There’s no legitimate debate about creationism, but you could still bring it up in GD if you’re witnessing. Allegations of election fraud can be brought up, but once they’re completely shot down, the debate should be over, right? A poster will get into trouble when he/she claims election fraud and then ignores all the evidence and posts to the contrary and moves on to the next claim. That’s not debating. Regarding Trump support, there’s a thread that’s going just fine debating Trump’s decision to pull troops, with many posters taking Trump’s side, so that’s obviously a valid debate. It gets harder to support his support for white supremacists and racist policies – like I said above, this board is extremely anti-bigot.
Whether you know them or not isn’t really significant data. I’m not hiding them in GD, so it would be trivial to find them. That you haven’t participated in the threads where they come up doesn’t change that they have “come up lately” in GD. All it says is that you haven’t participated in recent free speech threads (the Charlie Hebdo one, the Parler one…)
Fair enough. How many were since the rule change?
ETA: I see this has already been answered.
Ah, thanks. I started to read the Charlie Hebdo one, but it got so long overnight that I couldn’t keep up and then it got locked. Maybe I’ll have another look to find out your unpopular opinions…
Not to speak for MrDibble, but I think he’s a proponent of actual government censorship of hate speech, bigoted speech, and other speech he thinks is terrible. Given your thread about commercial speech, I’m sure you would find yourself quite opposed to his position.
His position is certainly a minority on this board.
I can give you the TL;DR version : I’m quite happy with government restrictions on hate speech I don’t like, and not down with restrictions on speech I do like. Also, deplatforming racists is just peachy for me. But not frozen peachy.
Oh, and it’s probably very important to note that I in no way identify as a liberal. In the slightest.
I agree that 10-15 years ago the Debating was better yet. We lost some excellent posters along that time too. But yes, 5 years ago it was dismal.
So there is no rule that says “Don’t Argue Badly”. As to your question, Hari explained above.
As far as extreme positions on Free Speech, I’ve declared that I don’t think self-identified Nazis & Neo-Nazis and the use of the Nazi Swastika should be protected by free speech. I was kindly told by many they disagree with me but I wasn’t hounded from the board. My theory is we never made peace with the Nazis but the German people so therefore being a Nazi or using their flag identifies you as an enemy of the US and the World.
He said the warning was for debate style, not the content. That’s what I meant by ‘arguing badly’.
I don’t see the trolling. I see misinformed and flat out stupid opinions that can be argued against, just like everything else in GD. This seems to be clearly about content, not about any rules. I don’t believe the very same kind of language and sentiments directed at the Trump and Republicans would be modded.
Here are all of his posts prior to the moderation. Could you point out what is considered trolling here?
I don’t think it’s correct that far left posters and positions are treated the same as RW positions which are equidistant from the ideological center of this MB. This is mostly based on (admittedly subjective) observations (and appear to be backed up by MrDibble’s posts in this thread) but also has a rational basis.
The radical left as represented by SmashTheState and such has very limited power in the US. By contrast, the RW, as represented by the Republican party, and of late Trump/Trumpists, and conservatives generally, has significant political power. So a left winger who may be equidistant from both positions ideologically, will regard the radical left much more benignly, as some misguided curiosity, while focusing the brunt of his frustration and fury at the RW. If the radical left ever gained significant power then this would undoubtedly change but that’s not the current state of affairs.
But the above is not necessary for the point I was making. Let’s suppose for our purposes that you’re correct and there is equal antipathy on this MB to posters who are equidistant from the left as right. It would still be true that this has the net effect of moving the board to the left. Because there are simply more people on the right side than the left so suppressing them or driving them away moves the center far more.
Right now, the US as a whole consists of a population of which about 48% actually voted for the Republican presidential candidate. On this MB, that percentage is more like 1%. (At least of people who actually participate in political discussions - I suspect that there are some “shy Trump voters” on this MB, who don’t participate in political discussions, but they’re irrelevant to the dynamic for this very reason.) For the most part, people considered conservatives on this MB are conservative relative to the board as a whole, though they would be middle-of-the-road or even liberal compared to the US population as a whole.
It wasn’t always like that. If you go back about 15 years or so, the percentage of Dopers who would typically vote for the Republican candidate was a lot higher - more like 25% or so. But the percentage of radical leftists was never anything close to that. If you remove the 25% on the right side of the spectrum, then you’re moving the right boundary a lot to the left, while not really changing the left boundary, which has the impact of shifting the ideological center to the left.
