As I just said in the thread about the banning of Diogenes the Cynic, I’m kinda new here. But I have been lurking for several years, reading the ongoing debates.
The single strongest impression I have gotten, from all these years, is a huge admiration for tomndebb. In fact, one of the first things I did when I decided to join and participate, was to send him a fan letter.
I think he was right: saying, “You didn’t answer my question” once or twice is a valid rhetorical follow-up technique. Saying it six times is just pointless.
For one thing, people need to have the right simply to ignore people they don’t like. (The Bad Astronomy BBS has, in one of its fora, a formal rule that people must answer direct questions. I don’t think there is such a rule here.) So, if someone doesn’t answer someone’s questions…hey…it might be the cold shoulder or the cut direct. A gentleman doesn’t press.
We can only hope you recover from this devastating situation and return to warm us with your easy personal style, friendly banter and deep respect for all posters.
I think Blake is basically right. Pretty clearly tomndebb was evaluating Blake’s argument.
Well tomndebb could have simply said something like this:
“ok, you’ve made your point – you believe that GIGOBuster is ducking your question. Now please move on.”
But instead he evaluated Blake’s argument. And I agree that it’s really annoying and frustrating. tomndebb did the same thing to me a week or two ago. I wish he would stop.
I evaluated Blake’s posts on a specific tactic of questioning. I made no reference to his position on the topic of the thread. I treated you in the same manner. A number of posters responded to your questions with pretty much unanimous responses that noted that Judaism has no central “papal” authority and that any two Jews will provide three opinions to any question, but that despite those variants, there were a couple of opinions on which a supermajority of Jews did agree, (including every Jew posting in the thread and everyone cited by anyone posting in the thread), to which you persistently replied that you were not satisfied with their responses and you wanted their (pretty much unanimous) declarations “proven” to you in some way that they had already explained (at length) was impossible. Given their unanimous agreement on the point in question and their unanimous assertion that your question was not possible to answer in the manner in which you demanded it be answered, I asked what you hoped to gain by repeating the question ad nauseam. I made no judgment regarding your “argument” since you had made no argument and you even insisted in the thread that you had made no argument–I simply asked what in the world you hoped to gain by asking the same question over and over.
Have you changed your mind and are now claiming to have actually had an argument to put forth, contradicting your claims in that thread?
You characterized his question as “dishonest,” implicitly evaluating it on the merits.
In the Judaism thread, a number of posters repeatedly made the “expulsion” argument, i.e. they argued in essence that since Jewish groups generally don’t expel people for atheism, it follows that Judaism does not command a belief in G-d.
I pointed out (repeatedly) in response that Judaism doesn’t expel people for theft either, and yet Judaism would seem to command that its adherents refrain from stealing.
You characterized my point as “silly” and “distracting,” implicitly evaluating it on the merits.
At the risk of pointing out actual facts, the thread in question was not over whether or not different sects had differing views on the existence, relevance or importance of certain commandments, or how their clergy refer to God, or how hard they push their membership to believe in God, but whether or not one could be a religious Jew and an atheist.
Your deliberate, willfully ignorant “non-argument” repeatedly sought to avoid the fact that one can be an atheist Jew just as they an be a thieving Jew, and it would no more be dishonest for an atheist Jew to self-identify as a Jew than a thief would be dishonest if he self identified as a Jew. Quite conclusively, the matter of expulsion proved what beliefs the Jewish people have, collectively, decided place one outside the tribe and the religion. And that issue proved that lack of belief in God was not, in fact, a negative belief that places one outside the tribe or the religion. But as you obviously held a position that you could not argue for, you just needled posters and repeated the same bogus lines of inquiry over and over and over again. Just as, even after you’d been told literally dozens of times that Judaism had no authorities to speak from on high, you kept demanding them in order to back up virtually every claim which was made.
The moderation in that thread was comparatively minor, and the bad-faith tactics you displayed could have easily drawn a Warning for being a jerk.
