So? It was the first of his mod actions in the morning. Do you think that mods review each post as they’re made?
As for it being the only joke singled out, it was singled out as a perfect example of why the thread, as it was developing, was unacceptable. It was the most offensive “joke” in the thread, and the least funny. It was at the “lick-their-lips-and-stick-'em-to-the-wall” level of racist “humour.” While both of the other jokes that followed it were inoffensive, it demonstrated why a thread for jokes about jewish people wasn’t gonna fly here.
Personally, I’m glad of it. I don’t see any reason to assume that x-ray-vision meant his joke to be taken any more hatefully than Bryan Ekers did, but whatever the posters’ intentions, the SDMB ought not to be a vector for that sort of crap.
What makes you the judge of “offensive”. I personally find the joke about not tipping more offensive as it indicated Jews are rude, while a breathing air for free with the “big nose” was humorous.
There are jokes about Bush here, I find them offensive, I think thats why a thread about jokes featuring the President should not “fly” here either. Where does the line start? Where does it stop?
Should we ask Larry Mudd before we tell a joke to see if he thinks its offensive? Should we do a survey? Jokes about Jews, The Challenger, are not to be told because they are offensive but jokes about 9/11, and the President are deemed okay as stamped by Larry Mudd, the Mods and and the offensive police.
Here is a hint, if a thread is something you find offensive, do not fucking open it, if upon opening it, your pussy hurts then close it and run to fluffy little fluffibunny forum where only sugar and cream are spoken.
First, the tipping joke, while referencing an offensive stereotype, has at its core a pun. Not the highest form of humour, but at least a little bit clever. The second joke combines two baseless stereotypes, and creates a strange loop because the caricature of large-nosed jews is rooted in the pseudoscience of phrenology, wherein a large, hooked nose was taken to indicate avarice. But this hardly matters, as that joke wasn’t the reason that the thread was closed. The thread was closed because it was on its way to becoming a compendium of racist jokes, which is a no-no here.
Oi – no need to refer to me about where to draw the line, you can just read the registration agreement. Jokes about the president are dodgy in GQ. Racist jokes are out altogether. If you want stricter restrictions on partisan humour or relaxation of the rules about hate speech, register at some other message board.
As for the 9/11 thread vs. the Challenger thread, fuck no, don’t ask me. You’ll note that I haven’t even expressed an opinion about either of those. As it happens, I think the 9/11 thread was valuable catharsis, because 9/11 was pretty fecking traumatic for most of us, even if we didn’t live in NYC or DC. I can understand how the Challenger thing seemed more like laughing at something horrible that happened to other people, to some people. Most of us, while saddened, didn’t have our worlds turned upside down by the Columbia and Challenger disasters.
Oh, fuck off. This is a moderated forum. Efforts are made to keep the place workable for the majority of the membership. That’s why we have mods. If you want to post without worrying about community standards, have fun in the troll-infested, moron-riddled, and lunatic-filled environment of UseNet. It’s not really that satisfying, and even the most erudite NGs are occassionally destroyed by a diminishing signal-to-noise ratio.
It’s not like I’ve never found myself disagreeing with, or been subjected to, a mod decision. Since we’re talking of 9/11, a good example would be the time, a few days after 9/11, that I posted scanner recordings from the FDNY and NYPD at ground zero. Cartooniverse and a few other posters were offended by this, because they saw it as using people’s death for entertainment and titillation, and TubaDiva agreed, broke the links, and closed the thread. Now, I have no idea how anyone could imagine that another person could listen to those recordings for “entertainment.” My intention was to give people an idea of just what those people were facing. I couldn’t listen to it without blubbering, but the main thing was that it was a documentation of incomprehensibly heroic action, and gave me a clearer idea of what it was like for them than I have ever got from news coverage, although I had been glued to the TV for days.
But do you know what? When that decision was made, I never fucking bitched about it, because I recognize that this is a community that contains many people who are bound to see things differently, and if something is judged to be intolerably offensive to a significant portion of people, then why the hell would I want to persist in giving offense? I wasn’t present at Ground Zero, and I can’t imagine how people who were dealt with it, or how things appeared to them. Sometimes, even if you simply can’t truly empathize with someone, you have to act as though you do – because that’s what decent people do.
Myself, I didn’t have a problem with the Challenger thread. Those jokes are tacky, and I wouldn’t waste my time reading them – but if the presence of that thread is distressing to a lot of people, I don’t have any trouble seeing it wished into the cornfield. On the contrary, if more people think the SDMB would be enriched by its continuation, it’s no skin off my ass. Pretty neutral, here.
But quit your boo-hoo-hooing over the fact that the SDMB is moderated. Moderation is what keeps this place ticking along nicely. Sometimes bad calls are made, and they get reversed. There have been a few that I thought were poor decisions, and if you care to look, you’ll see that I don’t mind saying so when it happens. This one, I’m content to read along and see what other people think.
