From the latest cop bashing thread, currently in the Pit:
Has there been another rules change? My understanding has been that cunt may not be directed at SDMB posters, but may be directed at off-board figures.
As soon as I saw Tom’s post in the BBQ Pit, I came up here to ATMB because I thought and hoped there would be a thread asing when that rule had changed.
That’s what I thought, too. I can’t find it atm but I think I even asked for clarification if this was the case once and that was confirmed. I might be misremembering.
Well, crap, i started my own thread, but this one was already here, so i’ll repost my OP here and ask for my other thread to be closed.
In the BBQ Pit thread about the police officer, we have the following exchange:
You are completely and utterly wrong here. We’ve even gone over this exact issue before in ATMB. The rule states, very specifically:
Bolding mine. There is NO RULE against using that word to refer to someone who is not a member of the Boards.
Not only that, but back in April twickster ordered someone not to use the word “cunt” against a non-Doper third party in a Cafe Society thread, and in the end it was agreed by members and mods alike that this had been a bad decision. You yourself said, in the ATMB thread on the issue:
Why now do you insist on enforcing a non-rule that you knew very well was a non-rule?
Shit. I come in here to see what all the fuss was about and found it’s over a post I’d made.
I was under the impression (and still am) that the rule against bad language was only enforced against other posters.
Think there’s any chance we’ll get an, Ooops, sorry?
[sup]Naaaaaaaaaaa[/sup]
Nope - we’ll get a week of silence, where a non-tomndebb mod comes in and says, “we’re discussing this”. A week after that tomndebb will feign offense and chastise us for beating a dead horse because he won’t understand why we’re still upset over something that happened two weeks ago.
My guess is yep. Mods make mistakes, this seems like a small one that gets handled quickly and easily.
Yup, looks like he made a mistake. But give him chance to correct it before jumping on his case.
I’m just posting to indicate that tomndebb’s post was made about 4 hours ago. He was last on the board about 2 1/2 hours ago, and about fifteen minutes before the OP was posted. He is presently offline. So please be patient.
I didn’t make that ruling, so I’ll let tom speak for himself. That said the thread started in GD and that’s where the post in question was made. The rule about directing certain expressions at other posters is a Pit rule. I don’t know how the GD mods handle the issue, so I’ll leave it to them to explain.
It’s perfectly understandable that you leave it to the mod in question to explain his own ruling. As a general principle, though, in the absence of any specific rule, it seems to me rather problematic to simply make them up as you go along, or to make rulings based on some very personal notion of what is and is not acceptable.
That’s pretty much what twickster did in Cafe Society back in March, and it’s a ruling that was almost universally acknowledged, by both members and SDMB authorities, as being both technically incorrect and also a bad precedent in terms of subjective and capricious rulings.
I’ll be interested to see if tomndebb has an explanation for why his ruling was appropriate for GD, given that he made a total of 13 posts to the ATMB thread about twickster’s ruling, and personally acknowledged that her initial ruling against using The Forbidden Word in MPSIMS had been the wrong decision. That’s one reason his ruling surprised me so much; i knew he had been right in the thick of the earlier debate, so it’s not like he was unaware of what the rules actually say, or of the general agreement about how they should be interpreted.
He said “this board”, though. Seems to me he wasn’t talking about GD.
We’ll have to wait to hear what he says. I can say for certain that the Pit rules have not changed, so I assume he was in a hurry and spoke a bit too broadly. But I’m only assuming, and we know what happens when we do that. . . 
Right. I don’t dispute what you say here. We’ll have to wait to see what he says.
Can’t wait but will. tom? I have an issue or 2 meownself.
You started four threads in a week about the (supposedly) same thing. What’s one more going to hurt?
And?
Let me repeat - what’s one more going to hurt? Just start a thread about your question.
You really don’t know how things work around here, do you?
I don’t think he knows much of anything.