# Who celebrates the new rules?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-celebrates-the-new-rules/488917>\
**Category:** About This Message Board\
**Created:** [March 10, 2009, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-celebrates-the-new-rules/488917 "2009-03-10T04:17:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 11

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**Author:** ![Eutychus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Eutychus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eutychus)\
**Post date:** [March 10, 2009, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-celebrates-the-new-rules/488917/11 "2009-03-10T12:16:22Z")

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> [@leander](#):
>
> 1. The new rules have caused lots of turmoil in a place that was running smoothly. They have created a rift between posters and mods (who frankly don’t seem to know what rules to enforce and how), and unnecessarily turned this place quite sour.

Considering how much bitching and moaning there’s been going on here both before and after the new pit rules went into effect, I would take issue with the idea that “things were running smoothly.”

Let’s face facts; the Straight Dope was never about free speech and never was. You want an unmoderated message board; to be able to say anything you want and it just ain’t gonna happen. I’ve been there; it’s hell. It doesn’t work. And I agree with what someone said in another thread that we can chew and nitpick and tear apart things so much that they become meaningless. I don’t think the rules that have been laid down are particularly difficult to understand or follow. We’re just afraid of the mods having to make judgement calls which, frankly, is what the job was all about anyway. Sometimes they make good judgements; sometimes they dont. But love it or not, that’s their call. Deal with it.

\*From another thread : \*

> [@Proposed language restrictions in the Pit](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/proposed-language-restrictions-in-the-pit/487910/208):
>
> And now we are irreverent, knowlegeable, sarcastic, and witty. We are the masters of the scathing insult and the pithy quip, and we demand cites. As the home page itself would have it, we are the “smartest, hippest people on the planet”, or at least would like to think of ourselves as such.

I wince every time I read a statement like that. The older I get, the more I realize that people who think of themselves as such usually are not. I can only point to a small handful of posters who have the art of the insult down to a feathered edge; sadly, the rest are just kidding themselves. It doesn’t take much more than a five-year old intelligence to call someone a jerk. Or worse.

I’m reminded of a story that may be apocryphal and was told by Mark Twain and that I’m probably misquoting. It seemed his wife, Olivia, didn’t like the idea that he was cynical and used bad language and like to find clever ways to insult his enemies. So one day, she met him at home and started using every foul word she could think of in every possible way she could. Twain just stood there and listened to it for awhile and then said “Okay …you know the words, you just don’t know the music.”

As Dopers, we’ve fallen so in love with the words, we’ve forgotten the music.

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