I don’t mind telling you that I don’t find spittle-flecked, hysterical complaints like yours particularly suasive.
Where I disagree with you is you basing your opinion on whats offensive, I read the rules and I could find nothing about offensive jokes. I did find the “Don’t be a jerk rule” and found it useful, if used correctly.
If every thread I started was “Why is a insert phrase here a such and such” that is a jerk.
If you read my previous post in this thread you will find I have no problem with the Mods closing that thread, but your post seems to justify it because it was an “offensive joke” then that should be specified in the rules.
Hate speech to me is not an innocent thread with some jokes.
Q:What do you call 500,000 white guys jumping out of a plane?
A: Snow.
Is that hate speech? To me its humorous. Hate speech is normally a statement meant to cause ire, or spread hate.
So I guess anyone cutting on someone’s belief in God would be hate speech as well? Is obesity a disability? To some it is so any fat jokes are “hate speech”
Or are we so “enlightened” that we shrunk down hate speech into what we want it to be while ignoring the rest?
I don’t disagree with you, I do not even have to look I believe you. But you said this
And I was asking why Larry Mudd thinks he is the one who deems the jokes, funny, or offensive.
I paid my money to come here because this is the board has fought my ignorance on many occasions in GQ’s and the debates in GD usually show me another side to an argument that I myself didn’t see. The rest is just interesting to read.
Trying to get someone to change their minds on a message board is like smacking your head against a brick wall, repeatedly. I do not try, but that doesn’t mean I will not state my opinion because someone uses such words as “spittle-flecked, hysterical complaints like yours particularly suasive” toward me.
Ah, I don’t suppose we have a lot to argue about, really. As for why I think that the quoted joke was the most offensive, it’s because it boils down to “Why do jews have those big noses? Because they’re cheap/greedy.” It doesn’t matter what group is the subject – it’s a particularly hateful joke, moreso than the other jokes in the thread. My judgement of how offensive it is informed by consideration of community standards more than my own personal tolerance. It’s certainly more offensive than your “500,000 white guys” joke, which is pretty harmless, being based on simple chromatic accident rather than anything hateful. Again, though, it doesn’t really matter, since the thread wasn’t closed because of that particular joke, it was just used as an example of the sort of thing that could be expected if the thread remained open. I don’t think it was a particularly controversial decision. I’m not claiming to be the arbiter of taste, here.
Hell, my tolerance for racial humour is proably higher than many other people’s, in certain instances. I love The Forbidden Zone, which contains many outlandish and patently offensive racial stereotypes. It’s a bit meta, though, so it doesn’t get my dander up. However, although I find it as funny as hell, I don’t complain that it’s not shown on network TV, because I recognize that my personal standards aren’t in line with the community standards that network TV adheres to.
I think the SDMB uses the most general definition of hate speech. “Bigoted speech attacking or disparaging a social or ethnic group or a member of such a group.” Couched as a joke or no, it ain’t allowed.
Damn straight. How long do you think a “fat joke” thread would stay open? Not very.
Sometimes the wall comes down, though, man. I’ve been on both sides of that one, many times.
Are you really that stupid? I’ve never thought so previously. Please find any statement from me in this thread where I defended the closing of the thread linked in the OP, or any of the reason(s) the mod(s) have given for doing so. I haven’t said anything remotely supportive of your declaration - not even through the most tortuous parsing.
OK. I will try to give as honest an answer as I can so that you can see where I am coming from. Here is the deal: I perceive a pattern on the boards. Specifically, what seems to be the case is that a moderator will make a call (either a warning or closing a thread, for example) that a poster will consider to be a “bad” call. This leads to a Pit thread. The pattern that I tend to see is that the “offending” mod will make perhaps a post or two with some non-defense defense of the call (that basically, over and over, seems to boil down to “because I can”). At that point, if people are continuing to make arguments against the call, some other moderator will just happen to come along and continue to defend the call. My perception is that you are still following this pattern, even though you are no longer a moderation.
What seems to be missing from all of this is, well, some sense that we can appeal to fair play or justice without having someone like you come along to tell us that or concerns are petty and the moderators not seeming to give much of a shit one way or another, beyond the seeming mandate to defend the actions of other moderators at all cost.
So, I don’t know, when I post a question that asks “why didn’t the people complaining get told to suck it up, rather than the other way around?” and you counter with this:
it is hard for me to see this as anything but falling into the pattern that I mentioned above.
Sure, at the end of the day we can all go home and sleep the sleep of the blessed and not really care that a thread was closed or not. It is, after all, not really that big of a deal. But you see, I also have a pretty developed sense of justice and fair play and, at least from where I sit, there are many moderators that are making decisions based of private agendas and hot-button issues that they have and are not moderating in an even handed way.
