Will some viewpoints be eventually banned, regardless of how polite/civil?

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1

Now that the debate over **Shodan’s **banning (for insults and provoking) has died down, I wanted to discuss something:

A year or two ago, a Doper started a thread in ATMB (I did some searching but can’t find it) in which he/she argued that there are some viewpoints that are simply so abhorrent that they should not be permitted on the Dope, regardless of how civil or polite the poster expressing those views may be. (The example used in that thread was scientific racism, or any view that one race is inferior to another.)

As we are often told by Dope mods/admins, the guiding principle of the Dope message board is: “Don’t be a jerk.” The vast majority of people who have been banned were banned because they were either trolls, spammers, or regular Dopers who couldn’t stop flaming or insulting others. I am not aware of anyone who has been banned simply for expressing a controversial view, as long as they kept things polite and civil - it was the attacking or insulting behavior that got them banned, not their viewpoints. We have several conservative Dopers who have amassed years of longevity and many thousands of posts here without getting banned (or perhaps even warned or suspended,) which helps debunk the notion that conservatives can’t get a fair shake here.

What I wanted to ask, though, was: Is the Dope ever likely to head in the direction of banning certain viewpoints entirely, regardless of how well-behaved a poster may be?

I don’t mean viewpoints such as Holocaust denial, Flat-Eartherism or 9/11 Trutherism - which are factually wrong - but viewpoints that are subjective but often regarded as offensive - views like “There are only two genders” or “A man who undergoes transition surgery hasn’t become a *true *woman, he just *resembles *one,” or “Trump is a great president,” - etc.

The Dope is influenced by outside culture as much as any other board, and with the direction that society is going in, it’s not hard to imagine, for instance, a few years from now a Doper making a comment that there are only two genders, but then receiving a warning from a moderator, saying, “This sort of viewpoint is dehumanizing and invalidating of someone’s gender identity. Don’t be a jerk.”

(My point isn’t to focus on LGBT - that’s just one example - one could name dozens and dozens of other political or social viewpoints that are subjective but offensive - but which could be expressed in perfectly civil, polite, non-flaming ways.)

If so, this would represent a major change in forum philosophy. Up to this point, Dopers have generally been safe from receiving warnings or other disciplinary action, as long as they kept things polite, civil and tame. But if we do head down that road, then we would be saying that it’s not just enough to conform in terms of behavior, one must conform to certain viewpoints and opinions as well.

Again, we haven’t had such instances (as far as I know of,) but the time to discuss or prevent something is in advance.

2

I say no. The stated purpose here is to fight ignorance.

Flat earthers, young earth Christians, anti-vaxxers, moon landing deniers, birthers, etc. etc. are some of the many topics that are regularly brought up by new posters and they are not banned.

As I said in another thread, as long as you try to abide by the rules here, anything goes.

Yes, there seems to be a tighter rein being held, but it appears to be more against insulting sarcasm whether it’s targeted against other posters or the public in general.

3

I’m not sure politely you can tell me that I have inferior intelligence based on the color of my skin or sex.

4

Velocity is drawing a distinction that I don’t think Omar Little quite caught, which is the distinction between views that are only stupid and/or ignorant, versus views that are both stupid/ignorant and offensive.

So birtherism, moon landing denial, flat earth, and so on, are patently anti-reality views, but they don’t seem to be offensive except to one’s love of truth.

But racism (“scientific” or otherwise) and misogyny, to pick two possible topics, are examples of the other category, the one that Velocity is, I believe, asking about.

I can’t answer his question, but I hope the rules don’t change in that direction, because I think it is not a healthy approach – it makes us look as if we are afraid of encountering those ideas.

And anyway we don’t get so much of that stuff here that we are in danger of being overwhelmed by it.

5

I greatly appreciate SDMB for outstanding advice in Computer Science.

I will discuss other issues on several other forums.

6

Arguments on “Men’s Rights Activism” seem like a topic that is politically and culturally sensitive, and not always a case of being factually wrong like Holocaust Denial or Young Earth Creationism. Yet it is also widely felt to be offensive and in particular, misogynist, to modern liberal minds. This topic has also been banned here.

7

Was it the handsomeharry has been banned thread, perhaps?

8

Do a board search on Cesario and get back to me.

I think it’s addressed on a case by case basis but yeah, I think there are viewpoints that are so far afield that as a community we regard anyone who expresses them to be trolling.

9

200 years ago, an argument for women’s suffrage would have then been ban-worthy trollery. Even what seem like self-evident truths ain’t necessarily so, and viewpoints far afield remain to enlighten us.

10

You don’t believe that you or another poster could successfully refute the argument that your intelligence is not inherently inferior because of your gender or race?

11

Bingo. Challenge basic assumptions. If these basic assumptions are so clearly correct, then any challenge to them should be swatted away with ease.

