Wow. Make a pun, avoid pun-ishment?
Why not? When you announced that you were getting married, we did not subject you to bans.
Yes, I relayed that one to Qadgop earlier tonight. He laughed very hard.
So, Doc, whacha doin’ later, cutie?
StarvingButStrong: I don’t think anonymity-protecting lies fall under the same category as what Number Six/Kaitlyn was involved in. Probably nearly every poster on the SDMB has changed details when discussing their personal lives. I know I do – I change or abbreviate the names of my friends and family. Sure, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about them anyway, but if I do, I want to leave them with some semblance of privacy. And how many posters refer to their spouses, or their children, by SDMB names? (I’m thinking of examples like Persephone’s Dianasaurus)
But I don’t invent an entire life for myself – how exhausting would that be! It’d be nearly impossible to maintain a charade like that, which I think is why Kaitlyn slipped up and got caught in the end. How do you keep the fake facts of your fake life straight for 4 years? I can’t remember last week clearly. But if you want to “play doctor” or “play astronaut” or whatever, there’s plenty of places on the 'Net better suited for that.
Whoops! I realized my last sentence was a little unclear. I meant you could “play” at being people other than who you are harmlessly, at RPGs and the like. I didn’t mean it’s okay to go around pretending to be a legitimate doctor.
Not quite. **Kaitlyn ** asked to have her posting privileges *suspended * and added that she deserved to be banned.
Dictionary.com defines *suspended * as:
which implies that the barring is not permanent. Now of course, she adds she deserves to be banned, but does not quite ask for said banning. In his explanation of her banning **Arnold Winkelried ** says:
Lying per se is not a bannable offence. Lying to protect your anonymity is certainly not something that will get you banned. To take a very relevent example, in Kaitlyn’s first day at school thread she said that she had changed the name of the town she lived in (‘Green Lakes’) to keep her anonymity. That was a lie, she wasn’t banned, and she shouldn’t have been. I refer to my daughter by a pseudonym, and don’t expect to get banned for that. I also don’t expect to be banned for being female yet having a male username.
On the other hand, if I took my username to an extreme and actually claimed to be an elderly Navajo man and started threads about life on a reservation, that should be bannable.
In reality I am a youngish British lesbian teacher, and the mother of a six-year-old. If I started a thread titled ‘ask the British lesbian,’ ‘ask the EFL teacher,’ ‘ask the mother of a six-year-old,’ ‘ask the gay teacher,’ or ‘ask the lesbian parent,’ or contributed to threads with those titles, and it turned out that I was actually a single straight man who worked in a waffle house, then my opinions in that thread would lose their validity.
I briefly saw a thread where Kaitlyn talked about how she’d been treated by lesbians at a gay bar. If I had posted to say that I have been in many lesbian bars with a transexual friend and they’d never got that treatment, then her opinion - as a supposed lesbian transexual - would have carried more weight than mine.
Lying about your identity is important when your identity signficantly affects how others interpret your posts.
If Kaitlyn had only ever posted in comic book threads or only mentioned her identity in passing then her lying wouldn’t have been that serious. But no; she/he made her/his supposed identity the basis of many of his/her posts. That was what made the lie bannable, in my opinion.
(I know this thread isn’t only about Kaitlyn; I’m just using him/her as an example.)
FWIW, I know far too many RL Dopers to have any hope of lying about my own idenitity.
You mean how nearly every thread she replied to was patterened after this:
I’m TRANSGENDERED and this is my opinion as a TRANSGENDERED person. Doesn’t it piss you off that you have to hear the opinion of a TRANSGENDERED person? Does it scare you?
TRANSGENDERED!
Of course I’m a moron and was replying to this part of your post:
:smack:
And for good measure, I am a :wally
Actually, I’m flummoxed by how often my sexuality comes up on these boards. It doesn’t come up nearly as much in real life! Perhaps that’s partly because in real life it doesn’t need to be stated, it’s just obvious (when I have my arm around my GF or refer to my partner as ‘she,’ for example), while online it not only needs to be stated, but it stays there forever.
Then again, it doesn’t happen on other messageboards, either. I think it might be because of this board in particular. My role of teacher also comes up a lot more than I’d expect too, because I can usefully participate in discussions about language and teaching (for example) whereas I’ll just lurk in threads on subjects like star clusters and chaos theory. I guess that’s part of the reason too. My sexuality is one of the factors that makes me different to the majority* of the posters here, and thus gives me something to post about rather than just read.
Sorry if that’s not particularly clear, I’m reasoning it out as I type. I guess what I basically mean is that it’s possible to look like a one-trick-pony even if you’re actually a chameleon with a whole repertoire of conjurances.
(As long as you’re not lying about being a chameleon, of course!)
