Irony thick enough to cut with a butter knife.
If you want to make this personal and about me, please just open a pit thread about me.
Naturally, I’m correct. You obviously had an argument you were trying to make in that thread, but you could not support it. So your actual posts consisted of willfully ignorant questions repeated over and over and over again while you did your best, and failed, to needle the unanimous grouping of Jewish Dopers and the unanimous conclusions of the cites they presented. You, yourself, denied even having a point of view and certainly presented not one single cite, and in fact tried to avoid even addressing the cites which were provided since they were not Jewish “authorities”, something you were told repeatedly did not and could not even exist. So yes, the irony is thick. Your argument fell apart when posters repeatedly demanded that you actually explicitly voice the argument that lay behind your ceaseless repetition of questions. You refused to spell out exactly what you were saying, because it was utterly unsupportable and you could simply Just Ask Question about the Official Story.
A tactic neither novel nor effective.
And to remind you, you were the one who chose to complain, in this thread, about how unfairly your debating tactics were being treated by Tom. Ironic for you to now try to call it out bounds and, what’s more, to claim that if I state the fact that your own objections to debating tactics apply to your own tactics, I’m somehow personally attacking you.
My points about you debating tactics are what you’ve just quoted me saying, and that’s both the reason it’s not at all beyond the pale for a moderator to rein you in when you disrupt a thread in such a manner and why it’s not Pit content. Of course, I have restricted myself to commenting on your posting style, which you yourself brought up as a topic of debate in this thread. I have remained mute on the subject of what the usage of such tactics evinces about the character of a poster using them.
I would think they would be fine in a Pit thread about Blake, but not a GD thread. Which is where the original tactic was used (different topic, same tactic), and was moderated by tomndebb. Remember, that’s what we’re discussing, tomndebb moderating in GD.
magellan01, there may be times when it is appropriate to step back and ask a more basic, foundational question, and put in an (a), (b), (c) list. That framework does have legitimate use, if only to frame the questioner’s perceptions of the situation. The respondent in that case can either opt for one of the listed options to clarify that starting point, can offer another option that the questioner didn’t list, or can attempt to clarify why that question isn’t really that simple. In which case it goes to finding something of a starting point.
But if the questioner isn’t trying to get to an underlying point or premise, but trying to summarize a complex topic with a simple yes/no or itemized list response, then the respondent may feel the questioner is not trying to understand, but rather just score rhetorical points. In which case, ignoring the list is one approach. I’d probably go with at least one attempt to explain why the question isn’t fair, but that’s me.
Sorry, I’m not going to get into that here. If you want to resurrect the GD thread, fine, I’ll be there.
The original questions were about temperatures and such – not about any poster’s honesty or trollishness.
It’s both lovely and obvious you think that. Others genuinely believe that you’re wrong; what’s more, it seems obvious to a lot of folks that your belief that their argument is about to fall apart is what drives your questions, rather than an honest interest in the position.
If you ask questions because you’re genuinely not clear on what people say, awesome. If you’re doing it because you think you just found their Death Star’s weakness, you’re much better off describing said weakness rather than trying to “force” your opponent into doing your bidding.
And when you discover that, wonder of wonders, your ability to force people to obey you doesn’t work well over the Internet, that doesn’t count for a win in any category–unless, that is, you learn from it not to try to force people to obey you over the Internet. Because then you’ve learned something, and that’s a victory for us all.
I initially read the topic as “the low standard of molestation …”
It’s obviously up to us to raise the quality here!
Um… Serious question: suppose someone used a particular logical fallacy in argument – “All cats have four legs. Some dinosaurs had four legs. So some dinosaurs are cats.” Suppose the poster continued using this flawed reasoning, in several posts and threads and fora… Wouldn’t this eventually rise to the level of the moderators’ attention? Shouldn’t it?
Are the moderators only here to ensure a clean fight – no hitting below the belt – or is it also their job to help make it a good fight, too – don’t cling too long in the clinches… If a member persists in error, especially egregiously and blatantly – shouldn’t this earn a gentle warning? Or is this beyond the competence of the rules?
Trinopus (I know, I know, read the darn things already!)
You already did. You brought it up, in this thread. Funny that, now, it’s totally out of bounds. Of course almost everybody involved in the thread and everybody reading the thread after the fact will realize exactly what your Just Asking Question tactics are about, and why you consistently tried to attack the Official Narrative with wilfully ignorant repetition, and not those disagreeing with it.
You fooled nobody. Just like the “I don’t believe in a conspiracy, necessarily, but there sure are a lot of contradictions and unanswered questions in the Official Story of 9/11… but no I’m not going to say what I did think happened and argue for it. I’m Just Asking Questions here.” folks.
In this thread, you claimed that Tom was somehow wrong in his moderation, moderation which was based on the facts that:
That you’d rather go back to needling people in GD is clear. But you brought it up here, and as a result, it’s perfectly fair game to point out that such behavior as yours is eminently sanctionable in GD because of its bad faith, disruptive nature. Tom went easy on you, and only told you to back off on one of the more egregious bits of willful ignorance that you were using to needle people with.
I agree most of this. I will say that the yes/no toggle-type questions can be used in the manner you describe. But it has been my experience that they are used much more often to get someone to clarify what his position actually is. It’s a way to stop the tap dancing.
I brought up tomndebb’s moderation.
Sorry, not going to get off track.
I don’t think so. If there is a rule against making arguments which the moderators deem to be flawed, the practical effect is to shut down debate.
Go figure, that’s what I was discussing too and what you claim is off topic, even when* I directly responded to your claim about other posting styles and pointed out that it describes your own. *
I can see why you’d rather not get “off track”.
I can see what’s going on too.
I basically agree, a lot of apparent disputes on discussion boards are not actual substantive disputes. They may be semantic disputes; or someone might have an emotional reaction to a point without any serious disagreement with the actual point being made. A lot of the time people change their positions but do not want to admit that they have done so. Questioning can be helpful to reveal all of these issues.
Indeed, and one of the meta points I was making in my case was that the history showed that the question (an in a thread about the exoneration of Michael Mann that once again had been exonerated of wrongdoing) was made to continue the moving forever of the goalposts regarding no warming trends, I even made an example of what does happens when even scientists make simple yes no answers (even with a further explanation later) what deniers get from those answers are misleading conclusions as was already shown many times before.
I agree. When I see that happening, however, I don’t regard it as a chance to score points or to force my opponents to do anything. Rather, I restate my position using my opponent’s language, or else I restate what I think my opponent is saying and ask them if it’s correct.
If I think there’s an obvious flaw in what my opponent is saying, unless the opponent is (IMO) very stupid, I assume the problem is with my understanding, not with them, and I ask genuinely clarifying questions.
There’s a big difference between questions asked to clarify (which may give examples of possible answers), and questions asked as a gotcha game, because you’re convinced that you’re the reincarnation of Socrates.
magellan01, trying to clarify is fine, but if the person says the issue is more complex, then trying to force the simple answer isn’t going anywhere. Thus the need to refine the question or options. Or ask them to explain differently.
If you think someone is trying to tap dance around committing to an answer, then you can state “I think you’re tap dancing around the issue - why isn’t it as simple as ___?” In which case you explain why you think the issue isn’t that complex. You add more content to your position or your understanding of their position.
But just poking them with the same question repeatedly doesn’t really help.
This is key. A person who just asks a lot of questions comes across as too lazy or too afraid to put forward a robust argument of their own. If you have a position worth defending, then put it forward and defend it.