Groupthink is dangerous and in the political field there are landmine issues. There shouldn’t be on this board.

12

I don’t think that is the point. The point is that believing the moon landing was staged is not inherently insulting to a class or group. Unlike your question.

There are thousands of “just innocently asking a question” posts which have the disguised (perhaps also to the poster) intention of proving that a class or group is inferior in some way.

The question is whether it is important to engage --in a reasoned, calm manner – with people who want to prove they are superior to the usual denigrated groups, or whether this is such a waste of time the latter should be warned then dumped if they can’t make the jump into the 21st century. Is ignorance going to be fought, or just catered to?

13

How is it being catered to? If the subject of the thread is that women are just innocent little cupcakes who have no mental capacity to be a doctor, why can’t there be boom: Study X that shows no difference in mental capacity between genders, Survey Y that shows that female doctors have an equal success rate in treatment of patients to male doctors, Study Z that shows medical students at universities across the country with no appreciable difference among GPAs between gender?

That’s how you fight ignorance. You aren’t catering to it at all.

14

OK, but what do you do with a poster that presents that point of view and then ignores the many studies presented to him or her? It’s a fact that there’s more than one gender, for example – at a minimum, there are people with XXY chromosomes or androgen insensitivity who will present differently than their genes – what do you do with people who still insist there are only two genders? What do you do with people pushing scientific racism after being shown that races are nonsensical from a biology standpoint?

Those gender threads don’t last four posts, with an ignorant OP devastated by actual scientific studies, biology, etc., and then slinking away. They last multiple pages before a moderator steps in and shuts it down. Scientific racism is no more valid than the moon landing hoax CT, but people pushing the moon landing hoax aren’t telling other posters here that they are factually inferior to another set of humans.

So, OP, what do you do with a poster that presents an ignorant and offensive viewpoint and then refuses to acknowledge all the evidence against them?

15

Here’s a view: a certain poster’s family should be tortured to death. That’s subjective, not objective. A poster could state the case for their view in civil language.

If we stifle that view (as, of course, I believe we should), are we garrotting free speech? Are we condemning ourselves to an echo chamber? Are we being snowflakes?

I’m pretty sure we aren’t, and I’m pretty sure any expression of that belief, or similar beliefs, is already forbidden from the boards, no matter how “politely” it’s expressed. So let’s figure out why we’re willing to ban the expression of that view, and work backwards from there.

16

“Refute” in the sense that the person making the initial argument will say something like “Y’know, you’re right, I never thought about it. I guess I should treat people as individuals and not make sweeping generalizations about gender or race” ?

Refute it in that sense?

Not a fucking chance.

17

You do what is always done. You rest on your arguments confident in the knowledge that the poster has not made his case. You cannot change the whole world.

That’s a strawman. The example is so far outside the bounds of reasonable debate to make it silly. Even if the outcome is that “Yeah, he’s got a good point, we should torture the poster and his family” it is illegal and unconstitutional. I suppose you could say that my comments would allow this because, after all, we could amend the Constitution to allow such torture, but it is so extreme that I would suggest so improbable that we should put a pin in this and revisit it if it becomes a real issue and not just a hypo.

But you’ve won the argument. Who says that people who make incorrect arguments have to go away cowering in shame? I’ve not seen in once in any GD thread.

18

And I didn’t mean to cut off this part.

That’s what GD is about! You tell me just like you did “Ultravires, you post is a pile of stinking horseshit because you assume there is only two genders” and we go back and forth (not here, but in a GD thread) about who is right and who is wrong and what was meant by certain comments.

That is the SDMB I knew when I joined in 2007. Don’t let it die, mods.

19

If I’m understanding you, are you saying that things that are “far outside the bounds of reasonable debate” need not be protected? Because this isn’t a strawman: people have been warned here before for wishing death on someone, or for expressing happiness in the suffering of someone’s family. You may not even say that the world would be a better place if I died from Coronavirus, no matter how politely you express that belief.

But if your standard really is that things “far outside the bounds of reasonable debate” need not be protected, that’s a starting point. If you’ll confirm that’s your position, we can move forward.

20

It’s really just a question of where we draw the line. Does anyone have a problem with restricting advocacy for legalizing child molestation on this board? I seriously doubt it. Our society has rightly decided that this is beyond the pale. How about restricting advocacy for bring re-enslaving black people? Hopefully everyone would agree that also falls into the same category. What about advocacy for an apartheid system due to the supposed inferiority of other races? Or just advocating that it be taught in schools that other races are inferior?

I imagine we all have a line we draw, and it’s reasonable to discuss where that line ought to be for the board. It’s not some broad philosophical disagreement – it’s where specifically we think this line ought to be, since I imagine we all agree there should be a line.