The problem, may then be, that you are missing a piece of the puzzle. The reason the mods might seem to be in lockstep, is because they are - publicly at least. That is one of the things which is stressed very highly as a condition of the job; they’re required to present a unified front to the membership. Controversial issues are argued - sometimes with a level of venom which approaches that seen between members here in the Pit - in their private off-board communications. But once the consensus has been reached, then any staff member who chooses to speak publicly on the decision, must do so in a supportive manner.
This, then, due to situational vagaries and interference of off-line life for the staff, may often prove to be the real source of a perceived inconsistency in decision making and rules interpretation. There could be a partially, or even wholly, different set of staff members deliberating recurring issues such as this one. Nornally, these types of issues don’t happen frequently enough (and some just aren’t weighty enough) that a general rule is deemed advisable or necessary. The staff would rather handle them on a case-by-case basis, judging each on its own merits, rather than bogging down the membership (and themselves) with a bunch of niggling little rules (which many people don’t even read anyway). This is in keeping with the general spirit of the boards; that the staff would prefer not to promulgate a whole bunch of very specific rules while striving to maintain an open and wide-ranging discourse as possible. There are simply too many drawbacks to a rigid system of moderating and even then, there’s no guarantee that implementation of such would return results better than we see today.
Now, one may, of course, argue that presentation from the staff of a unified front isn’t necessary, but actual experience here instructs otherwise. (I can remember a couple pretty nasty incidents between the staff occuring here in public which were exceedingly divisive of the membership. Both of these happened prior to my modship and I believe those incidents were the genesis of the unified front directive.) Further, a board where the staff is seen to argue in public would be a very unpleasant place; much like patronizing your local tavern might be if the wait staff was constantly bickering with the bartenders. Makes for a very unpleasant experience and one that is open to abuse by both the members and staff.
Summarizing then, the reason you perceive occasional inconsistencies is because there are occasional inconsistencies. The problem, however, isn’t deemed great enough that the beneifts of fixing it outweigh the drawbacks of the system thought required to fix it.
What I’d like to know is why UncleBeer’s responses in this thread didn’t draw so much as an admonishment from the moderators. If the “joke” thread was considered tasteless, what do you call having a big ol’ shit in the middle of a celebration thread?
Then perhaps those staffers who didn’t undertake the action in question should voluntarily refrain from commenting on it publicly.
And, upon reviewing the linked thread and your comment about how blowing up teachers might be good for the public schools, I add my voice to the chorus of amazement that you weren’t smacked for it. Certainly in at least as poor a taste as some of the jokes that got the shuttle joke thread locked.
If you don’t think a post is appropriate, report it. If you wanna know why the mods did, or didn’t do anything, ask 'em. Whining about it in here isn’t likely to produce an aswer to the question you so righteously claim to seek. Same to you Otto.
Perhaps. But that’s not what’s happened here. Skippy said that he conferred with Cajun Man on that decision. I posted the above because Binarydrone insists this thread is about a larger pattern (although I’m still not so sure since the larger pattern wasn’t even mentioned until the thread had received numerous replies); my post shouldn’t be taken as the explanation of the actual events of any particular instance - including this one.
A very mild “fuck you” to you good sir for accusing me of “whining” about your post. I merely stated an observation. I couldn’t care much less whether you get sanctioned for your remark and I couldn’t be bothered to report it. I didn’t read that thread until it was linked here anyway. While I can’t say I’ve never reported a post, I tend not to.
Nor should my post be taken as limited to this specific incident. I have no idea whether there’s a “pattern” or not because frankly I don’t pay enough attention to that sort of thing to notice. But from my own moderator experience (which sometimes included a “toe the company line” requirement and sometimes didn’t) I’ve found that having multiple authority figures chiming in on the same issue usually doesn’t help resolve anything.
Isn’t the Pit where we’re supposed to go for that sort of thing? “This is the place for all complaints and other discussion regarding administration of the SDMB”, according to my front page at least.
I had reported your post in that thread. Nothing happened. Since it seemed to be an even worse example of exactly what caused the “joke thread” to be closed, I’m sincerely curious about the lack of any moderator response.
And HEY LOOK - it’s a whole thread about a moderator’s decision concerning, of all things, tasteless remarks about Space Shuttle disasters. So I posted about it here.
So, I don’t think that a single post, asking a sincere question in a thread about exactly that subject is “whining”. Following another legitimate avenue of questioning is more like it. If no anwer is forthcoming, I will probably send an email as well.
Also, it now seems that thread has turned into a more light hearted “how can we destroy the remaining shuttles (just the shuttles - no people) thread?”. So the context for anyone looking at it now - at the time I was referring to the thread, it had stalled at post 27, back on August 11th.