There was a sequence of posts by myself in the Pit, and three responses from @Miller.
I’ll repost my comments in sequence with the moderation notes for reference:
I’m not sure how it works in third world hell holes
I also will note based on the rates of sexual violence in South Africa you are more likely than the average board member to be a rapist.
I’m not sure if it’s anger because you’re sad that you live in one of the worst countries on earth and that gives you an inferiority complex when talking with Americans.
So I have one complaint and a comment.
The complaint is that Miller’s final mod note, the one that actually resulted in a warning, was the only one that really told me, as a poster, what he was taking issue with. Apparently there is a rule now that you cannot insult someone’s “Nationality.” Okay, if you had said that in mod note #1, I would not have done so again. I don’t mind having a warning or whatever, but I will just say and I’m being sincere here–I would not have made the other two posts if you had told me in plain words nationality was off grounds now. It has not been my experience it has ever been out of bounds before. (Nationality is not the same as race, sexual orientation etc, which are much more established as being out of bounds.)
Frankly, the first mod post / mod note couplet I don’t even understand. I call a country a “third world hell hole.” Miller calls it hate speech. I frankly didn’t really know what it meant at the time, and maybe I should’ve questioned it, but I don’t have a history of accumulating warnings here. My assumption was Miller was trying to tone down the thread or something, I’m not sure. But to pull the first line out of the Wikipedia article on Hate Speech:
Hate speech is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation”.[1] Hate speech is “usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation”.[2] A legal definition of hate speech varies from country to country.
My understanding, and I think most people’s understanding is that hate speech is a bad thing because it targets individuals for prejudice based in their membership in some sort of group (usually groups they do not control being members of, but of course not including groups they choose to be in i.e. no one calls it hate speech when you attack members of the Aryan Brotherhood for being in the AB.)
My actual first post attacked the country of South Africa, calling it a hell hole. I’m perfectly fine if that is now against the rules, but I would kindly suggest that we have a lot of political threads on this forum in which countries are bashed regularly. I have seen Israel, America, China, North Korea, Brazil, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Russia, Japan all bashed at one time or another. I’m sure many other countries have been bashed as well.
As part of the rule against attacking someone’s nationality, does that also mean going forward we cannot say negative things about specific countries at all?
The 2nd post noted is the one where I personally felt like I was closest to being out of line. You could read that to suggest that I was trying to backhand call MrDibble a rapist, or at least tar him with association. I did carefully choose my words to avoid actually doing that, which I felt was in the spirit of the Pit and the Boards. My understanding is the Pit is a place to specifically attack other posters, with certain rules in place. I would never intentionally attack other posters outside the Pit, and I have to admit that the “mostly free for all” format of the pit makes me think a lot more about what the rules are or aren’t when I’m posting there, because basic civility is not a guide in that forum. I will however note that my second post seems relatively different from the first. My first post called a specific country a hell hole. The second post said a specific poster was “more likely than average to be a rapist” because his country had a higher incidence of sexual violence compared to other countries. One was country-targeted the other poster-targeted.
The second mod note by the way doesn’t expand on the first, it just says “The more time you spend trying to find the line, the more it moves.” Which is frankly pretty dystopian. If the “line” was “no attacks based on nationality” I’d have known at least what the line was, that was not mentioned in the mod note. Frankly I think by the time of the second mod note, Miller was believing I was trying to attack MrDibble based on his race (which I was not), but I could see him stepping in as a moderator with talk that could be suggestive of that.
That’s why for my third post I made sure to completely eliminate anything that I thought would be racial, and instead I referred to South Africa as “one of the worst countries on earth.” Again, fairly obviously speaking negatively about a specific country. I also insulted MrDibble on that post directly by saying he had an inferiority complex when dealing with Americans, which obviously was intended as an insult (again, in the pit.)
In response to this Miller issues a warning and says it is because of attacking someone’s nationality. Okay, fair enough. As I said my only complaint on the warning is your first two notes were non-descriptive and didn’t give me as a poster much guidance on how to avoid a future warning, other than I guess not being mean to MrDibble–but it was a pit thread targeting me and he was one of the many posters insulting me non-stop, so that seems unreasonable. But I do appreciate that moderating the Pit is probably pretty hard, and I actually think you do a good job of it. But it’s my genuine opinion your first two mod notes did not serve the purpose of informing me as a poster what I was doing wrong. Your third one did, perfectly, and should probably have been what you said in the first note.
Now moving on from that, I do think a rule protecting countries from attack is actually a fairly big change in board rules. And I think it raises a series of questions:
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Is this rule present only when a poster from the country in question is present in the thread?
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Are countries now privileged the same as posters are? For example I would never call someone a “piece of shit” in a Great Debates thread–that would be attacking another poster. Would I also be precluded from saying something like “Russia is a piece of shit for what it’s doing in Ukraine?”
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Has it been considered that by specifically prohibiting insults of countries, in the Pit no less, you are now affording more protections for countries in the Pit, than actual individual Doper posters who post there? For example I can be called a fascist all day long in the Pit, but under this regime it’s questionable if I could call China “fascist” as that would be attacking a country.
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If the rule is not actually protection of countries from insult, but another poster’s “national origin”, then why were posts that actually were targeting the country itself included in the various mod notes?
There’s probably more to think about with it, but these are the questions raised in my mind right now.