*Yeah, there are lots of other gay people here - I’m not the only gay in the village - but they’re not a majority.
I presumed that’s what ad happened with the quote.
Perhaps Kaitlyn did mention her sexuality more than I (or other gay posters) do too, I really don’t know.
(I initially typed ‘gay members’ and realised how wrong that would sound!)
I think the untruths fall into three categories:
-
Protection of anonymity: I purposely fuzz my location on message boards because I don’t want people I don’t know to know exactly where I live. Hence, “NW Indiana” rather than “123 Main Street, Griffith, Indiana” or “999 Home Street, Hobart, Indiana” or whatever my real location is. When discussing real life instances I normally change names and locations to protect the privacy of others, particularly those I have no way of contacting to ask permission. These are “lies” in the sense of withholding information or failing to state the whole truth. Our society recongizes this as a legitimate form of deception, provided it is not done for purposes of breaking the law. These untruths cause vanishingly small harm while protecting people from harassment or harm, and thus are entirely justifiable, even expected to the point that if someone posts under their real name many will still assume it to be a pseudonym.
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Storytelling: most strongly exemplified when a post generates a statement such as “I don’t care whether that’s true or not - it’s a good story!” The use of fabrications has a long tradition in storytelling. Particularly when the post makes it explicit that some details have been changed for entertainment value, I have no objection to this. I don’t think this has a place in General Questions or Great Debates, which are explicitly fact-based, but in IMHO or MPSIMS it certainly has a home.
-
Out-and-out falsehoods: That’s the trolling, false identies, postings intending to cause harm, and gross misrepresentations. That’s someone claiming to be an MD or or lawyer who isn’t. That’s someone engaging in role-playing with intent to stir things up. This isn’t accidental, and it’s not small-scale. THAT stuff has no place in the Dope, in my opinion.
I hate to sound like a Libertarian, but we’ve got enough restrictions on SDMB as it is. The trolling rule, and the jerk roll cover really blatant examples of lying.
And really, it is kind of fun catching a person in a lie and watching the back peddling, side stepping and diving for cover that usually ensues. I think if we were to check threads, some of the most popular were those where members have caught blow hards in lies and then picked them apart.
Usually, after we have done such things those whom were picked apart go and hide in a hole somewhere or melt down in such a fashion that they break some of the major no-nos (one wonders if they do it on purpose) and are banned.
What I am saying, is that that I don’t feel it is necessary to have such a rule, our vigilanteism already handles that. Besides, truthing, I feel, is a sign of maturity and sometimes takes time to be achieved. There are more than a couple of posters on the board that I have seen change their stories as the reality of our community has sunk in and they became part of it.
If it is a big enough lie, we’ll catch them, and eventually we’ll skin 'um alive. That’s where the fun comes in (kind of a gruesome analogy - sorry).
I’d break this down into three sub-categories:
3a - “Trust me, I’m a professional” - Pretending to be an accredited member of some profession which you are not and making claims as an authority in the subject.
3b - “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” - Making up facts to back up your position on a subject.
3c - “Speaking from personal experience” - Inventing a false online persona and then running with it.
Offhand, I’d say A and B are the ones most likely to cause damage and they’re the ones the liar is most likely to get caught at. But based on what I’ve seen, people are most offended by C.
Is Ilsa_Lund banned yet?
(not my research, obviously, read this on LJ after being directed there to better understand some recent board drama)
2004/02/10: 16 years old, and senior in college - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4533352
2005/01/31 age 26 - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5785573
2004/01/26 was in school ~8 years ago (implying that he isn’t in school now?) - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4491168
2004/09/25 started college at 12 - http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5294357
2004/04/13 homeschooled from 5-7th grade, then started college http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4750739
2004/01/26 went to poor southern school until 5th grade, then started college
2004/08/17 emigrated to New Zealand http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5145275
2004/09/15 Claims to be a herpetologist, no PhD yet http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5265416
I’ve had my doubts before about his claims about himself, but I had no way of doing any research. My thanks to the anonymous LJ poster who provided this information.
You might want to have sent that to a Mod or Admin rather than posting it here, Zero Gravitas.
If I did that, it would seem like I personally care about getting Ilsa banned…I don’t, but I felt this info was relevant to the topic and felt like sharing. I know this essentially has the same result as emailing it to a mod, but the distinction is important to me.
And the privacy issue? I haven’t checked out any of your links nor their supposed discrepancies, but even if they exist there may be a good explanation, and I doubt Ilsa wants his good name baselessly smeared all over this forum. I suspect, however, that you are well aware of this. Anyway, I’ve called it in for you, so the question is moot.
How is this a privacy issue? These are just links to things that Ilsa said on this message board. I could see it being a privacy issue if the contradictory claims were made somewhere else, especially if it was under a different name.