I don’t know if it would even be possible to have a perfectly neutral board without restricting topics and/or members to certain safe categories.
Some posters are attempting to have a productive or at least interesting discussion here. This doesn’t help, and you’re not in the Pit. Knock it off.
I respectfully disagree. You and I can discuss and debate any topic under the sun as long as we keep emotions and vitriol out of it or at least to a minimum. When the name calling and labels start from either side then the mods should bring the smack down. This needs to be applied equally. I call you a tree-hugging pinko? SMACK You call me a Tea Party racist? SMACK
I welcome a reasonable debate. Arguments don’t have to devolve to ad hominem attacks.
I think things are just fine as they are. I’d hate to see a further expansion of mod notes and warnings, especially for what seem to be mild offenses.
Can’t we all just not get along and nut up about it?
So you don’t think 7 or 8 liberals disagreeing with a conservative at the same time would be an unfair pile-on, as long as everyone was civil about it?
Same behavior, not the same liberals, if that makes sense. I’m struggling to remember the thread title or subject, but the exact same thing happened in a socio-political thread within the past month or so. Someone came in, posted a question, and instantly, the liberal crowd posted a bunch of very snarky, very condescending and very hostile comments about why one answer to the question was wrong in their view.
Seriously, aren’t we all grown ups here? What is wrong with the principal of free speech that it shouldn’t apply here at this message board? There is no right to not be offended, as far as I know. We have certain board rules against direct personal attacks and insults, and I think the mods do a pretty good job clamping down on those violations. For everything else there’s the pit. Why isn’t that enough? If someone perceives that they aren’t being fairly treated, why is the answer ‘everyone else must change so that I won’t be offended’. Just don’t be offended, or if you truly just cannot stand how things are at this board, then why are you coming here? If I was going to a message board and was constantly feeling persecuted and offended by what I see there, I wouldn’t insist that everyone at that board change their ways. I’d just stop subjecting myself to that which I don’t like. This really feels like a completely avoidable problem, but the way to avoid it isn’t to expect that an entire message board culture should change to suit some subset of users’ perceived offended sensibilities.
My point was that the same behavior occurs in political threads, often by the same gang of usual suspects. Sort of a similar example, even if it’s inexact.
I wasn’t meaning to equate liberal/conservative with atheist/christian or anything like that.
Oh, and Airbeck the point is exactly what you say, except that we’re arguing about if and why conservatives find it so uncomfortable around here.
From what I’ve seen (and other conservatives have noticed) the warnings seem to be disproportionately against the conservative members. To use one of the most abused expressions, I would like things to be “fair and balanced.” God, I hate that Fox News used that phrase.
It can be done civilly. A poster says, “A is true,” and a whole bunch of other people come forward to say, “You are wrong because of…”, “You missed…”, “That only applies for…”, and so on. At no point are they being out of line, they are merely providing alternative information to bring the discussion along. If they are all jumping in to say, “You idiot, you forgot about…”, “That’s the kind of stupid things we always hear from Republicans,” and so on then it is inappropriate and should be dealt with by the mods.
That sounds like micromanaging the board to death if you ask me.
Let free speech reign. If the heat’s too hot for you, then maybe you shouldn’t keep standing next to the stove. The ‘you idiot’ example isn’t really relevant because direct insults are already outlawed.
It almost seems like the suggestion is to outlaw snark and sarcasm. If that happens, this place will be like having a discussion at a church social. No thanks.
I don’t think one could make conservatives feel that things were fair. Witness fox news and “fair and balanced.”
It is their nature to feel persecuted.
Thing is, this is not The McLaughlin Report, we are not sitting here f2f (or live via satellite) having a real-time discussion. Because it is text, one can easily hit FF (scroll) to get past the irksome material. Read a sentence or two from a poster you know is a problem, you can probably just skim over the rest of their content to the next post. Yes, a pile-on can make it a screen full of thread-apples with little worthwhile dialog, but if the noise level is too high and the thread is (in your view) irredeemable, you can abandon it, perhaps start a new one to reset the conversation.
