Most of the mods don’t have a clue, but Gfactor is actually one of the better ones (in the same vein of Giraffe). If you *really *want to make a point then the personal insults about your mother would probably be ruled out of line by Ed and TPTB - if you chose to pursue that. IMHO.
But don’t waste any time or energy on FinnAgain’s insults.
Yeah. I’ve made my point and have moved on. Life’s too short to get bogged down by these things.
Amanset party of 6 billion, your table is ready. He will say Yahweh is antisemitic if he gets a cough. Disregard him.
Which begs the question “why have the moderators not done anything about it?”
QUOTE=amanset;12275595]For those not sure as to what the alleged anti-semitic views were, Finn Again repeatedly - and without any sort of evidence even when directly asked for links to posts - stated that I supported the rounding up of Jews, including those in international waters, and keeping them in concentration camps
[/QUOTE]
No worries mate, he does that to anyone who disagrees with him relative to current Israeli policy. Not only him, but he’s most vulgar and nasty about it. ‘Special case’ eh?
Rather highlights the sheer idiocy of those vulgarity rules; I’m personally terribly thrilled that the very, very precious board rules ban banal ‘vulgarities’ such as cunt - although understood that somehow this is terribly nuclear to middle brow American provincials in charge - and motherfucker, and I am spared being told ‘fuck you’ but it is entirely appropriate to call someone a child molester, one merely needs to do it in such language that the bourgeouis middle brows are not face-value shocked it would appear.
Queer really, I should think some good old fashioned direct Anglo Saxon vulgarities, as Fuck You are rather less offensive than calling those who disagree with you child molesters (or otherwise using indirection to essentially effect the same insults as banned, but with plausible deniability).
Pity really, but the Israel is Holy faction do seem to support him, although the why escapes me. I personally find the Ivan the Anti Semite excuse (a fairly pitiful sally-forther on that front (i.e. the accusation is spot on, but he’s pitiful)).
The sheer gob-smacking dishonesty does get one, and that the Mods give this a pass, well…
Excellent question. No doubt the subject matter.
Here’s the deal. The pit is for blowing off steam and being entertaining. If you really want to carry on a rational, thoughtful discussion of anything, don’t take it to the pit.
No one on staff is going to verify the accuracy of posters’ claims, nor should they. You’re the one taking his bait in the pit. Either don’t argue with him, or keep it where the rules are more suited to your liking – places like, say, GD, where the rules are in place to support your vision of how these discussions should go.
Frankly, it’s threads like this, and attitudes like yours, that have led to these ridiculous rules aimed at making the whole board/bored MPSIMS. I presume you’re an adult, and furthermore you’re anonymous. Asking for rules and moderation is a lot silly, because you’re making a knowing choice to participate in the pit. If his accusations and points aren’t worth responding to, which they generally are not, then don’t.
You have two choices: acting like a reasonable adult and ignoring childish and silly insults, or acting like a child and tattling to the teacher that “FinnAgain is touching me!”
Please don’t drag the rest of us down to that level.
Because it’s the Pit, that’s why.
There are a number of posters here who avoid the Pit, for any number of personal reasons. Perhaps you should be one of those.
I’ll note that I have noted no tendency on FinnAgain’s part to avoid GD, where personal insults are not allowed. You may want to move your disagreement to that forum.
Actually, I preferred The Pit when it was more open. I think the new rules regarding language were a bad idea.
However, I was getting supremely pissed off with Finn Again due to his insistence that I was some sort of anti-semite. That is a serious accusation, way beyond just calling someone a cunt, and one that I would rather have someone deal with.
If truth be told, I looked at the rules and tried to find a backdoor way to get Finn Again into trouble as I knew that yet again the moderators would do absolutely nothing about Finn Again and his openness to truly disgusting accusations.
I mean, let’s cover this again. He repeatedly accused me of supporting the idea of rounding up Jews, including those out in international waters, and putting them in concentration camps.
That is a whole world apart from calling someone a cunt or their Mother a whore. That is a public accusation of anti-semitism in a public board that can be easily searched. Those claims, along with the username that I use in a lot of different places, will be available to all for a long, long time. He’s basically called me a Nazi sympathiser. And it is all absolutely baseless, as I have shown in the thread. His “proof” of me having those views, which wasn’t in any way proof, was posted hours after he started accusing me of it!
But this, as others have said, is the problem. It is a touchy area and I fear we have cowardly moderators that refuse to deal with it. To paraphrase wmfellows in the pit it is apparently a hideous sin to call someone a cunt or tell someone to fuck off, but routinely accusing someone of anti-semitic views with absolutely no evidence is a-OK.
Those are fucked up rules.
So sorry. My real beef isn’t about language. It was about Finn Again, his attitude and baseless accusations of anti-semitism. Knowing that the moderators would do nothing about that touchy area I made a foolish attempt to get some kind fo action using an alternative rule. I shouldn’t have bothered.
