Because posters in the past have been officially told to cease their Livejournal-style series of postings.
I’ve stayed out of this because, really, when you have a mod giving special protection to a poster, there’s really no point. But this is the SDMB and revisionist history is (or should be) anathema.
Except the “OPs don’t control their thread rule”
Here, for one of many examples
Apparently an exception exists for Liberal when you’re around to protect him.
For the record, I did exactly the same thing that Tomndebb has allowed others to do for years.
I wrote
which was the sort of statement designed (and I fully admit it) to associate the word “lie” with Liberal’s lies without technically breaking the (really stupid) rules.
and was told by Tom
That’s the entirety of Tom’s note to me. He didn’t give me a mod note for the “lies” thing, which is good, because I would have to point out that that sort of circumlocution is precisely the thing he allows Der Trihs to get away with constantly*. He gave me a mod note and specifically enjoined me to “back off the hijack” because my responding to comments the OP made and returned to AFTER I was told not to participate in the “hijack” were returned to by Liberal in several more posts.
Except when Mods decide that side conversations carried on by the OP need to be protected from any sort of challenge. Or why didn’t you tell Liberal not to carry on with the “hijack”? What your note said, later backpedaling and revision aside, was that I was being ordered not to challenge Lib who then went on to spew his garbage after you silenced me.
Yeah, later, in another thread, you abandoned the “hijack” part and came up with the “Oooh! You said the 'L-word” excuse. But your original note to me was very clear–you asked why I felt the need to have the dreaded L-Word in my post and didn’t warn, caution or prohibit me from that circumvention of the “lie” rule and your only instruction to me was to “back off from the hijack” that Liberal continued after your mod-note.
*See here, for one very, VERY typical example
"Believing in God is the opposite of “intellectual vitality”; it’s more intellectual brain death. " clearly a violation in all but name of the “No name calling in GD” rule.
and the very typical comment from him
“Atheism is not faith; it’s the denial of faith. Pretending otherwise is a lie of the beleivers; an attempt to pretend that their beliefs are of equal worth.”
Which is fine, but it certainly violates the rules far more than I did.
Perhaps there should be a forum for Witnessing and nothing else. I read GD for the DEBATES. If there is no debate then why put it there in the first place? I have no problem with people that just want to spout their beliefs but if there is no room for any sort of dissension then it belongs someplace other then the GD forum.
Someplace like a blog maybe.
Has anybody else here asked to start a thread of the type Liberal has started? These complaints of “he’s getting special treatment” don’t hold water if he’s simply doing something nobody else has asked to do. He wanted to hold a more formal style of debate and define the terms involved ahead of time. The Great Debates mods sometimes come down on a poster who repeatedly shifts the goal posts in an argument, but that’s not the same thing.
I’ve skimmed the first of the Aesthetical Jesus threads - that’s all I could do, since they’re long and philosophy usually puts me to sleep - but Liberal doesn’t monopolize the discussion there; I think he made 12 posts out of 135. He started the topic and states his views, others give theirs. The OP isn’t the boss of a thread, but many threads here are done in the style of “I propose that ” or “prove to me [y],” where the OP tends to drive the thread. This looks similar, and it’s not blogging.
Fenris, I think perhaps you should either get over this liar thing or deal with the mods in private. Dragging it into multiple threads is not doing any credit to your arguments here.
Xploder, I don’t think we get nearly enough witnessing to justify giving it a separate forum, and given the makeup of the board, witnessing threads usually turn into debates.
I’ve always wondered why Witnessing should be included in GD. Witnessing isn’t about debating at all, as five minutes spent trying to debate Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons on the doorstep will show you. It’s as if you joined a Debating Society and the first time you went along you were forced to listen to someone’s long and impenetrable creed with no debating allowed. Decidedly odd and I can’t imagine why it was put in GD in the first place.
It’s clearly not worth having a separate forum for it but IMHO would serve as a far better home than GD, which should be reserved for genuine debates.
If this is the case then that goes some way to answering my objection in the previous post. But why then is no debate allowed in Liberal’s thread?
(I personally have nothing against the fellow by the way).
Nice, but I didn’t bring it up, nor have I since the initial incident. Perhaps you should direct your attention to the person who DID drag the mischaracterization into another (not multiple) threads.
And: ps as my cite shows, yes, people have tried to blog on the Dope before and the mods have uniformly forbidden it.
**tomndebb **thinks poor **Liberal **is being attacked on all sides by “posters with ancient grudges against Liberal who are mad that they cannot shut him down simply by complaining”.
Now knowing **tomndebb **I am absolutely sure that he will not let this predisposition cloud his ability to mod GD at all. In fact, I’m sure this will make him a better, more understanding mod. It always has.
As for Lib, it MUST be those “ancient grudges” and not the many other behaviours over the years. Yeah, it’s just a few “ancient grudges”. That’s it. :dubious:
I do notice that since I said something to him in his latest blog/thread, he is now going to get ready to maybe START the actual debate…in THREAD NUMBER FIVE. Maybe the fact that there have been a few threads posted here in ATMB recently about his blogging here finally got through but I doubt it.
Whatever. My point stands that all four of those threads could have been contained in one thread and would have been better off as a blog post rather than being posted in GD.
Just out of curiosity, Xploder, what is it that you’ve been so interested in discussing in these threads that Lib has been preventing you from mentioning?
