Reference: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=288914
I started to discuss this matter in the Pit, but thought better of it when it dawned on me that it is indeed a topic for genuine debate, that it is an appropriate discussion to have on a message board, and that nothing productive would come of a Pit rant anyway. First, I’d like to examine, from my viewpoint, what went on in the referenced thread, then talk about hijacking in more generalized abstractions, and finally apply those principles to the observations. After all, for purposes of deduction, what applies to an entire set applies to every member of the set. In fact, that is the very essence of deduction: reasoning from the general to the specific.
Alias titled the thread, “You stupid, fat, bigoted, psycho heartless bitch”, and launched it with a rant about a workplace discussion on abortion. The theme of the OP, of course, could not be known from the title of the thread, and as early as the second post, a digression occurred. Captain Lance Murdoch opined that the heartless bitch’s fatness was not relevant in any way to any thing. I was the sixth poster to respond, and having read the OP along with Murdoch’s response, I was moved to opine as well that I saw no real cause to accuse the heartless bitch of bigotry. Both Murdoch and I saw fit to comment on the thread’s title and its relation to the OP.
With the eighth post of the thread, TVeblen sought to enlighten me as to what she thought might be the underlying support for the charge of bigotry. The OP had accused the heartless bitch of using the word “homo”. (It was within quote marks.) When I returned to the thread, I saw Veb’s response to me and responded to her with the 35th post. I took issue with whether “homo” was indeed a bigotted term, based on a previous discussion in which Excalibur, professing to be a homosexual and, I suppose, thereby an authority, informed me that he uses the term “all the time”, and that many of his “fellow homos” do as well. Thus, he seemed to be informing me, comparing the term “fundie” to the term “homo” was invalid since homo was not a pejorative. I informed Veb.
Ilsa_Lund almost immediately followed up with a question (post #36), which I answered (post #37) after making the rounds through other forums and threads. Almost three hours later, I encountered this message to me from Harborwolf in post #38. Here it is in its entirety: “Geez Lib, hijack much?” A roll-eyes icon accompanied the question. That was the first time that the topic of hijacking had been raised in the thread. I responded to Harborwolf by citing his side discussion with Weirddave about a 16-18-year-old girl he had worked with some time ago, whom he described as a “major pain in the ass”, making the point, of course, that if I was hijacking the thread, then so were they.
There ensued a mini-avalanche of assaulting posts, all directed at me, all accusing me of hijacking the thread (five people in total raising the charge), some of them taking time to examine the issue of whether “fundie” and “homo” are comparable (including, remarkably, the notion that a person’s faith is necessarily a matter of choice), and none of them talking about the OP. I thought the very irony might explode on my screen.
One of the five invited me to take the issue elsewhere, and so here we are — except that I have no interest in discussion “homo” versus “fundie” since barring some new argument, my mind is settled on that matter. A pejorative is as a pejorative does. If we put every reference to “fundie” on a ledger, those in a pejorative context on the credit side and those in a neutral or flattering context on the debit side, we’d be drowning in debt.
Rather, I want to discuss the issue of hijacking threads. First, a few general observations:
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No thread, except for one of trivial length, has ever progressed without meandering back and forth about this and that. Typically, they begin on topic, but eventually veer. I don’t imagine this thread will be any exception.
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Pit threads in particular often tend to merge into either a meltdown, a rhetorical slugfest, a pile-on, a series of jokes, or a moderatorial closure. There are exceptions, and some Pit threads have been more productive than some Great Debates threads in terms of insights gained and shared.
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If hijacking is defined as digression from the OP, then the charge of hijacking ought to apply equally, regardless of personage or historical enmity. In other words, it cannot be that Smith posts off-topic and Jones posts off-topic, and Smith is hijacking while Jones is not.
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Raising the topic of hijacking, when the thread is not about hijacking, is itself a hijack if hijacking is defined as digression from the OP. Unfortunately, non-comprehension of this principle provides ammunition of a sort for any arbitrary intellectual worm who has nothing to counter an argument, and therefore withdraws into a hole from where he might hurl an accusation of hijacking.
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A response cannot possibly be a hijack owing to the very definition of “response”. Before there could be a response, there had to be a post to which one could respond. If the response is a hijack by association, then the post to which it is addressed must of necessity be the original hijack.
Based on those generalized principles, I have some observations about the specifics of that thread:
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It seems to me that if there was to be a charge of hijacking, it should have been leveled against Murdoch in the second post, who protested about the heartless bitch being called “fat”. Neither the word “fat” nor any derivative of it appeared anywhere in the OP, but only in the title.
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If commenting on the title rather than the OP is hijacking, then the charge of hijacking should have been leveled at me with my sixth post, which addressed the accusation of the heartless bitch’s bigotry.
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If responding to a side-issue is hijacking, then Veb’s response to me in the thread’s eighth post, suggesting a possible rationale behind the bigotry charge, was itself a hijack.
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If digression from the topic of Alias’s workplace was a hijack, then it seems to me that the side discussions about 16-year-old girls who are pains in the ass are themselves hijacks.
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The sudden accusation of hijacking had nothing to do with the OP, and was therefore a hijack as well. It had no effect other than the lobbing of a rhetorical grenade that caused a pile-on.
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Once people had decided to engage the issue and discuss “homo” versus “fundie”, they waived the moral ground from which to hurl accusations of hijacking. It is tantamount to someone voraciously gobbling down something that they are declaring tastes horrible.
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The accusation of hijacking is like any other accusation. The person accused ought to have the right to defend himself without being viewed as the initiator. It is the attacker who, by definition, did the initiating.
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