FWIW, “feckless potshotters” is the kind of thing I’d be happy to see warnings for. Your behavior in that thread was the opposite of behavior that leads to good conversation, and I’m curious whether you’ve found productive conversation comes from that sort of behavior in other venues.
Yes your fingers are indeed in your ears as I haven stated repeatedly that I did review half of the cites.
Yes. Best to focus on “certain types”, that is a clear policy.
No. Asking probing questions of Russia baiters is pretty much a nonstarter everywhere.
Allow me to be clearer. I’m glad to see the mods taking on fact resistant posters. I don’t think such people should be banned entirely, but removing them from derailing threads is a good way to go about it. I think the next step should be a subject ban for such posters.
More like you read the first, skimmed the second, and ignored the rest.
So you know it doesn’t do any good, but you keep on doing it. That’s pretty cool.
Characterising them as “Russia baiters” is also a devastating rhetorical flourish.
I believe - though he can correct me - that Bone may have been referring to your reading other people’s replies in the thread.
Nonetheless, Great Debates and Elections are for discussion, not potshotting - whatever that means I’m sure it’s not helpful - and such can earn the ire of the moderation staff. A certain amount of snarkiness is tolerated as a part of the grease that allows discussion to move. Too much, or a poster whose contribution is only redirection and cutting comments, however, can lead to sanction of one form or another.
If you can’t live within those restrictions, I suggest you avoid Great Debates and Elections going forward.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. And I’d put it more emphatically like this:
A link is not, by itself, a cite.
It becomes a cite by either summarizing or quoting the stuff that matters at the link. To someone clicking on the link, it should be at least reasonably clear when they’ve found the germane content.
Otherwise, it becomes a guessing game, where the reader of a post has to dig into the links, make assumptions about what content the poster intended as support for his argument, and all but make the poster’s argument in order to rebut it. (At which point the poster can respond to the rebuttal with, “no, I meant this other part of what was at the link, which you haven’t rebutted at all,” so fuck that shit.)
Let’s confine this discussion to discussion of moderation, rather than the topic of the underlying thread.
The first question is whether it is appropriate for a moderator to take action to keep threads on track. The answer is yes. The next question is to determine what actions are appropriate to take. Moderators have a variety of tools and limiting participation is one of them.
That being established, the key question is whether behavior in that thread warranted the particular action. I agree with John Mace that it is always available to challenge cites. But that is not what was done. Instead rather with the direction the thread was going there was essentially no way to proceed and I felt the best course of action was to limit your participation in that particular thread. And what I see now is that discussion about the issues resumed.
Will, You are free to start your own thread to discuss the aspects you wish, so if there are facets that are not somehow being addressed you are welcome to do so.
In the years I’ve been here, I’ve learned that many people read this page at work (like I’m doing now) and therefore are not able, or willing, to click on cites. So, if you want to make something a part of the discussion, you need to “quote” it, and not just paste a link and say, “see here”.
But, I don’t think that is what happened here.
Sage Rate made a fairly basic claim - that there is little doubt that Russia and Wikileaks have a relationship. In support, Sage listed 4 cites. Note, though, that while the cites supported the contention, the point being made was simply that Russia and Wikileaks were related; this was stated plainly in the comment (and, in fact, I recall that Sage made a point of clarifying that proof of “control” of Wikileaks by Russia wasn’t being asserted).
Now, it seems to me (humble reader of the Dope that I am), the Will could have questioned what, in those cites, supports this claim. It might be kind of lazy to do so, but it could also be a legitimate question if Will isn’t able to read the links.
Instead, though, Will dismissed the cites as incredible - and then admitted that he was being dismissive because he got partially through the first one and didn’t like the people quoted. In so doing, he essentially conceded that his argument was flippant, since he wasn’t giving the opposing viewpoint any legitimate consideration and was flatly refusing to fully review the information supporting it. (Plainly, if he saw one cite, he had no problems clicking links or reading them). It was just being obstinate.
Then he made this worse when he was called on it by changing the argument. No longer was he disputing the point, in the thread, that there was a relationship of some kind between Russia and Wikileaks. Instead, he was insisting that he was promised internal discussions that proved a conspiracy between the two.
Of course, no such claim was made (instead, in the midst of discussing evidence of a relationship, there was referenced internal memos - and, indeed, the links provided do reference internal Wikileaks memos that state Julian Assange’s political biases for Russia and against Hillary Clinton).
