Words are so important except when you are struggling in debate in which case they are “just semantics” and things mean whatever you want them to mean, by “[your] definition”.
Personally I use the word “chicken” to mean “roadworks”. I do maintain that a bunch of people repairing a road are doing “chicken” by my definition, so I win, so there.
And your last sentence is factually incorrect. See post above.
All you are doing is imposing your own beliefs in order to dismiss the OP of that thread.
It was certainly not a philosophical discussion in the sense of a Socratic Dialogue or a Kantian discourse. However, it was an exploration of one person’s personal beliefs based on some series of ideas, i.e., that poster’s approach to life or his philosophy.
If you cannot exchange views in the context of the thread, as posted, you can always ignore the thread.
No. That was a not very subtle, if mild, personal attack.
It is semantics if you’re arguing about the definition of a word and I don’t feel like I’m struggling in a debate or even trying to debate.
Since I’m not a mod you shouldn’t concern yourself too much with my definition of threadshitting anyway. I was merely pointing out that to me, without anyone else having called it that, I viewed it as threadshitting by my own understanding of the term.
But given that a mod does use a similar definition and I, an unaffected bystander, write that I think it’s threadshitting too - if words are so important to you, read them. That’s two people telling you their definition of threadshitting. What is quoted in the board’s rules isn’t a final definition of any possible examples of threadshitting, although in this case it comes very close to describing exactly what the poster did.
The addition of the paragraph you quoted at the end of a threadshit doesn’t make it less of a threadshit. It looks to me like more condescension, again intended to make the OP feel foolish and themselves feel smart, but not to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion.
Agreement and agreement.
If someone opens a thread about, say, the Holy Trinity, it is threadshitting for someone to come along and say, “There is no evidence for God.”
It’s threadshitting to say “There is no evidence for or against the Trinity, so the discussion is vacuous.”
It’s not threadshitting to say, “There is no evidence for or against the Trinity, so the discussion is hard to come to grips with,” followed by one or two adroitly chosen Biblical texts, which is pretty much all the evidence there can be.
I’m also not happy with the post that said, “Define demon.” This “Define God” meme is of very little use; it only serves to obstruct debate. If the definition matters, make that part of an actual thesis. “If, by God, you mean the Jewish God, then the answer will be different than if you mean the Southern Baptist God.” That’s valid, and actually carries some information forward. But “Define God, and until you do, there is nothing to talk about here” is (in my opinion) not exactly threadshitting, but pointless and obstructionist.
Where do you draw the line of beliefs which are essentially matters of opinion and beliefs which are objectively factually wrong?
Suppose I start a thread asking why we don’t send Superman to the Middle East to put an end to ISIS. Some people might respond that the reason is Superman is a fictional character and therefore cannot interact with the real world. But I counter that I believe that Superman is real and therefore people can only argue against my idea within the framework that’s consistent with my beliefs.
Would you tell other posters they cannot deny my beliefs? Would they have to only present arguments about why the Obama administration isn’t employing Superman to combat terrorism that are consistent with the assumption that Superman is real?
Maybe that thread shouldn’t have been moved to GD. It wasn’t witnessing, and it wasn’t trying to put forth a thesis. I’m leaning towards CS, since it’s more about beings in literature than IRL. Or perhaps IMHO. But definitely not GD. I think ECG mistakenly thought it was witnessing because it was about some form of spirituality.
Not a valid comparison. Thread closed. NEXT!
[that’s threadshitting your post]
I don’t think that comparison is completely valid because the OP asked like 15 questions about “Superman”, indicated he was of some kind of spiritual significance to him, and generally filled a good half page or more with various musing about him and Lois and the gang and opened the floor to discussion.
To step in and just answer “Doesn’t exist. NEXT!” is threadshitting, regardless of any justifiable incredulity one may feel about the premise of the OP.
Exactly. And, “Superman doesn’t exist, period” is also threadshitting. You can start out with that – “Well, Superman doesn’t exist, but, okay, to play along, would he actually want to get involved? In Action Comics 253, Clark Kent said…”
You can actually have it both ways! You can “wave the flag” for your disbelief, and then move into the subjunctive realm of abstract cogitation.
I would have moved it to Great Debates as well. It’s about religious belief, and that’s where such threads go.
So do only hidden meanings count when the mods deem, on threat of warnings, that you’re threadshitting?
What is so elusive about it?
Threadshitting is when you go to the trouble to post in a thread just to say that what the participants are trying to discuss isn’t worth discussing because of [whatever reason].
That could be done by directly saying “this isn’t worth discussing” but it also could be done, as in this case, by answering complex or multiple questions and themes with simple, dismissive posts like “No, because they don’t exist.” without providing anything to support the statements or engaging the OP and other participants in the conversation they are trying to have.