Further to my previous post, let me say that I don’t want to get distracted from what I see as the critical issue in this thread:
Whether tomndebb is evaluating peoples’ arguments and using these evaluations as a basis for moderation. It seems pretty clear to me that he is. That’s why he referred to Blake’s question as “dishonest” and my point about theft as “silly.”
In a recent thread, you demanded yes/no answers to a series of questions. I repeatedly refused to offer such answers, since they were misleading questions–but finally, exasperated, I answered one of your questions with a yes/no answer. Exactly as I’d predicted, you completely misunderstood the answer (since it was a poorly-framed question for which my “no” answer did not tell a fraction of the story).
There are people on this board who think that asking poorly-framed questions, and then not allowing complex answers, is a legitimate or useful debating tactic. It’s not. It’s a very foolish tactic.
If a person asks such a question, and is told that the answer is more complex than the question admits, and then receives said more complex answer, and if the questioner then claims the question wasn’t answered, that’s dishonest. Whether the original question was dishonest is immaterial.
If you don’t want to be told that, you should use a more honest debating tactic.
If we have a rule on this discussion board that you are not allowed to make arguments which are deemed to be dishonest, the practical effect is to shut down debate.
This type of moderation is one (of many) aspects that distinguishes the Boards from Yahoo! Answers and the like. Similarly, other posters occasionally engage in I’m-not-touching-you-isms, something else that Mods have occasionally controlled. In both situations, it has strengthened the Boards; rather than elevating the conversation, it prevented its descent.
Again, the substance of the arguments is immaterial: the tactic of claiming someone hasn’t answered a question simply because they gave an essay answer instead of bubbling in one of your multiple choices is what’s dishonest.
If we have a rule that this form of dishonesty is disallowed, it won’t shut down all debate, although only you can speak to whether it’ll shut down your ability to participate.
Demanding yes/no or choose from the following list answers and claiming that failure to respond in such a fashion is a crappy debate tactic and claiming that failure to answer in that format is not answering the question is not honest debating.
So you’d be fine with a series of posts following you around that said:
Hey, didn’t you threaten to leave already? Why are you still here? Is it a) because you are a liar or b) because you are solely posting here to troll?
[wait until after your next post]
I see you unsurprisingly didn’t answer my question. Pick one of those two options, as that’s the only way to answer the question. It’s awful if you think you can get away without answering, but you won’t fool me.
[after your next post]
Still trying to avoid the topic of your dishonesty/trollishness? Answer it a or b and don’t just write a bunch of weasel words trying to avoid the question.
[your next post]
Why aren’t you willing to participate in this informed debate about your lying/trollishness? You keep avoiding my question, why is that? Still looking for an a or b response instead of an attempt to dodge the question.
[more posts]
Looks like you are unwilling to answer honest questions that would shed some light on this topic. What are you hiding from?
[another post]
This is the sixth time I’ve had to point out that you are trying to avoid the discussion here. Just answer the question already, and if you don’t it’s clear that anything you have to say is worthless.
This board is for fighting ignorance, so it’s right that you got called out for that kind of juvenile behavior. That’s not a good faith attempt at discussion, that’s harassment and an inability to debate honestly.
And if that’s the last straw for you, then, seriously, don’t let the door hit you on your way out.
Yes, but there are times when what a poster is asking is not answered in a long post. And again, and again. There are times when the person being asked does not want to answer, because it hurts the veracity or consistency of his position, but also doesn’t want to admit that, so he’ll write an essay with all sorts of information while skirting the issue. At those times, it is fine to say:
Hey, wait. Before we go into all this interesting nuance, what is your position on the basics of X:
A. (position a)
B. (position b)
C. (position c)
I agree. And a lot of arguments fall apart when the arguer is forced to spell out exactly what he is saying. To be sure, questions can be annoying but I think a lot of the time the annoyance stems from the cognitive dissonance which comes from starting to realize that you said something unfounded or nonsensical.