Valentine Pontifex

As those who have kept with various thread know, Jimmy basically lied his &^% off by making it appear that a TheologyWeb moderator said something that he did not.

This of course only serves to confirm in their minds and in the minds of lurkers who might have saw our side that evolutionists are lying hypocrites.

I dare say that convincing people that evolutionists are liars is far more important to Answers in Genesis then keeping it secret that Socrates is Sarfati.

If someone want to post to creationist owned forums, I really don't care if you obey their stupid little rules (like not mentioneding that Socrates is Sarfati) since they can cary out the consequence of that action via their moderation powers. But I do care a great deal if you lie especially if you lie about them.

We might need some sort of Infidels code of conduct visits to forums of those who disagree with us.

1) There is no room for making false statements that you know are false. Why should they believe what we have to say about fossils if they discover that we lie to them?

2) No matter how poorly designed their site is do not exploit security holes or badly designed features for malicious purposes.

3) Do not use one persona you control to give high praise, endorsement, etc. of another persona that control.

4) Immoral behavior of fundamentists is not justification for immoral behavior of "infidels."

I will remind everyone one that we often say that one does not need a God to establish absolute rules from a high for morality to exist. If we are not lying about that then we must actually act as if we believe it.

Duvenoy

10/4, Valentine! In the venacular: you da man!

Courtesy and factual evidence must prevail. If we can't produce the evidence, we should remain silent in the discussion. If we cannot be courtious, we should leave the discussion, what ever, powerful argument we might have.

doov

pz

This is all well and good, and I agree that those are good guidelines. However, the secular web cannot be considered responsible for the activities of individuals at other web sites. If we caught people using II to organize violations of those guidelines, I think we ought to squash that vigorously. I don't think we can tell people what they are allowed to do elsewhere.

For example, what about all those christianforums refugees posting in MD? I can't quite imagine suggesting to them that if they want to post here, they have to abide by our rules for good little atheists when posting on CF.

It might be better to simply mention that violating those standards of behavior here would get anyone in hot water, and we don't endorse people doing things at other sites that we do not allow here.

Jayjay

I second this motion.

In specific, I can't understand the hero worship the guys who get banned from TWeb for poor conduct receive at II. When Joe Meert doesn't bother reading the rules and gets banned, you guys cry persecution. When Jimmy Higgins flips the metaphorical finger at TWeb moderators, you think it's "clever". Sheesh.



Not that I have anything against Joe or Jimmy; I think both of them have made excellent contributions at TWeb (and still are, hopefully). I'm just frustrated because that kind of childish behaviour makes all the atheists/evolutionists look bad, which is exactly what creationist fanboys at TWeb want.

Jimmy Higgins

And that was?
{editted to add}
Oh, the signature thing. I can't really disagree with you there. This is also the only web board which I've ended up doing that, not making it right, but there is a history of behavior. I shouldn't have done and it was bad to have done it, but I pretty much got fed up with being told I don't know anything about anything merely because of my ideaology. The mods there only censored posts, they never moderated them and I had it.

To repeat, I shouldn't have done it, but I did, however, I think TWeb's complete taking advantage of being a "victim" is so typical of their behavior. They go out of their way to be kind to Socrates, but when someone on the other side of the fence acts up, they pounce and use bright large letters to point it out, even adding their own post to point it out.

In conclusion, shouldn't have editted mod's note on my signature (probably won't do it again on the next board), but I won't lose sleep over it. My intellectual points were made and ignored by the wonders over there merely because they know that they can't answer them. I through with it.

Valentine Pontifex

PZ, I agree that the moderators of II really can't enforce any set of rules of behavior outside of II. But it might be a good idea to set up a guide for those who who to do battle in hostile forums.

Jimmy, thanks for saying that you should not have done it.

One thing that we must remember that fundamentalism is held for emotional reasons. Giving them more reason to dislike us that is both emotional and logical is the worst thing we can do. And disliking someone who falsely and knowingly put words in your mouth is quite rational. It will confirm in their minds their worsts suspicions about us.

Now if someone decides to retire from TW and as a parting shoot put in the truth about Sarfati then I say go for it. It is best to wait a few day though so the moderators are unlikely to read the post until someone complains. But in any event keep it clear that you are the one saying it.

--------------------------------------------

I think that the way they do signatures is really a huge
security hole though. I think they are trying to save disk
space by not just adding the current signature a post -- bad
decision.

Happy Wonderer

In some ways I agree with you, their goal is to pounce on anything that makes 'us' look bad. However there is a general theme here that I think is more important than the accusations of bias.

