The argument has been addressed and not the OP personally. What justification is there for claiming that by strictly sticking to addressing the argument, the argument will not be discussed? Further, any number of topics are raised in GD and mocked while they’re being factually rebutted
What standard of logically based and elaborated-upon dismissiveness is acceptable, and why? How can I tell what is proper, GD-standard behavior and what adheres to your new standard?
You’ll note that not only is it a horrible argument, but I’m certainly not the only one who’s been pointing out its absurdity. Which brings me to…
Your admonition of my 100% GD-legal conduct seemed to be because the OP responded with personal insults/comments in response to factual refutations of his argument. Isn’t your claim, instead, more accurately, that you want me to limit conduct that has always been considered acceptable in GD not because it will make the thread go “off topic” (as indeed not only am I fully on topic, but so is everybody else so far but the OP), because you are afraid that it will provoke further off-topic, Pit-content responses from the OP?
Edit: title should probably read “what you need to clarify, please, Marley.”
But blarg.
I agree the topic is not well supported, is kind of odd, and that the OP was probably overgeneralizing based on his personal experience. I said so in the thread. The OP objected to your tone. I asked him to refrain from making personal comments about you, which are not allowed in GD, and I asked you to tone down the sarcasm to help head off further unnecessary personal arguments.
That’s about the size of it. I’m sure you are capable of handling this without my inventing some kind of complex system of rules to help you work out how sarcastic you can be. Your behavior didn’t break the rules, but it did contribute to that situation.
There, I suppose, is the problem.
I believe that your position is incorrect and an instance of poor moderation.
If I’m staying within the rules and addressing the OP’s argument and not posting off-topic, then I shouldn’t have to modify my behavior lest the OP violate the rules. If you believe that the OP will likely respond to GD-legal criticism with Pit-behavior, then it seems better to move the thread to the Pit than to possibly hand out Warnings to people for engaging in GD-legal behavior in GD.
Besides, and more importantly, whether or not the OP follows the rules in GD is his own affair, and I don’t bear any responsibility for it, not even if I’m absolutely mordant while providing factual/logical refutations. We’re all supposed to be adults here, and part of posting in GD is the explicit understanding that someone can absolutely savage your argument, and do so with Cecil-level snark, and you can’t attack them personally except by linking them to a Pit thread about it. I hope, at least, that you realize I can’t be the one drawing a discussion off-topic if my responses are entirely confined to addressing the topic, with no exceptions.
And absent “some kind of complex system of rules”, there’s really no way I can know what’s going to be over the line and what’s not, especially if the standard seems to be whatever might provoke the OP into violating GD rules. “No direct personal insults” is a fairly objective rule. “You’re being too snarky” is a bitch to implement, and I’d rather not draw down a Warning for “excessive snark as defined by Marley today, but maybe not if he’s in a different mood next week.” I could, for instance, post another list of analogies with in-group preference for any number of traits (nature-lovers, opera-goers, health-nuts, etc…), and that might certainly come off as snarky. Do I get a Warning for that? I could point out further logical/conceptual problems, especially since the OP’s argument was based on the claim that one girl who may have come up with a reason to brush him off was a “racist elitist”. Do I get a Warning for that? Etc.
I would suggest that you are being overly zealous in a desire to be ‘even handed’ between one poster who is not following GD rules, and one who is.
I think it’s reasonable to ask a poster to modify ‘forum legal’ behavior to help avoid a problem. If the OP continues to make personal comments in violation of my instruction, he’ll be noted or warned for that. I’m not asking you to take responsibility for what someone else posts, and I didn’t ask you to stop disputing the points the OP made. After reading your comment “Not that the whole ‘A Jewish girl didn’t want to go out with me because I’m not Jewish, that elitist racist!’ isn’t interesting,” I said this:
That point of argument was particularly noteworthy though, as he built his entire OP around the fact that one girl, who he wasn’t even dating, immediately told him she wouldn’t be up for marrying him when he asked her out… and then he figured that she was an elitist and a racist because she said it was expected in her family that she should marry someone from her religious group.
… and then he figured that “a LOT” of Jews were also elitist racists, and Jews as a group get “a pass when it comes to racism.”
And I suppose I won’t make any headway, but I believe that it’s quite unreasonable to ask a poster to modify forum-legal behavior (especially with a vague and subjective set of guidelines) when the only problem is that another poster may not follow the rules in the course of responding. But I’ll do my best not to draw a Warning.
