Yeah…new rule: No insulting dead liberals, but conservatives are fair game. Because we hate conservatives here.
Second verse, same as the first.
In this context, “new” means “four years old.” And you were aware of this because you were certainly active in those ATMB threads.
I can’t stop you from making this complaint every couple of weeks, but it does kind of lose its luster when that happens.
Seems supremely arbitrary to allow dancing on some graves but not others. If the departed is popular, no dancing. If he’s not, put on them dancing shoes.
Hows about a no dancing rule, period, in MPSIM and kick up your heels as much as you like in the Pit? Then no one has to guess who is popular and who isn’t.
Maybe if you and your co-mods would stop making decisions favoring liberals, I’d quit raising the issue. You can stick your head in the sand all you like, but conservatives do not have a level playing field here.
I think the argument that Koch was a liberal is not clear cut. He backed George W Bush, hated unions, was aggressively pro-Israel, and pissed off the Black constituents. He had some liberal leanings, but hardly cut and dry.
Your argument of bias based on Koch’s liberalism doesn’t hold water.
As for dissing a controversial dead man, there’s hardly a better precedent to be found, than
Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary of Richard Nixon, July 16, 1994.
Since, as you admit, it’s a judgment call as to whether the figure is merely disliked or REAALLLLY disliked, and also a judgment call as to whether the poster is being slightly obnoxious or REAAALLLLY obnoxious in dissenting from the hushed respectful tone of the RIP thread, why don’t you err on the side of reason and simply request that future dissenters open a Pit thread without the warning, whistle-blowing, THIS WILL NOT STAND stuff? Same effect, and less aggressive overbearingness. I realize the inherent contradiction in suggesting that restraint in mod behavior might be a good thing in general.
Nobody made a decision favoring liberals. A poster was warned for making an overly nasty comment about Koch in an MPSIMS thread. Six years ago - so long ago that none of the current MPSIMS mods were even on the staff - nobody was warned for similar comments about Jerry Falwell. You can either recognize that these kinds of situations are handled a little differently than they were six years ago because in 2009 we had a long discussion of how we handle these threads in the interest of trying to be consistent - or you can complain forever that it went differently in 2007. Your choice.
I strongly suspect that the OP would not have been warned if he’d worded the post in such a way that it didn’t look like threadshitting.
I.E. “I’m glad Koch is dead. He bungled the handling of the AIDS outbreak in New York and consequently huge number of New Yorkers died due to his incompetence”
Or, “The guy heavily exacerbated racial tensions during his reign. I won’t miss him.”
Or even, “Under his reign New York turned into a pisshole swamped by homeless people. Good riddance!”
Note, I’m not saying I’d agree with any of those, but had the OP at least explained his reasoning, I suspect the worst that would have happened is perhaps a note to tone it down.
Yeah, thats pretty much it.
Don’t crank the he’s EBIL and I hope he burns in HELB to 11 unless you are pretty darn sure thats a vast majority consensus and or you have some facts to back up your case.
Itsa variation on the don’t be a JERK rule. If your Aspergers is so bad you often get surprised at being called a jerk ya might want to tread lightly.
Can I expect similar protection for the next conservative celebrity that dies? First liberal that threadshits gets a warning, even if it is one of your favorites?
I’m not at all sure that my motivations for disliking Koch matter very much. I don’t like him for a wide variety of reasons–among them, his cowardice in hiding his sexual identity (detailed here) --but threadshitting is very much a judgment call, and so is the degree of Koch’s evil. It’s obvious to me that if there had been a Mod in charge of MPSIMS who shared some of my animosity towards Koch, or who thought I was a fine fellow, I would have been informally chided. If a mod actually agreed with me about Koch, the mods would be circling each other defending NOT giving me a warning.
Well
Yah called it wrong.
Suck it up.
You can expect the MPSIMS mods to enforce the same rule. Whether they note or warn the poster depends on their judgement about the post in question.
Gee…wanna bet that their judgement favors liberals over conservatives? Say George W. Bush dies, and one of your pet posters pops in to say they hope he rots in Hell. That will be deemed acceptable, because he wasn’t a liberal, and many liberals despise him. Pelosi dies, and I post that I won’t miss her, and here come the jackboots…
Can I just say that, no matter how much I may upon occasion disagree with the mods and their rulings, it’d drive me insane to constantly hear this pedantic rules-lawyering bullshit from the same people.
“You put your hand over the line!” “No I didn’t!” “Yes I did!” “You get away with it because mom likes you better!” “No she doesn’t!” “Yes she does!” ad nauseum.
I swear to Og, it makes trying to keep up with the latest information about what is and isn’t acceptable now on the Dope a major league fucking tedious pain in the ass. Gah, you all have my utter sympathies. How anyone retains their composure and doesn’t go all ban happy on peoples’ obnoxious pointy heads, I have no idea.
Which is why I’m calling for them to enforce the rules that are actually rules, and where there’s a lot of gray area and judgment-calling, as here, to refrain from issuing warnings. I mean, listen to **Marley **here: “Whether they note or warn the poster depends on their judgement about the post in question.” That’s tantamount to saying that the only criterion is not any clear rule, or any other kind of criterion, other than the individual Mod’s judgment about the individual post.
But I was cited for breaking a rule, that doesn’t exist, on the basis of my having been here long enough to know better. The only thing I could possibly learn from this is to have liked Ed Koch more.
This question suggests your complaints haven’t been effective and that you don’t think you will be effective in the future. Do you think perhaps you should try looking at this another way?
“Pet?” Do you want to field this one, pseudotriton ruber ruber, or should I? Seriously though, Oakminster, I don’t know what else you expect here. I can’t promise that a mod will warn some future poster for saying something that offends your sensibilities. I can say the mods will apply the rule as they see fit and that they’ll strive to be fair like we always do, which means they may note or warn the poster depending on the content of the post and their or judgment. I can’t promise you’ll be happy with the results. In fact I wouldn’t bet on it.
Do you think you should actually make some effort to be fair and impartial in your moderating? Because you don’t. You modded me for “gun grabber”, when there was no legitimate way for me to anticipate such an arbitrary and capricious ruling. Pretty much every recent other thread on the subject contained much stronger language…yet you picked my post to suddenly apply a new rule of “civility” without prior notice.
Mods, like judges, should strive to be consistent and predictable. Similar facts should produce similar results. That is not the case on this board.
We do. If you disagree and feel we are either biased or don’t care about being fair, what is complaining going to accomplish? You said in 2009 that we didn’t mod some of the Kennedy threads fairly because Falwell was treated differently (although it’s apples and oranges); you’re saying now that the warning in the Koch thread was unfair because of Falwell; and you’re saying you don’t think it’s going to change. So I would think that suggests that either you’ve misunderstood how we mod this stuff or that we don’t care about this complaint. (First one is the correct answer, but the complaint is useless either way.)
What happened after that?