What I find disturbing as a lurker is the increasing acceptance of censorship. I have followed the internet from the early days and I have to say that I feel that we have been making a bit of a right turn from the original direction. The idea of freedom of information and expression is getting lost, and I wonder what implication it has for society as a whole. To carry out arguments by modifying user files and posts is an extreme abuse of administrative authority, and suppressing speech by suppressing portions of posts is even worse than banning people that you disagree with.

The administrative powers of the board are there to protect the board and enable discussion - not as a way giving one side or another an advantage. Removing spam, copyrighted material, and death threats is an appropriate way of using that power. Removing material that you don't agree with, think is poorly backed up, or inflammatory is not an appropriate use. If you disagree with a post, you can always post your disagreement. After all, that is what a discussion is!


It seems to me that there is never a need to censor anyone who is following the rules of discussion (ie, not posting spam or illegal material.) If someone makes themselves look like a jerk, leave the post -- it tells everyone else what kind of person they are. Even the earliest USNET newsreader programs had an ignore feature so that you could filter out the jerks. (In my experience, when enough people started ignoring them, the jerks tended to go away.)

Censoring posts, changing .sigs, and banning should be true last resorts --- not to get rid of an annoying person, but only for those cases where the purpose of the board (discussion) is in jeapordy. Flame wars are unfortunately part of a discussion, and mods can step in with a posting -- but eliminating the messages puts the mods too close to the war, and they have extreme firepower at their disposal.

In this case, I do not think that it was very proper for Jimmy to pretend that a moderator had said something that they hadn't -- but why was there a moderator comment about "making a martyer" in his .sig file in the first place? In the real world, any administrator who modified a users .plan or .sig files (UNIXisms) without the user's consent would be fired immediately. (Or should be, some shops put up with really insane people just because they sort of know how to make a sendmail configuration file...)


Administrative authority is a powerful and seductive tool, and not everybody is mature enough to handle it. When the administrator starts carrying on arguments by modifying posts (or .sig files), I think that is a pretty good clue that that particular administrator doesn't "get it."

HW

Valentine Pontifex

Happy Wonderer,

I agree censorship needs to be opposed.

But that the posts of their opponents is splattered with red is all the evidence that fair-minded lurkers need. The people that don't care about it are unlikely to be ever convinced.

We don't need to provide evidence that we can't be trusted.
A fair-minded lurker does have the right to judge us on that especially when that lie is falsification of evidence such as falsely putting words in a moderator's keyboard. And how can we argue that creationist arguments are dishonest if we condone dishonest activities in our own camp. Indeed the side the cares about the truth must be harder on falsehood coming from its own proponents then it is of its antagonists. Sarfati does not care about enforsing honesty from creationist. The only exception are when the dishonesty comes from creationists like Hovind who are in competition for resources and which have made many statements that even uniformed people can easily debunk.

If we make it clear from the start that our "fundamentals" for debate are no censorship and no lying then not only will we have the advantage of being correct but we will have a long term rhetorical advantage as well.

Joe Meert

JM: Well, I have to say in my own defense that I generally do not pay much attention to detailed rules on these websites since they tend to be similar. In the case where I was suspended I had apparently posted to a forum that was for 'Christians' only. When I was told not to post anymore, I thought the moderator was referring to a thread---not the whole section. I started a new thread in an attempt to abide by the rules, not neglect them. IN fact, the subject of the thread was "Uniformitarianism for the rest of us". Interestingly, according to the rules, I should rightly have been allowed to post there anyway!

Cheers

Joe Meert

Happy Wonderer

I agree that we cannot condone lying about what somebody else said, Jimmy's response was not the way to go about it. Personally, I would have left the moderator's comments unaltered in my .sig and had them visible to all every time that I posted. Three weeks from now the moderator would be pretty tired of seeing their juvenile comment over and over. (That is in many ways the same as your suggestion that the red ink speaks for itself.)

Here is an example of a mindset that I find a bit disturbing:



TheBear in this thread EDIT: and oddly enough, the moderator's comment referred to posts about Kent Hovind who AFIK was not part of the discussion. I do not know if the confusion was intentional, but there were in fact no personal ad-homs on either side.

I see the fora as a practice for real world interactions. When people get comfortable censoring their own little BB world, they get comfortable with the idea of censorship on the outside.

I do not know what we can do about this. Is it a reflection of an anti-free-speech attitude spilling over from the 9/11 response? Perhaps the best that we can do is be extremely sensitive to the issue on our side now. It can be very difficult, one banned case I know of was banned for making a very distasteful comment. Perhaps instead of banning or censoring, group shaming would work (and liberal use of the 'ignore' function.)

hw

Sigh, I suppose I should go over to CF and talk to them about this but frankly the level of discourse there puts me off -- especially as they explicitly do not want public discussion of their practices. Spookly like our anti-terrorism efforts...