Now, personally (since we are in ATMB), I don’t think Will should have been banned from the thread.
But he was definitely derailing it with a style that was, at best, “distracting”, and could fairly be described as not debating in good faith. My vote is that moderation was proper.
Yes. There are fact-resistant posters. A good way to test this is to provide facts and see if they are resistant. Unfortunately no facts were provided. There was a data dump of a sort, with a lot of silly content front-loaded.
Yes. The poster was batting .000. Perhaps my mistake was engaging further after I realized his contribution was unserious, but I wanted to give him a chance to do a good job.
Confronting warmongering propaganda is the burden of a truth-seeker in a free society.
Yes. I find it necessary to shake off the irritating potshotters with devastating rhetorical flourishes. If I don’t, they will quickly multiply I have experienced. It’s like flies at a picnic. Nevertheless I must eat.
I can live with the restrictions just fine. I haven’t received a lot of warnings for someone who is so incessantly attacked by feckless potshotters. In any case, I am sometimes overwhelmed by their sheer volume.
Yes. Great comment.
Nah. You have mischaracterized the discussion, but the moderator has asked us to not go into that in this thread.
The prospects of such a thread being properly moderated in the relevant forums are not good.
Maybe we can all try to do a better job. I hope you will not resort to another moderation tactic which is completely unprecedented in order to silence another antiwar viewpoint. In this case, the unprecedented event was a threadbanning for not reading every single citation and asking for specific quotes.
Really? :dubious:
Nah. You have mischaracterized the discussion.
The admins and moderators of this board have always been huge fans of war. I find it slightly off-putting, as I lean only slightly pro-war. If there weren’t any more wars, yes, I’d be disappointed, but life would go on. Hell, I’m fine with an occasional skirmish or firefight, if there are a few casualties. But the mods— it’s all “rockets’ red glare” and “we will fight them on the beaches,” day in and day out.
You have an incredible ability to recharacterize comments in a completely different way, as if the prior comments aren’t available to be read.
The moderator has asked us not to get into arguments about Russia/Wikileaks. There was no comment about not getting into the conduct you engaged in and the moderation response.
So (and without even addressing the substance of a Russia/Wikipedia connection), the initiating comment was:
Sage Rage was kind enough to respond with an answer:
This was followed by cites. Now, as I said, you could have asked what those cites said, or how they supported the statement (presumably a fair thing, since - as I previously noted - you may not have been able to read them). You did no such thing, instead pretending like you knew what the cites said but disagreed with them based on who wrote them.
This was a mischaracterization of what you were given. Which became apparent when you admitted that you dismissed the cites (and the statement they were supporting) because you didn’t read them. When the conversation tried to return to the substance of the statement (which is the subject of the thread), you didn’t address the statement (or even the evidence), but instead confirmed that you were not giving sincere consideration of another poster’s argument.
At this point, it’s a complete hijack, as we are now down the road of talking about what you have read, instead of the subject under discussion - whether there is some connection Russia and Wikileaks.
Others tried to get past this to continue the discussion
But at this point you were moving the goalposts, as it were, and making this about whether claims that were not made were proven to your satisfaction.
(Note that you made no request for “pulling out what is not BS” - you simply dismissed the cites as not worth your time to read. When Sage tried to explain in simple sentences what the cites revealed, you ignored the explanation and demanded the raw information - “What did the internal communications reveal?” - which you had been given links to).
And now we get to my conclusion about moderation.
At this point, the thread was lost. And the reason the thread was lost was because Sage Rate had taken the time to provide you with an answer to your question (one factually supported), which you had completely dismissed, and now - since the thread was all about how satisfied you were - you had upped the ante to demand quotes directly from Wikipedia about how Russia controlled it (despite the fact that nobody was making that claim - in fact, Sage’s original answer to you specifically eschewed the claim that everything Wikipedia did was for Russia)
You derailed the thread, rather than accept the point (there is evidence of a connection between Russia and Wikileaks) or refute the point (with your own links to show otherwise).
Your petulant response was a problem, and moderation seems appropriate.
Without getting into the content,
are both top-notch usernames.
God damn it, I said thyme!! Arrrrrrgh!!! :mad:
If you actually believe that’s why you were banned from the thread, you haven’t been paying attention to this one.