And the same still applies today. There are virtually no real conservatives anymore, as above, but the moderates are now the “conservatives” and there are still a lot of them. Many of these moderates have various positions which are anathema to left wingers, as noted in this thread for DA and a few others. People who espoused such positions would be acceptable if 25% of the board was to the right of them, but when they’re the right fringe of the board, it’s easier for them to be declared out of bounds.
The point of all of which is that the user base is not only not static, but its composition is itself influenced by “being responsive to the desires of your user base”. You’re responsive to the desires of the current user base, but this responsiveness itself shifts the makeup of user base and shifts their desires along with it. Then you need to be further responsive to their desires and the base shifts further, and so on with no end.
I agree, for the most part. I only mean to say that I don’t think the board is moving ever lefter as a result of the real phenomenon you’re describing; I think it’s just shrinking into a smaller space. If it were moving more and more to the left, I think I’d generally like the politics of the posts I read about the same, or not much less than I used to 15 years ago, but I have not had that experience.
I definitely don’t think that just because there might be similar reactions to “both sides,” that means they are equal reactions. I’m sure they aren’t, and I am quite sure that a mirror version of me, as far right of the SDMB’s sort of Obama-Hillary center as I am far left of it, would have been banned by now. Of course, as a far leftist, I would naturally also argue that there’s a major moral difference between those two positions and they don’t merit equal reactions, even from an entirely bias-free perspective.
If you would read this thread, it should be obvious. It was not only that single post but also another.
That is trolling or being a jerk. Misogynistic , racist and homophobic. The trifecta!
So he can not offer his opinion that a Native American lesbian was elected to congress based on her identity? Why can’t you just argue against his opinion, or better yet, just ignore him?
People did argue against him, which he ignored in favor of saying the same dumb thing again. Someone responded to him (“she wasn’t elected just for being lesbian and native American. In fact she achieved X, Y, and Z and her accomplishments are similar to other freshmen representatives. Also she did MMA”) and he just doubled down on the stupid (“Yeah like I said she got elected for being a lesbian native American who did MMA”). That was when he showed he wasn’t interested in actual debate but was just here to get people riled up.
And since he created a thread to say the exact same things 2 years ago and subsequently ignored any counter argument while repeating the same baseless charges he established a pattern.
Should he have gotten a warning; I don’t know. But he was repeating the same accusations he’s been using for the past 2 years without acknowledging anything anyone has said. That might be OK in some forums but not really in GD.
Assuming his opinion wasn’t changed by the arguments people made, is he not allowed to express that? The fact his opinions offend some people does not necessarily mean he’s trolling.
You don’t have to have your opinion changed but if you insist on your original point repeatedly without acknowledging counter-arguments, it’s hard to see this as anything but trolling.
Let’s use a hypothetical, let’s say that someone starts a thread saying the Earth is flat. Someone posts a photo showing the Earth from space as a sphere. The Flat-Earther doesn’t even acknowledge the photo, just repeats the assertion that the Earth is flat. Another person cites phenomena like measurement of shadows, observations on the horizon, and so forth. FE again ignores the arguments, doesn’t remark on them, and just repeats that the Earth is flat.
FE doesn’t have to agree. Doesn’t have to be correct. FE doesn’t even need to use solid reasoning in an argument. But when FE doesn’t address any actual refutations of their claims, but just repeats what they said before, it has changed from a discussion with a sincere disagreement into what is essentially spamming. Even if FE is presenting sincere beliefs, they aren’t sincere about having a discussion and that is the point in which you can legitimately call it trolling.
I guess that makes sense, thanks.
Seems you didn’t get a direct answer to the question I bolded, so I thought I’d go ahead and chime in. (I consider week old threads fair game if I actually have something to add.)
But, in threads that aren’t sexual in nature? Yes, I do understand that said jokes are now moderated. It started as part of the big push to go against misogyny. It was stated by many female posters that jokes that sexualize them in nonsexual contexts were unwelcoming (e.g. a joke about boobs in a thread by women about bras). And it was successfully argued that moderating only when it was about women would be unfair. So the result is that such jokes are moderated, regardless of gender. They are only allowed in threads that are explicitly sexual in nature from the beginning.
Heck, the threads that actually brought it all up were specifically hypotheticals (about superheroes, no less!), so it makes perfect sense to me that, if anything, those types of threads might get a tighter rein.
Granted, I’m not a mod, let alone @engineer_comp_geek who made the decision. But the moderating decision made sense to me in light of the previous discussion, and I thought you might want more detail than @What_Exit provided.
If you want, I can try to find the specific threads where this was discussed.