I didn’t say that I WAS interested in discussing things. What I said (I think) was that I enjoy GD and debates in general. If you can find a debate in any of those first four threads I’d sincerely like to see it. It’s a waste of space and bandwidth and it’s nothing but an over long blog post.
Sorry, missed the edit window…
I guess maybe I didn’t say what I just said. Brainfart I guess. To restate it, I like to read debates and I enjoy the back and forth challenges and responses. NOBODY should need four threads to state a position. That isn’t a debate, that’s a book, and a boring book at that. Here:
Now let’s look at that. His next post is going to consolidate his interpretations of the rest of the book of john, with links provided. Then he’ll open the floor for discussion on that post. THEN he’ll write the OP for Part V where the actual debate could maybe even start. You don’t see anything asinine about that? He couldn’t have maybe done the same thing before rather than make four separate threads?
Which was the unfortunate statement of Lib’s to which I referred. He has not “controlled” the debate except to focus on a specific topic. As noted, he has not received any Moderator support to do so.
This is not correct. The “for years” thing changed under pressure from board members a few years ago and has been enforced consistently in the same way ever since.
If you didn’t like the “stupid” rules, you should have stuck around to argue against them when they were hammered out to a near unanimous consensus by the other denizens of Great Debates a couple of years back. Since that time, such constructions have not been permitted.
No, it does not. Der Trihs is pretty careful to keep his insults and his other claims general. We have always permitted posters to insult liberals/conservatives/Democrats/Republicans/Socialists/Libertarians/believers/atheists/whatever as long as it is the general group attacked and not specific posters. When Der Trihs has stepped over the line and made it personal, he has been reprimanded. (And since we do not read every post in every thread, if no one reports a particular violation, it might get missed, but that is the way that the rules are enforced.)
You started out with an accusaytion of lying–that I addressed immediately–and then tried to drag in a separate issue, for which I told you to back off on a hijack. After hammering it out in this forum, I even noted that you could return to the point if you kept it pertinent to the other thread. The “lies” rule has been clear for sufficient time, that I presumed, (apparently in error), that my mentioning it was sufficient to call attention to your transgression.
Liberal stated that the ground rules would be completed in thread IV and the debate begin in part V way back on the first page of the current thread. Nothing has changed in that regard.
Have you actually read all five threads even though you think they shouldn’t have been allowed to continue? I’ll be polite and say that’s not very sensible. Even if you’re correct about it being a rules violation, what’s the point?
Fair enough, I see now that tomndebb was referring to you earlier. (I probably should’ve picked up on that, but I didn’t.)
The thread you cited was not closed for ‘being a blog.’
Where do you get that debate isn’t allowed?
As a matter of fact, yes I did, even though it says that witnessing threads are allowed, I erroneously believed that there was room for debate within those threads. Again, there is NO debate in four separate threads. That sort of thing should have been either consolidated into one thread explaining everything before hand or else posted somewhere other than in GD. If I were to pick a book up at random here in my house and then proceed to start four different threads wherein I deconstruct the book and explain why I believe that every passage in said book is relevant to my belief system, but wait, no debating until I say so, I think I’d get slapped down pretty damn quickly.
sigh…I’m slow…on review, here.
Also, in the very first post of the fourth thread, he consolidates the previous three threads into ONE post, so don’t try to say that the four threads could not have been one thread to begin with.
note: I’m not saying that you have said that, I was saying that for whoever might, sometime, maybe in the future, yake exception to it.
There appears to be extensive discussion of the terms related to the topic, though, even if there isn’t “debate.”
No, that does not at all say debate isn’t allowed in the thread. (And this I relates back to my earlier point: I think witnessing belongs in GD because it always turns into an argument anyway.)
Maybe they could have. What’s it matter?
So…to be clear, if instead of saying (paraphrased) “I wish I could call you a liar, but I can’t here”, I had said “Jews are not polytheists*; it’s the denial of their faith. Pretending otherwise is a lie; an attempt to pretend that their beliefs are something they’re not.” I’d have been fine???
Tom–that’s nuts. I fully admit that I was doing my damned to not break the rule but tap-danced around it intentionally…trying to get to the line without actually crossing it the way it’s done regularly in GD.
You can’t possibly be telling me that it’s ok to follow the “Der Trihs” model and go to you and say: “You’re Catholic? All Catholic people are deluded liars.” but it’s not ok to say “I wish I could call you a liar, but I can’t.”
…can you?
I mean, if the rules of GD are that I could, in the middle of a debate say to YouWithTheFace “All articulate black women with strong opinions are liars.” I suppose that’s your forum, your rules. But they don’t make a lot of sense to me.
You still haven’t explained how I “dragged in a separate issue” when I was responding to LIB’S OWN POSTS–I didn’t start that tangent, he did. And he continued to make posts on that alleged “hijack” even after you told me (and not him) to stop discussing it until you reversed your decision (which I appreciated).
*Or whatever example you want. Dex said last go-round to not get into the specific lie.
Rather than re-wade through all that mess, I’ll just retract the statement that debate is not allowed in those threads okay? I will agree with you that while witnessing threads usually turn into argument threads, that doesn’t mean that it belongs in GD. There are argument threads in every forum here.
What matters is there is no logical reason that I can see, other than vanity, to post four separate threads on what is essentially, the same thing.
Perhaps, but the threads that caused a mod to step in and remind the OP that there are other, better places to blog, and that the SDMB was not intended for that, are many. No, I’m not going to waste my time looking them up. If you’ve been paying attention you’d’ve seen them, too.