Although frankly I shouldn’t have bothered full stop. Evidently Finn Again is a made man, untouchable. He can accuse anyone of anti-semitism, Nazi-sympathising and whatnot as many times as he likes, to as many people as he likes, and the moderators will do nothing.
I refer the honourable gentleman to the reply I gave some moments ago.
None of those accusations break the rules in the Pit.
You just don’t get it, do you?
Have you read the rules recently?
The rules start with “The BBQ Pit is the forum for rants about the outside world or quarrels between posters - often the first turns into the second. Although the standards of discourse are looser than in the other forums, the Pit is NOT a free-for-all - you don’t have to be nice, but you do have to be reasonably civil.”
I would class Finn Again’s routine accusations of anti-semitism to be trolling. Which is against the rules.
There’s also the pesky bit about “If you say hateful and/or racist things, you may get warned or banned.” Go read the thread and come back and tell me there’s no hate there.
But then again, if you read what I wrote I also argue - as others in this thread also have - that having rules where you can’t tell someone to fuck off but you can call them paedophiles or anti-semitic is supremely fucked-up.
Followed immediately by some 15 paragraphs describing the lack of “civil”, none of which are broken by your complaints.
Look, I completely understand that you are unappreciative of the way that FinnAgain comments to you in the Pit. There is a very easy way to avoid that; don’t post in the Pit.
Which is not true, as the bits about trolling and saying “hateful” things are contained in those paragraphs.
Call me weird though, but I feel that repeated baseless accusations of anti-semitic views shouldn’t be tolerated. Even in The Pitt. The Pitt is for blowing off steam, not for unchecked libel.
So, just to be clear on your position:
You liked the Pit better when there were fewer rules about what your were allowed to say.
And:
You’re angry at us because we’re not enforcing a sufficiently stringent interpretation of the new Pit rules.
Does that about cover it?
Not really.
I think the priorities are all wrong in The Pitt. The focus of moderation seems to be about the individual words rather than the meaning of the words. That’s how we end up with the ludicrous position where telling someone to fuck off gets you in trouble but repeated, baseless and potentially libelous accusations about such things as anti-semitism are treated as OK.
I’ve already stated that, in recognition of the lack of moderation action towards Finn Again in the past, I made a misguided attempt to use alternative rules just to get him the public slap on the wrist that he has long since deserved.
Seriously, which do you think is worse? A phrase such as “fuck off” or “suck my dick” or accusing someone, with no actual basis or proof, of anti-semitic views?
Oh, I’d say “anti-semite” is definitely more insulting. But the standard isn’t “too insulting,” it’s “too vulgar.” And “anti-semite,” as an insult, is many things. But it is not vulgar.
Well then, it should be trivially easy to show that my arguments are false. Instead of claiming that I engage in dishonest behavior, why don’t you go to the Pit thread and rebut the argument I made? Amanset kept demanding a cite to a post I never said existed, even after I explained why his response, in the context it was made, indicated certain things. Surely if my argument is as dishonest as you say, you should be ale to go to the thread and point out all the flaws in my chain of reasoning.
Heck, you could even freely insult me there and talk about not just my argument, but about how as a person I ‘argue dishonestly’.
Oh, and, the bandwagon fallacy is not called a fallacy because it’s a really neat way to prove a point. And yet again, if what I’m saying is so obviously wrong, it should be trivially easy to demonstrate my factual or logical errors. Go for it. A whole it thread was started to claim that I argued dishonestly, that I’d never said things that i was on record, clearly, saying, and so on. Take a swing at me in the proper forum if you’d like.
Except, of course, I didn’t say that he was an anti-Semite. I didn’t imply he was an anti-semite. I didn’t insert subliminal imagery into my post to make people think he was an anti-semite.
-I pointed out what the actual policies of the British were at the time and why they were morally reprehensible.
-I pointed out why his original response, in context, indicated support for those policies. Especially as my first post on the subject that he responded to clearly outlined that the discussion was one of all of the multiple camps the British administered and not just one, and I also clearly stated that one of the policies I was objecting to was their policy of capturing and imprisoning tens of thousands of people.
-I pointed out why his follow up response about the Jewish refugees under British control, in toto, meant that he could not argue that his views were only about a few, select examples.
Can you, in fact, quote anywhere at all that I said he was an anti-Semite? Do you not find it odd that Amanset went to such trouble as to tally up a list of all the insults I flung at him, explicitly and pulling no punches, but for some reason he was unable to cite any time I called him an anti-semite, a racist, a bigot, etc…? Isn’t it just a bit odd to say that I was rather explicit and forceful with all of my criticisms and insults, but when it came to as serious a charge as racism, that I decided to be coy about it?
Me, coy?
Really?
I’d also note that there’s a serious distinction between arguing that one supports polices which are morally wrong, and that one is a racist. I might say, for instance, that someone who supported the Japanese ‘internment camps’ during WWII was supporting a vile position, but that would not necessarily mean that they hated Asian or Japanese people. I could (and have) argued that supporting torture was a morally abhorrent position, but that did not mean I claimed that those who supported it were racist against Arabs.