We agree about the flaws in the argument and there is no need to rehash them here. It’s difficult to be more specific when my entire request was “please be less dismissive” but since your other posts were generally fine, I think you can handle it.
Another thread dispute pretty much boiled down to someone being admonished for a round of “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you! …”
This is clearly different in many ways (e.g., FA isn’t being intentionally provocative), but a core aspect is the same: The mods not only enforce rules, they occasionally set the conversational tone of the board. Though I may disagree with some aspects of their directions, overall they are a key component of the overall Board culture that differentiates this place from Yahoo! Answers and the like.
ISTMT Marley clearly agrees with you regarding the weakness and other faults of the OP. His direction is somewhat limited to managing the general tenor of the thread. Managing snark in a snark-prone thread may cramp style, but opens the topic for better discussion.
Part of your problem is reading comprehension. The other part may be that I didn’t spell out every possible detail to make someone like you happy.
For example, I never said that the girl was “an elitist racist”. You did. A number of times. In fact, this is what I said at the bottom of my OP…
“If I love you in every way but won’t marry you because you aren’t of the same religion, color, or whatever, doesn’t that make me an elitist and a racist by definition?”
That is different than me explicitly calling her an elitist racist. Actually, what I was implying was as a white person, if I made that same comment on why I wouldn’t marry someone else based on religion, color or whatever, wouldn’t I be considered an elitist and a racist. You completely changed that to suit your shorthand, and it was perpetuated on page one of the thread.
You used the term “elitist racist” no fewer than 4 times on your own, typing it each time. You also used it in a post of your own, where you are claiming to quote me. See post #30 of the thread. You quote me from the op by using “elitist racist” in quotation marks. It’s something I never typed, and yet you use it with impunity. I used it once, when I quoted you with the quote button.
You can’t simply read something, filter out what you want and don’t want, and not expect some backlash. But you do. Constantly.
And where exactly do I say this? … and then he figured that “a LOT” of Jews were also elitist racists, and Jews as a group get “a pass when it comes to racism.”
I don’t. I never even imply that a lot of jews are elitist racists. You’ve taken your own made up phrase, attributed it to me, and now claim I’m doing some figuring based on that. You spend so much time attacking me or anything that may be remotely viewing jews in an unflattering matter, and you make things up to support your theory. But making words up, putting quotes around them and then saying someone else said them is not only wrong, it’s unethical. It isn’t something you are going to go to jail for, but it makes all of your posts suspect. People that call you on it are always admonished and/or pitted.
As for where I might have done better: I could have explained in excruciating detail the reason I asked this question in the first place. The fact that this exact thing happened to a friend of mine recently. She was given the chance to convert, but unless that occurred, the relationship was over. I remembered my experience from my own life and used that, since my experience is the only one I can speak directly to. The recent event also caused me to revisit my jewish and non-jewish friends, their spouses and what I knew about their relationships. I cannot share with anyone an example of a Jew converting to a non-jewish religion, but I do have a number of examples where the conversion took place. There are also, like many folks in the thread, married and not in a twist about it either way. No conversion was required.
Since you seem to want to debate your claims in ATMB instead of the thread you made them in, I’ll just keep this ATMB thread for what reasonable measures I should take to avoid provoking you into violating GD rules, and I’ll refute your claims in the thread in which they belong.
I replied here because this is where I happened to be. That’s the sum total of my reasoning. Why do you think I did it?
Besides, the thread in question (the last time I checked anyway) was headed in the right direction. Why would I want to devote any more space in that thread to demonstrate how you “debate”? Your “methods” are well known on this board. Derailing the thread to suit you is not something I’m interested in.
Ah well. For those who are curious about the errors SFP made in his recent claims, there’sthe correct thread. This thread is about whether or not it’s appropriate to moderate acceptable forum conduct because another poster will be ‘provoked’ into posting personal commentary outside of the Pit.
Oh, and one more thing before I bail on this. For those actually reading this, don’t go to Finn’s link. He links to a single post, not the entire thread. Why? Because what Finn says is truth!:rolleyes:
Here’s the link to the **start **of the thread. If you decide to read it, god bless you. If you don’t care, I can’t blame you.
Life demands my attention elsewhere. Sorry Finn. You’ll have to get someone else to pay attention to you now.
Since Marley23 has provided clarification of his instructions, and this seems to be developing into a rehashing of the initial dispute, I’m going to close this. Discussion of the original topic of the GD thread should continue in that forum.