Except he did. He specifically argued that the logic given by Jonathan Chance was like that used to against Emmet Till. When you use an analogy, you are comparing the two things.
If you were making a point about having to follow the rules, even if you disagree with them, and I pointed out that your logic was faulty by saying 'To illustrate, the Nazis were following the rules when they did the Holocaust," would you not clearly understand that I was comparing you to Nazis/Hitler?
Because I would be, and that’s why I don’t make such arguments.
Also, do note that he said “I knew someone would say that” meaning he knew his argument would be understood in that way, yet he made it anyways. So it wasn’t an accidental, innocent usage.
gee – I wonder why conservative posters are less likely to report insults that are degrading to women? Its almost like they don’t see posts that target women of minorities with degrading language as a problem, to the same extent that liberal posters do.
FWIW I do think thats many of the posts targeting conservatives are inappropriate and I do report posts by liberal posters when I think they go to far, but I have little interest in patrolling the Dope looking for posts to report. Sorry, I didn’t happen to go to page 351 of a 355 page thread. Did you actually read that post, or did you have to run searches for bad words to cherry pick that example?
Even the most echo-chambery types around here don’t usually claim that moderation was the same five or ten years ago as it has been for the past couple years. Seems pretty obvious to me that he didn’t change, the moderation just got stricter. Which many would say is a feature, not a bug! And they are certainly entitled to that opinion. But either way, the case you are making here is risible.
Well, are you pairing the underpantsness with a kilt? Because if you’re pairing it with a kilt I’m totally in favor of underpantsness. Also in favor of people not wearing underpants on their heads.
This. 100%. Mods should just own it! Many forums are run this way. I think it would be most unfortunate for this to be one of them, but let’s not pretend this is anything other than what it is.
I agree that post #8 is a good read–until the end. I see no reason to assume that school is doing a bad job. I hate that teachers and administrators are always scapegoated this way, both on the right and left.
I argued about this some months back, and the people who throw this word around essentially admitted that it’s the new replacement word for “sexism”. Which means we no longer have a word that specifically means what “misogyny” used to mean, and that’s a shame.
I don’t believe someone should be banned because their sincere, non-vulgar expression of their unique perspective triggers rage in many, even most, posters. And yes: this credo could be called self-serving (I’m hardly unaware of how many here feel about me), but I think it is very philsophically defensible, going back far before I was born to John Stuart Mill at least.
Please google “reductio ad absurdum”. :rolleyes:
The very idea that anyone would even argue that signing every post “Regards, [name]” would be a rules violation is so ludicrous it makes me want to weep. The only possible reason they could have for being triggered by that is that they don’t like the content above the “Regards”, in which case the salutation is completely irrelevant.
Wow! A warning for the Emmett Till reductio ad absurdem? Things are just getting worse and worse here. :smack:
I’m constantly torn between GBCWing this place due to the moderation, and stubbornly feeling like I “shouldn’t let the bastards win”. Which I guess is trolling, by this extremely loose definition? I guess that makes everyone who has ever chafed against being silenced, whether in a de jure or de facto manner, a “troll”. :rolleyes:
BigT, I’m sincerely surprised that you don’t understand how analogies, thought experiments, and reductio ad absurdem work. Let me try one to illustrate.
Let’s say F-P had instead said “People who lived in Pompeii had agency too. They could have moved away from the area around Mt. Vesuvius and then they would not have died.” Would this mean F-P was accusing the moderators here of being volcanoes? :dubious:
LOL! You’re bad.
Someday? I would have assumed that day had already arrived months or even years ago. No?
But a big part of the point opponents of Shodan’s banning have made is that his posts will get reported to the nth degree because his views rub them the wrong way. I guess you’re saying that this is sort of Reddit but with an appeal process? (Even on Reddit, though, you can still look at the downvoted post if you’re curious, which I usually am.)
This is what is so very sad. If this place were relatively recently created and were moderated like this, okay. Probably not a place I’d gravitate toward. But it has a history, a legacy, to it (and I actually go back further than my join date says: I was here in the AOL days in the mid-'90s as a college student) that is unique and not replicable (AFAIK) elsewhere. It’s a real shame to see the road it is going down.
I will miss Shodan. He is smart, insightful, witty and amusing. He is also well-read and well-written on the topics of his choosing.
In a sense, Shodan was already gone, as long as he continued to post here. Bonelaid it out pretty well when he left, except that I think it was more than just the political divide. It’s the divide between people who like controversial opinions and those who just want a comfortable place that doesn’t challenge them.
I think that this banning says more about a few people (not the mods) being allowed to direct the board culture than it does about Shodan.
I agree with Dallas Jones, Isosleepy, Crafter_Man, Fotheringay-Phipps,pool, SlackerInc and others that Shodan was targeted for his views. I also agree that it’s like walking over landmines to post here. I don’t agree with any of them on much else.
As a woman, a survivor of sexual assault, a female who was targeted for at least two rape scenarios online and someone who was relentlessly followed on a couple message boards for a time, I’m disgusted that misogyny is being used as the pretext to get rid of several posters.
But since I’m not ready to flounce yet, I’ll sit and watch in horror as the board continues in the direction it has. I watched in horror over Shodan’s warning in the Pit and his suspension, Bone’s abrupt departure and the banning of several other posters. It’s sad to see. I miss the time when just about every topic was well-represented on both sides.
There is so much cringe in the admission that you’re here because you aren’t going to let a message board be the boss of you. This cringe is transcended only by admitting to being a troll and papering over it with the schtick of “aren’t we all trolls”. If you’re here to troll the libs, just say it, don’t try to smear everybody else with the old “if by whiskey” fallacy.