Most forums tend toward a blood-in-the-water effect: if you become angry and defensive wrt other posters’ responses, you make the feeding frenzy worse. If you ignore the attacks and attempt to post reasonably (assuming you have substantive reason on your side), you will fare better and garner respect.
Hence, I would say that the persecution that some people feel is at least partly their own damn fault for letting themselves be suckered into a fray.
As a minor suggestion, I propose that anyone who uses the phrase “usual suspects” more than once in a thread to refer to opponents on this message board be compelled to name at least two “suspects” or withdraw from the discussion.
Thing is what you and other conservatives have “noticed” is not what the seems be true to others here. Now you may feel that my perception of a large number of conservative posters acting jerkily is a “grey hairs stand out” effect … I don’t think so, to me what stands out as grey hairs is the jerky behavior and it is only then that I notice that the behavior is more often originating in those who usually post conservative positions (a minority of them but still disproportionately, there are many liberals here and very few of them are jerks, and most of them have been multiply Pitted by other liberals), but I’ll grant the possibility. And you, who read thread titles like “Post examples of conservative fiction” and “Obama should target …” as attack threads that are highly offensive (“hate filled”) to conservatives, see conservatives as a minority deserving of special protections from institutionalized discrimination.
I would suggest, supported, once again by your research, that perhaps you should be as open to the possibility that your perception is biased as I am attempting to be.
In any case the premise being suggested by this whole line of argument boils down to that conservatives are a minority here because there are fewer of them (and thus the pile ons and discriminations against them). If only there were equal numbers then there would not be so few (because they’d be in a more comfortable environment). Conversely that there are lots of liberals here because there are many of them here. A bit of a tautology don’t you think?
There was a longish thread in ATMB about why this is a silly idea.
Regards,
Shodan
Basically, the free market of ideas has shaped this board to be the way it is. Now we want a bunch of authoritarian central planners to come in and artificially reshape the board by dictate?
I don’t think so!
I agree. Don’t remove an easy cue for content free posts, and to just skip on down.
Unfortunately I do have to note that the moderation of this thread does provide some support for the position of the conservatives here.
One moderation comment. True the comment moderated upon was a jerky comment but it was not made in isolation and was in response to a jerky comment that had no moderation comment made about it and in context of several other jerkish anti-conservative comments made in this thread which were let slide. While I maintain my belief that conservative here are post jerkily at least as often as do liberals this does give some support to the claimed belief that moderation is, probably without realizing it, biased in what they judge crosses the line. Of course this is n of 1, nothing conclusive, but given the thread … boy, if you are not going to be evenhanded in this context, when will you be?
FWIW.
I don’t think mandated niceness is a good idea. I think the board will end as we know it under such a scenario.
Which ‘jerkish’ comments in this thread violate actual board rules? If they don’t violate any actual board rules, then what your really advocating is mandated niceness.
Maybe ‘liberal’ posters are better at being snarky and sarcastic without actually violating the board rules. Maybe ‘conservative’ posters simply cross the actual line more often. I see jerkishness from both sides regularly tbh. Dancing right alongside the line without crossing it may be jerkish indeed, but do we really need to legislate that everyone be nice to each other? Do we really need the mods to constantly interject like Mommy telling us to play nice together? What is this a children’s show on PBS? I’ve been having discussions on the internet for as long as I can remember basically and this board is pretty damn civil compared to most places to discuss politics online. Just because you feel that you’ve been insulted doesn’t mean that someone has actually insulted you. People should be able to stand up for themselves for crying out loud without running to the refs and crying about someone being mean and hurting their feelings. If you want to discuss controversial political topics online, you should not be surprised if the tenor of the discussions isn’t 100% polite at all times. Its just never going to be like that on the internet, no matter what board you’re on. Its the nature of the beast.
The one mod comment in the thread was an admonishment for directly insulting all liberal posters on the board as ‘a form of mindless herd animal’.
Were there other actual insults that they ignored? Again, if someone feels like they’ve been insulted by a comment that doesn’t mean that the comment was actually an insult. We have rules banning insults, but not for preventing hurt feelings.