If you really want to post just to say there’s no point in even posting, like Trinopus said you could declare that you don’t believe [whatever] but you will play along and argue their points on their individual merits pretending that [whatever] was possible, or you could engage in a full on debate of their post with actual arguments.
The “rule” quoted in the OP is from a glossary of terms. I think the entry for threadshitting just offers a couple of general examples and wasn’t intended to be a complete and literal list of all possible things that qualify. But it concludes with a line that wasn’t included in the OP:
I guess it’s been awhile since I looked at the main page. You are correct:
Great Debates
For long-running discussions of the great questions of our time. This is also the place for religious debates and (if you feel you must) witnessing.
No it really wasn’t. It was a series of specific questions about certain clearly stated factual propositions.
It was in fact precisely analogous to my duck quack echo analogy, the only difference being, you don’t have a soft spot for unproven nonsense about ducks. Not for a single moment would you spout the dreck you have in this thread, or have called the post in question threadshitting, were it not for the fact that it is culturally verboten to call a spade a spade when it comes to religion.
Got bad news for you tomndebb. Sometimes people ask questions based on unfounded premises that mean their questions cannot be honestly answered without pointing out that their questions are unanswerable because their premise is unfounded. It is not the culture of this board to support ignorance by failing to point this out.
It sucks to have beliefs so silly that they cannot be rationally discussed without an appearance of condescension, but what is one to do?
Bingo. I was trying to think of a good analogy but this is excellent. Though let’s face it, Superman is never going to receive the soft treatment that Biblical fairytales receive around here.
No it was not suitable for CS. You and others seem to be missing the point (despite myself and others making it repeatedly without rebuttal) that the OP in that thread was asking about actual demons that she thought actually existed. Not about storybook characters or theological characters. She was asking about the specific behaviours of particular real things (real to her).
Your post encapsulates perfectly why you and tomndebb are wrong, and demonstrates how you have to move the goal posts to score a goal.
The OP in that thread was not asking people to play along. They did not ask for thoughts based on the subjunctive realm of abstract cogitation. They were asking people to provide answers (in GQ) to questions about what the OP thinks to be a real phenomenon. Your “play along” and “abstract cogitation” comments are (per tomndebb and Crazyhorse) “condescension” and a “not very subtle, if mild, personal attack” since they are clearly implying that the OP’s apparently sincere beliefs can’t be anything other than stories with which you are “playing” or about which you are cogitating in the abstract. How insulting!
I didn’t include that line because it wasn’t relevant: nobody in the OP under discussion said the OP was inane or pointless. And the rest of your post is an attempt to imply to the contrary, because without your magical powers by which you can declare implications that people didn’t make, your position is dead in the water.
None of that entire quote is relevant. It’s just a glossary of terms not a rulebook that the mods have follow. The post begins: “There are a number of terms commonly used on the Straight Dope Message Boards, that are basically “in-jokes” or references…” It’s just a newcomer’s guide to terminology used on the boards.
The board leaves it up to individual mods to know it when they see it. I’m not a mod. My opinion as a semi-interested member of the peanut gallery, because threadshits like that annoy me even when the premise of the OP is something I consider ridiculous, is that it was definitely threadshitting. I have no more to say on the subject. Good luck.
So the only definition we have isn’t relevant because you don’t agree with it, and the definition is whatever you and the mods think it is.
Sounds good to me. Arbitrary rules that mean whatever the enforcers of the rules think they mean is certainly a tremendous basis for a system of governance.
No. The definition is whatever the Mod staff has been enforcing for lo the past 17 years, regardless how you want to ignore history.
Meh. You apparently are also not particularly familiar with the definition of “arbitrary.”
This is clearly not true in this case, since multiple posters responded without the condescension.
Ordinarily, I would be inclined to agree with this… but I can think of so many possible ways to define “demon”, that it would be tedious (for both me and for the reader) to go through answers for all of them, and I suspect that the OP’s definition would be one completely different to any that I came up with anyway.
And John Mace, that thread inherently could not exist without witnessing. Therefore GD was the only possible forum for it. If the question had been about, say, the demons in the His Dark Materials series, then CS would be appropriate. But it wasn’t about demons in any particular fictional work; it was about demons as the OP believes them to actually exist in the real world.
Superman is “objectively, factually” a fictional character. I can back that up by presenting actual information about when, where, and by whom he was created. Which would be the helpful and appropriate thing to do if you were to actually start such a thread in all seriousness.
If the Op had merely stipulated that demons existed then I think that I could agree that a mere “No, they don’t” might be a bit curt…but that’s not really the full story. Is there an objective and factual way to handle
and
Beyond stating that demons do not exist, what could possibly be said to the OP, especially since the topic of the OP’s mental condition has been ruled off-limits? Sure, there are posters discussing the history of the belief of demons, but there are conversing with each other, and not the OP, and are really avoiding what the OP is saying.