This is so comically, hilariously inapt that it doesn’t really bother explaining. Hint: It wasn’t against the law to live in Pompeii, and volcanoes don’t issue years of warnings that they’re about to erupt.
What’s simultaneously sad and funny is how certain people find this place intolerable after the “don’t be a jerk to people” rule gained the addendum “and women are people.”
Yet despite all the jeremiads about how horribly sad it all is, you keep coming back for no purpose other than to complain about it.
That’s a shitty position to be in. As (probably) one of the people you think are bastards, I’ll help out and declare you the uncontested victor. I lose, and hope you are thereby less torn.
Meanwhile, I remain astonished at the people who think that vigorous conversation among diverse views cannot happen unless you put up with people calling women “harpies.” Their experience of vigorous discussion is wildly different from mine, and I’m pretty pleased that bit by bit we’re having less of their sort of vigorous discussion.
This board naturally tends to reflect the zeitgeist of the era. Circa 2017-2022 will forever be known as the time when casual misogyny was no longer tolerated in most of Western society. This board (the mods, and the posting community), to its credit, has tackled this issue, too — with generally positive results, in my opinion.
To me, this was his worst sin: his perpetual twisting of other people’s words to pretend (oh so innocently) that they meant something completely different than what they’d actually said so that he could riff on the twisted version. This wasn’t “having an unpopular opinion” - one can argue an unpopular opinion perfectly well without being disingenuous and many posters here manage to do so without ticking up so much as a mod note. What Shodan did was to deliberately argue in bad faith, lying subtly enough to stay in the grey area between honest mistakes and overt trolling and thus avoid too much moderator scrutiny. And he did it over and over and over again until it was fairly obvious to many of us that he had no intention of honest engagement in any discussion on a political topic.
I too wish his ban had ultimately come for his trolling behavior, although the three trolling warnings piled up already undoubtedly weighed down the scale pretty heavily as it was. But there’s a reason the “last straw” analogy exists in the first place.
Heffalump and Roo, whether to ban, or presumptively ban, homeschooling is a controversial topic. This board was discussing that topic and people on both sides of the issue were debating, bringing up valid points and some cites.
What did calling the Harvard professor a harpy bring to the discussion? How did that help in discussing whether homeschooling should be banned?
I very much disagree with people here who are saying we can’t discuss controversial topics on this board. We do it all the time. GD and P&E is filled with threads about controversial topics. But, let’s debate and discuss them like adults, without childish name calling of each other and third parties. That name calling brings nothing and makes the debater look weak.
Open up another abortion thread if you must – it won’t get closed down, unless people make it personal. Abortion is a controversial topic. Open a gay wedding thread about religious bakers. Open up a thread about tax rates, how to deal with the coronavirus, and so on and so on.
The post that got Shodan banned just took a swipe at the professor because of her sex and took a gratuitous swipe at liberals and their supposed indoctrination of children, neither of which was germane to the topic, neither of which advanced the discussion or debate. In isolation, that wouldn’t have gotten him banned, but he had a history of similarly provocative posts that weren’t provocative because of the subject of the thread – they were provocative because of gratuitous attacks on people and demographics, unrelated to the thread.
It really isn’t hard not to use misogynistic or jerkish terminology outside of the Pit, because that terminology doesn’t belong in the debate forums anyway!
I don’t really have a motive. I was just curious about whether or not it was really true that that type of language (which strikes me as unarguably more offensive than “harpy”) was moderated when directed at certain women. It doesn’t particularly upset me in any event – I find the use of insults and vulgarities to be off-putting and it certainly causes me to post less, skip threads, and think less of certain posters, but I’m not sure I’m materially more put off by “fat bleached blonde tRump cunt” than other “clever” insults. I’d like to see less of all of it, but that doesn’t seem likely. But I’m not going to waste my time mining the board for infractions (except, apparently, yesterday after a few drinks), unless you want to make me a Moderator and pay me the big bucks.
I can’t prove or disprove whether or not it gets sanctioned when reported. I assume the various examples I’ve found will result in increased moderator action (my apologies to the late-sanctioned posters), but that seems like window-dressing.
But, if your point is that sexist insults aren’t being moderated because “conservative” posters need to report it when it’s directed at “conservative” women (and that “liberal” posters aren’t likely to do so), then I think that’s pretty much consistent with the claim that’s being made by others. If we’re not going to tolerate that type of language, then the onus is everyone who is inclined to report posts to report posts, regardless of whether they like the target.
shrug I made no such request. Per your admission, this is your idea of fun after a few drinks. Do it, or don’t do it, but don’t pretend like someone is laying this burden on you.
This is not my point. My point is that your search results don’t represent moderation practices so much as a combination of reading, reporting, AND moderation.
My assumption here isn’t that it’s on conservatives to report bad liberal behavior. My default assumption is that most people don’t even probably 95% of posts that aren’t a screen above or below a post that they’re engaging with. In the political forums that’s most likely to be an adversarial situation. The case you cited is a prime example. We don’t know who even saw that post, except for the ones engaged in it, and “Poster B” chose to respond with a direct personal insult instead of moderation.
This is all to say that your cherry-picking project isn’t a faithful representation of how moderation happens. I do concede that we can’t search moderation reports, so we have no visibility into whatever moustache-twirling colloquy results in things shaking out like they do.
Who are these people? Can you quote their posts? Best as I can tell, no one has suggested this.
What people are saying is that Shodan was unpopular because of his minority views, and that as a result of this unpopularity, a hard line was taken when he committed a dubious infranction in using the term harpy.
It would be ironic if you were misrepresenting the position of your opponents here, in light of your earlier post to this thread in which you declared that Shodan should have been banned for (allegedly committing) that very transgression.
