position, and the other side has run out of arguments. And here we are.
Regards,
Shodan
No, but it is typical of the stupid nature of Tomndebb’s posts where his posts show the belief that “Rules apply to thee, not me”.
Suspect of what, exactly?
Do you consider people with lower IQ than you to be inferior to you? Because that’s the implicit assumption you are making here. I don’t think that. But do you? And let’s face it… IQ is a measure of… a person’s ability to take an IQ test.
Let’s also keep in mind that when you say “black people are inferior to white people”, anyone reading that is going to assume you mean “all black people are inferior to all white people”. That’s an important distinction to be made when one is talking statistically.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to just quote what the guy actually says without twisting it to make it sound different. Just quote him. It’s as simple as that. Let the quote speak for itself.
And before the mods come in and shut this thread down, let’s take any debate about who is and who isn’t a racist to the Pit thread where there is some discussion on the subject going on there.
Yes, indeed: some people find it offensive to be labeled as racist when they explicitly make claims that fit the dictionary definition of racist. Should we be able to argue in favor of accurately describing such people, despite the offense they may take?
Pretzels anyone?
it is not the main point of the OP or most of the discussion at all, although the redirection to this idea by persons attached to the idea of their martyrdom and having the tendency to see all things through distortive ideological goggles it may seem so to them.
this may seem so to the extreme ideological who also may not the learning or the mind to follow the sciences and understand facts only through their specific ideologies, but there is not a lack of the argument or the demonstration of false and distorted facts around genetical concepts.
the subject of the OP and the main of the discussion has been only the illogical and ad hoc approach of the moderation around a certain forbidden noun with as it happens a definition that can be objectively met, as Fenris has noted.
but misdirections to favored subjects and complaints are to be expected.
No, IMO we should not. The discussion ought to be about the truth or otherwise of any given statement. Labelling the person making the statement adds nothing.
I think you are wrong. Are you going to debate the question, or do you have anything besides not-terribly-thinly veiled ad hominems?
I am not 100% sure I understand this, but what I mentioned was what happens after various posters present what they think is refutation, and the poster with the unpopular position does not agree that he or she has been refuted. IOW one side runs out of arguments, and wants to resort to name-calling.
Did you have any response to that situation?
Regards,
Shodan
I think the issue that needs mod attention in the case under discussion is more on the lines of hijacking every goddam thread about either race or genetics into this same, tired debate about IQ scores and race. Can we just have one thread on that topic and not let every other thread devolve into it? Reminds me of the time when every political thread, no mater what the original subject was, would eventually become a debate about the Iraq War.
THAT we could make happen. I’m perfectly comfortable with an OP asking that such be excluded and my enforcing it.
Generally, the original poster does not have that level of control - one starts a thread, one doesn’t own it - but from time to time I’ve seen good reason to back that sort of thing up.
But why does the OP need to ask? You guys redirect threads that get hijacked all the time, and you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to know what a rat hole this particular hijack always turns out to be. The same 3 or 4 people arguing the same shit over and over and over.
This is another matter, I admit. But if I redirected every thread that went down predictable rabbit holes GD would look pretty empty. So in general the policy is to leave them be unless they get truly out of control.
But an OP asking for something particular like that? I’d be willing to entertain the idea, sure.
Perhaps the flip side could also be implemented - the OP could request that there be no accusations of racism in the thread in question.
Regards,
Shodan