All right; I’ll pay more attention to your username :).
I agree with all of this, except that I think you’re misunderstanding the OP a bit. It’s precisely the judgement call around moderating disparagement of race and gender (and, as I showed earlier, class) that I’m addressing.
The rule up to now has basically been that posters have very wide latitude to disparage non-belief groups (e.g., race, gender, to a large degree class, sexual preference, etc.), as long as they did so using polite language. Politeness, not respectfulness, was required.
I’m asking the board to reconsider this orientation, and require more respect. It would mean that certain views would no longer appear on the board: no more people suggesting that attempted rape is a trifle, as UrbanRedneck did in that monstrosity of a thread, no more suggesting that black people are genetically inferior, and so on. You wouldn’t even be able to advance these propositions using the finest words.
Removing such categories of nonsense from the boards would not, as some folks’ fingers are just itching to type right now, result in an echo chamber. There’s literally a shit-ton of other stuff to discuss and argue about, such as the linguistic atrocity I supposedly committed earlier in this sentence. We can argue about the best way to proceed with Supreme Court nominations without needing to dispense with the “What next, arresting someone for peeking up a little girl’s skirt when he was five?” juvenalia, and we can bicker about whether affirmative action is a good idea without having to barf our way past “Black people need it because their IQs are too low, just listen to this Sam Harris podcast for proof!”
Worry less about polite; worry more about respect and compassion.
Being polite is the opposite of compassion. Politeness is about catering to the powerful and ruthless, so politeness means lying in their favor, submitting to their will, and ignoring the suffering of their victims. Polite black people sit in the back of the bus like they are told; polite homosexuals stay in the closet, polite women submit to any man who wants to abuse or rape them and don’t complain about it afterwards.
Being “nice” and “polite” and “respectful” and so forth are all about submission to the worst people alive, since they are the ones who define what such terms mean.
I feel that one thing that made and makes the Straight Dope unique on the Internet is that it is a message board in which many controversial or challenging topics can be debated in a community of smart, ‘argumentative’ people, as long as the rules are followed - a community where offensive truth is permitted to be spoken because it is about “fighting ignorance” - as long as it is the truth. If we were to adopt a policy of “You cannot speak truth because it is offensive,” then we would become no different than many other message boards on the Internet. The Straight Dope wouldn’t be the Straight Dope anymore; it would have lost its mission.
(I am totally on board with the idea of banning offensive falsehood - but because it is falsehood, not because it is offensive.)
Any time I’ve heard this or similar concepts before on this board, it’s always been about defending and justifying assertions about the inherent inferiority of black people, women, gay people, or similar.
Wait, are you saying genetics, biology, or physics discussions if it concerns differences in human populations should be forbidden on the basis that such discussions lack compassion? That seems like unnecessary censorship of legitimate debate. Scientific journals and respected newspapers address such topics frequently. Is the implication that the SDMB lacks the emotional maturity that The NY Times has?
No, “we” want nothing of the sort and quite a lot of people understand that when a group has been unfairly privileged to the point of lacking all empathy and comprehension of how the other groups have to live it’s quite a salutary lesson for them to find out just how much it sucks. If they don’t experience it themselves, they endlessly witter on about how it’s not “really that bad” or “it doesn’t really happen that often” and similar dismissive bullshit. Nope, pendulums swing and that’s just fine with quite a lot of us and eventually they do stop in the middle quite naturally. You might not like it, but that’s probably because you have reason to fear having to exist the way you’ve been perfectly fine expecting others to exist for centuries. Again, too bad so sad.
Oh man, I’m so tempted to embroider that on a sampler in order to have it around for future amusement purposes. Are you in need of the fainting couch and smelling salts, Ms Bernhardt? snerk
What if I have no basic respect for other posters (or people in general?) I firmly believe that respect needs to be earned, whereas politeness, civility and compassion are things I can and do give out freely. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that someone creating an account on a public message board is an action that requires me to respect them for it.
The way you’re using the word “respect” doesn’t seem to be related to how I’m using it. “Compassion” is more closely related to the respect I’m talking about than “admiration” is.
I disagree with the part I emphasized (the part about “the rule up to now…”), so I don’t think you are characterizing the current situation correctly. Further, I don’t think the example you gave comes near meeting the criteria you described in the first post I quoted. Urbanredneck explained in a subsequent post (to you, per a question you asked him) that he was talking about something more akin to the statute of limitations. He explicitly said the act should have been punished if it had been reported earlier, so I’m not seeing how he said that attempted rape was “a trifle”.
Do you really think that the idea of a statute of limitations is “so revolting that the politeness in which their words are framed cannot raise their words to the level of appropriate discourse”?
I think many of these situations can be addressed if we make an effort not to assign the worst possible meaning to a post but instead ask for clarification before jumping to conclusions. I’m not claiming I always abide by that rule myself, but if we are to be compassionate, isn’t that the best place to start?
And if someone really does post that “attempted rape is no big deal; girls just need to get over it”, I feel confident that the mods will step in and take action under the current rules. They generally give posters the benefit of the doubt, and refrain from taking action unless there is no other, reasonable way to interpret a given post. I think the post you picked, above, is a perfect example of unnecessarily assuming the worst about a poster’s intentions. I don’t want the mods to do that.
I rarely see posts that fit your description (first quote, above), and that are not moderated if reported. But maybe there are a bunch of them out there and I just missed them. I’m all for swift action against posts pining for “the good ol’ days when blacks knew their place, women didn’t make such a bid deal when men groped them (or worse), and gays felt enough shame that they stayed in the closet”. But let’s make sure the post is really saying that, and that we’re not just reading more into it than is there.
Well, that was exactly what Starving Artist got clipped for but I’m pretty sure that was not the first time he said something of that nature and he was never even warned for it. I think your confidence would have been unjustified a mere 4 months ago and until we see how it plays out going forward I would say it should still be shaky. tomndebb is on record as not seeing much difference between race and political affiliation as far as “bad” prejudice goes.
Speaking as someone who has gotten more than his share of abuse on this board, I am totally against this. Let people speak. I would rather know the hatred in someone’s soul and have that useful information than to try to communicate with them while they hide their true feelings. That’s how you get category errors and miscommuniction. It’s also how you wind up with an infantilized public. Or was saying that a violation of your new rules?
And I am pretty sure that the standard you want is one that will lead to endless fights over what is or isn’t acceptable. What’s going on with speech on campuses should be a warning tale, not a guide.
This trend of trying to shut down speech you don’t like is very disturbing. If the Straight Dope starts up a ‘truth and safety’ council or starts policing microaggressions or speech that is merely uncomfortable (as opposed to obvious personal attacks), I’m out of here.
We had this thing called the enlightenment. Learn it, love it, live it.
Ok, so we’re discussing a ban on GD threads devoted to IQ and race.* As it happens, injecting compassion into the OP of such threads would make them more condescending aka worse.
Six years ago, I’d say that the answer to bad speech is more speech. Today, I’m… uncertain as to where I stand.
Velocity: Um, no the Straight Dope would be unique on the web even if there were a de facto ban on race’nIQ threads. Or just herderrrace’nIQ threads. And clever people like myself could easily jam a de facto topic ban into this board’s mission: I’d apply Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. That doesn’t imply this is a good idea. I’m just knocking down one objection to it. (A modified version of your argument could probably stand.)
We’re discussing other things as well. But this is where the rubber hits the road.