Like I said…this is one of those fundamental points of disagreement between us. You aren’t going to convince me and I’m not going to convince you. Personally, I think that the line the mods take on this board is the right one for a board who’s stated goal is to fight ignorance. You can’t fight ignorance if you just ban out of hand stuff that pisses off this poster or that one. The best way to fight these guys is a good old fashioned SDMB humiliation shark feeding frenzy. Posters posting hate speech or crazy crap generally get short shrift, get humiliated in the feeding frenzy (which is seen by all the lurkers and comes up in Google searches years later), and they either slink off back to whatever hole they crawled out of or they cross the line and are banned because they broke the boards rules.
I like Mr. Dibble being on all the time as I have learned quite a bit from him over the past few months. I do not understand the mods interpretation to Ed Zotti’s statement.
One attacks concepts versus people of a racial/ethnic differentiation. That is hate speech, it isn’t benign and it has many pernicious effects on those people who are the direct targets. Allowing such speech to fester is dehumanizing/harmful. This is compounded by how the haters are often obsessive/compulsive in defending/propagating their (socially harmful) hate speech.
Tolerating such speech is also risky/dodgy; can you be certain that your level of tolerance isn’t due to (or changing based on) your continuous exposure to the denigrating ideas?
By all means let these racists have the rope to hang themselves, but don’t for a second think that the devaluing of people based on their racial/ethnic make up isn’t harmful/injurious/wrong. I hardly think that this needed to be said, but there it is.
Feel free to petition Ed Zotti on that point.
Until today I did not know it could be rejected, let alone interpreted.
Done; hopefully he’ll respond.
I’m not interested in petitioning Ed. I’m wondering why you choose to moderate when you refuse to moderate at least one of the rules.
Honestly, I’m less interested in his motives for not doing his job than in the fact that he’s not doing it. That seems like a matter for Ed to handle, given that Tom’s already declared his intentions.
Is ‘hate speech’ actually defined? What all does it specifically entail? Or are the mods just supposed to know it when they see it, which would make this a judgement call?
I’m curious as to why this devolves to tom~.
Anyone have any evidence that things have changed over the past 15 years? Or that asshole or idiot opinions are any more or less tolerated than in the past?
I already explained that. I am not choosing to refrain from moderating; I find no consistent basis on which the vague phrase can be moderated.
To be clear: there is no consistent basis on which to moderate that phrase. Lot’s of people will have different ideas about what constitutes hate speech, but there is no consensus. We have had one poster about whom I received numerous complaints that he was engaged in hate speech regarding one set of people. Every time similar complaints were posted on the board, significant numbers of posters responded that the complainant was wrong and that it was not. That same poster also had a habit of speaking poorly of a different group of people. Interestingly, the posters who complained about his remarks regarding the first group never bothered to complain about his posts regarding the second group and vice versa. It was always a matter of whose ox was being gored.
Most of the stuff that falls into someone or another’s idea of hate speech eventually crosses into trolling and the poster is compelled to back away from the remarks or is banned.
The same could be said about insults, being a jerk, or any number of other rules.
Besides, if there is one thing I’ve learned NOT to expect around here, it’s consistency.
ETA: It sounds like JC also does not moderate hate speech. If that’s correct, then let’s strike the rule from the books, at least for GD.
Are there any other rules that are too vague to bother with?
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
I am on record, having posted the point on more than one occasion, that I do not Moderate “hate speech.”
[/QUOTE]
In this post, marked as being one in which you are exercising your role as a moderator, threatens Haberdash specifically with Warnings for “hate speech”. So apparently your decision to be forced into not moderating hate speech must have come in the last two weeks or so. What happened?
Or was it similar to the situation with the sticky, where despite what it says, hate speech isn’t really against the rules? IOW you weren’t really going to Warn anyone for hate speech - you just claimed you were.
Is it the same with the other violations you mentioned - that trolling and personal attacks aren’t really against the rules, because there is no consistent basis for enforcing them?
I am hoping for a little clarity here - hate speech isn’t against the rules, except it is, except the rule isn’t enforced, except it is.
Regards,
Shodan
Dude, it’s called using your judgment, and it’s exactly what moderators are for. This is almost as silly as your recent claim that moderators warning people over personal attacks might be considered “taking sides.”
Are you also the mod who claimed it was super hard to define “junior modding,” citing the example of a regular poster saying “jdavis is the only administrator on the board” as an illustration of how hard a call it is?
Have you considered that you might not actually want the job?
Very misleading. Der was suspended for a month and he was clearly on the ban train. Those in such circumstances rarely survive long here. Rather than continuing the indignity he withdrew. Props for that.
Well, there are other moderators, right? I’d be pretty sad to see Tom go, if only for his superior skills in parsing the impenetrable.
Dibble: Speaking generally, the board has long fed a large amount of slack to our resident bigots: one poster was even been banned for flaming them in GD. By the standards of the world’s democracies, this board leans centrist but it does have pronounce free speech inclinations. The downside is that the dreary business of replying to these numbskulls (again, speaking generally) falls to Dibble, Ibn Warraq and others.
Anyway, I also use ignore only on rare occasions: it’s generally directed towards seemingly sane posters who consistently screw up their facts, as opposed to attention seekers.
“group”? Yikes!
If you truly held that context was important, you would not have so blithely (and erroneously) conflated 19 individual Muslims with “all Muslims” (as you clearly implied).
You’d get a pass if you made clear the “group” you were referring to was “al-Qaeda”, but you didn’t – just like Construct.
Haters gotta hate: decent people don’t generalize from the actions of extremists within a group. Also, false: not a lot of hatred was directed against Christians despite various acts of terrorism committed by a few fundamentalist extremists in this country. See Olympic bombings, abortion clinic bombings.
To be fair I wanted to include this disclaimer, such as it is.
In general the mods prefer anti-group sentiment to be slapped down by members than banned by moderators.
Go read my post. I indicated that he was going to begin collecting Warnings for three offenses. Other Mods feel more confident regarding their ability to recognize hate speech and I figured he might pick up such a Warning from one of them. I never claimed I would Warn him for hate speech. Trolling and personal insults will get one Warned and banned regardless of hate speech accusations.
nm, crossposted. ETA: Again!