I see that the documentary Revenge of the Nerds has escaped viewing by this younger generation.
I lived through that shit. We held sit ins at Radio Shack. Police officers hurled discount off colored batteries at us. It was the other N word of the day.
History people. History!
I checked your two warnings, and neither seems mild or jocular to me.
You can say almost anything to the right people and in the right circumstance as a “joking ironic insult with no sting at all”. That doesn’t say anything about whether the term itself is an insult.
At the risk of making the thread all about me, check again. The first one was rescinded, so I wasn’t talking about that one (although the post incorrectly warned was a joke about how opinions are like assholes, IIRC–jocular).
The second one was about a kid with Downs Syndrome who took on an honor he hadn’t earned. I’d argued that it was not comparable to cases in which neurotypical folks took on similar honors. Someone responded with a post in which he jokingly claimed a doctorate and other honors; I responded with a fake compliment on how well he’d hidden his mental disabilities, saying that of course he must have them if his case were analogous to the one we discussed. Of course I didn’t mean he actually had mental disabilities, and that was completely clear from my post: the entire point of the post was that he didn’t have mental disabilities and so his analogy didn’t work.
The reason I accepted the warning was because when I talked about how well he’d hidden his mental disabilities, I said he’d hidden them “fairly well.” The modifier on well, I figured, doomed me, because that was a sly dig, meant as a joke. But I figured that jocular or no, it was an insult and could be warned.
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I’m generally with Fotheringay-Phipps on this. The comment in question was insulting, but not “an insult,” IMHO.
In a discussion of vegetarianism, some zealot might tell me, “Meat is murder! You’re a killer!” In the context of the discussion, I would not consider that an insult (although I wouldn’t object if a moderator stepped and told us to keep things civil). It would be a rather over-the-top description of the actions being debated.
If that same zealot told me I was the Pol Pot of Porterhouse or dumber than the slab of steak on my plate, then that would be an insult to me, not a comment on the actions being debated.
If my debating partner said, “You eat meat. I bet you would kill a kitten for laughs,” that would also be an insult in my view. A comparable statement in the breastfeeding debate might be, “You don’t breastfeed. I bet you beat your children, too.”
My bottom line is that debates should be a little more free-wheeling than moderators seem to like these days. Not every negative or unpleasant statement is a rules violation. If things are getting heated, tell a poster to cool it before they reach “jerk” territory, but don’t declare a comment to be a rules violation without very clear reason. IMHO, of course.
Am I seeing an indication here, earlier in this thread, that if I get pissed at something someone writes in a thread, and I start a Pit thread about it, that I’m not permitted to mention doing so in the original thread?
The problem is that, before now, the definition of “personal attack” was calling someone a name. That’s a clear line that’s easy to understand.
While it was accepted that there might be other types of comments that crossed the line, these were never put under the concept of “personal attacks” but “being a jerk.”
And, if I undestand teh logic stated here, this should have applied when tapu was accused of promoting the gay agenda to her kids when she asked for parenting advice.
No it wasn’t.
Of course you are - as long as you don’t use insults to do so in the original forum.
How many times are we going to split hairs here.
If you reread the post that received the warning, can you come up with a way to say exactly the same thing in a nonconfrontational manner?
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If that was directed at you, would you consider it an insult? That pretty clearly accuses someone of being a bad parent, and that’s certainly not a compliment.
There’s an enormous amount of snark routinely posted outside the Pit without attracting warnings, which would count as insults if you treated implications as insults, as you’re doing here.
Directed at me, by a male, would put me in a situation where I’d need an attorney.
ETA: in a face to face setting.
I’m 100% in agreement with your line of thought as it’s sometimes hard to see where the line is drawn by the mods.
But when a poster adds the words “you” and/or “your” to an otherwise derogatory comment, it’s not unforeseeable that it will be taken as a personal insult. I’m still trying to work moon phases into the insult/no insult equation because I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.