Nor have I called more than a handful of Dopers anti-semites, and always with very good reason which I happily backed up at the time and would do so again would you like to challenge any of my claims int he Pit thread (so that I could discuss another poster’s character in the proper forum for doing so.)
All of which makes your mistake an interesting one.
While I’m at it:
To those who really think I called anybody a pedophile, your argument is that I was being dead serious and not mordant… seriously?
In context, if someone says something like:
They’re not commenting on a behavior and a pattern of untrue and insulting accusations, but making a factual claim? Really? In context, you’d read that not as an example of the type of behavior discussed in the sentence immediately proceeding it, but an honest-to-goodness accusation?
As for general accusations on my part that people are not saying things that are true, in general if you claim that there are people on the board who have argued that “Israel Can Do No Wrong!”, or what have you, yeah, they’ll get pointed out as untrue. I’m not sure why this surprises anybody.
Often, the use such claims are put to is obvious, such as the original GD thread which spawned this in which Captain Amazing (IIRC), who had explicitly said that there should be a settlement freeze, was accused of supporting unlimited settlement growth. I can not for the life of me understand why some people are shocked at the response such claims receive. What do you expect? If you say something that’s not true, and say it in a manner that can reasonably reasonably be construed as serving the purpose of insulting someone, what response do you expect?
“I think that the United States is wrong to torture people and shouldn’t do it.”
“You always support the United States no matter what, and you think they should torture people!”
“You’re a liar.”
“Ah-hah, see!?!? You called me a liar. Why oh why do you call people liars so often? See, you called me a liar and just a few posts up when Joe said that you enthusiastically support America torturing people, you called him a liar too!!! And look at Pete. Just a few minutes after Joe made his post, Pete said that you never disagree with anything America does and that you want them to torture even more people, and you said he was a liar too! Clearly, this shows that there’s something wrong with you. Not only that, it shows that you’re a total broken record who just repeats the same thing. When Joe, Pete and I said that you supported torture, all you could say was that each of us was lying.”
And yet, not only did I provide evidence, I explicitly gave and elaborated upon my evidence in great detail, several times. I did in fact link to posts. I did in fact explain the context, and the basis for my accusations, and why I felt a later response of yours served as confirmation for my original claim.
No, the discussion was whether or not you supported the British policies, not the Nazis’ policies. The fact that both were immoral and both involved the Jews ins some way or another =/= “British are Nazis!”
In point of fact, I asked you several times to condemn the British policies clearly and unambiguously, after I argued why your original response evinced support for them and why a followup comment of yours cemented my claim. You never did condemn them.
And in a specific instance where you were discussing the SS Exodus, a British action that consisted of piracy on the high seas, the murder of one sailor and two Holocaust survivors after they were bludgeoned to death by British sailors, the capture of 4,000+ holocaust survivors and their imprisonment behind barbed wire and snipers… you said that it was, IIRC “possibly” the wrong thing to have done.
Except you didn’t actually show that, and I repeatedly told you what my proof was, and you repeatedly said that it was something else, and then demolished that strawman.
Besides, even if your description of my argument was accurate, all that would mean is that the first part of a discussion didn’t conclusively prove something… the second did.
“Jim Crow was wrong and shameful.”
“Hey, blacks should have been happy that they had any water fountains to drink at all. Water isn’t free, you know!”’
“I can’t believe you’re arguing that it was okay to make racism the official law of the land.”
“Hey, I never said any such thing, I was only talking about the economics of water distribution, you’re dishonestly distorting my position. In any case, yes Jim Crow was okay.”
“See, you just repeated the very thing you claimed you weren’t saying!”
“So? I said it after your accusation. There are, clearly, no backsies.”
The part where they pricked my finger with a needle kinda hurt, but having the Image of Cecil burned onto my hand was an honor.
Thanks for your belated candor. It was obvious from your first thread report that that was what you were doing. Instead of trying it once, though, you tried it four times (first report, then you replied to a PM from Miller and made the same argument again, then you made the same argument again in your second thread report, and now this thread). Thing is, the truth should have been told from the start.
Instead, you tried the disingenuous approach. This isn’t a formal warning, but you don’t have much credibility left with me, and you’ve already wasted my time with “backdoor” (i.e., frivolous) arguments. I’m not going to spend another second considering new arguments now.
Let me reiterate two points:
Bolding mine. That’s what it’s all about, what I like.
I have no idea what the current brouhaha with you is all about so you can save your “if what I’m saying is so blahblahblah” for someone else because whatever it is that you’re discussing (whether I’m for it or against it) isn’t worth reading because of the way you discuss it.
The way you go after anyone who dares to have a different opinion than you do makes reading even the things I agree with you about a sour experience so I’ve found it far more pleasant to just skip it. In this thread I’ve offered the OP my opinion on just how much insults from you are worth based on your posting history and not on whatever you’re flipping out on people about now. It has nothing to do with a bandwagon and everything to do with my experience reading your posts.
So, carry on!