My point was that you cannot use an aggressive tone and language in your post and then claim to be perfectly calm and rational. Maybe you were, I don't know, but there's no possible way that a reader could have taken that from your post. That was what I was calling ridiculous, the expectation that somebody would read it and presume you were absolutely calm.
I'm not sure what you're attempting to say here and do not see the irony. This is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. This doesn't mean that no discussion can take place or views are not able to be aired. It just means that acceptable bounds have already been laid down by the publisher/owner and our job as posters is to stay within those bounds or he/his representatives will deal with it. There is NO freedom of speech here, this is an important point. There are things you are not allowed to say, often things that are perfectly legal and said a million times a day. The Munichs/United thing pops into mind as specifically an instance where Ric has felt strongly about an issue and deemed it unacceptable under any circumstances which we adhere to as posters. Personally I lack his passion on the issue and have made my views clear but if I see somebody using the Munichs phrase to describe United then I'll deal with them just the same.
Nobody else really talks about science and/or technology and often when I attempt to explain things I get insulted, ironically by one of the participants in this thread, so have little desire to start them myself.
This is the most interesting point anybody has made all day. Yes, I'm suggesting that the way the forum and the moderation of it is set up as long as you stay within the pre-defined bounds of the Code of Conduct as it is interpreted and applied by the Ric/the moderators then you have no case to answer.
Let's think about why that is for a second and why this MUST be the way to handle it for a second. Let's say that you find something abusive and I don't. Which one of us is correct? Neither. Abusive, patronising, maliciousness, these are all completely subjective terms whereby what consists them and doesn't will wildly vary in opinion. What you think is abusive is not absolutely definitely abusive.
So the alternative is to strictly define the Code of Conduct to define exactly what acceptability is. Anybody who knows me well enough would understand that this is something that I both have supported in practice and application. Anybody who knows anything about moderation understands that this document would be 50000 words long to cover all possible cases and would only ever be read by me, Google Search Robot and that lad who keeps starting threads at 3am because he's bored out of his tits. So we're essentially going to turn moderation into an exercise in legal application, memory and, well, being a sad bastard. The only effective mods will be "busy cunts" like me as @SWP's back would say.
50000 word Code of Conducts that come up with any and all possible use cases that you see on a forum is an unworkable solution. And in any document or process in the world when you begin abstracting you lose accuracy.
The current version gives enough scope for posters and mods to use their common sense. If you say that all Islamic people are sand niggers who should be hung then expect to be permanently banned. If you mildly imply that Islam is probably not the greatest thing in the world then you can expect to not be sanctioned at all. The issue isn't that there is a line, it's the location of it that the argument is about.
And whether they like it or not there will always be people who don't and will pull them on their irrational points
Because it's abuse in THEIR OPINION. The moderators and Ric might find this opinion to be ludicrous. Alternatively, and this is much, much more common here, people are making crap comparisons between things that have little to no links once you stop taking them out of context.
I agree that people's perceptions dominate their opinion. I also think that people's perceptions are ultimately their problem and they aren't going to dominate mine. We do the right thing whether or not people see that. Nobody on the mod team is in the PR business and nor should we be. This is a forum for adults and written by adults, the idea that just because you don't understand why a decision was made meaning that it was made for no reason is something people should have forgotten in secondary school.
I've said this a few times and I'd like people to get this through. We don't moderate collections of letters, we moderate on context and application. If I angrily called somebody a **** outright and directly then I'd get a warning for it. Calling people a **** is often Bluemoon's way of saying hello and the vast, vast majority of the time is meant in jest. So no I wouldn't be banned just for using the word ****. On a similar and very important note, neither would anybody else.
This goes into a larger point but nobody on here is ever permabanned for something trivial like that. People are banned because they have built up a backlog of offences, have had discussions with moderators about it on numerous occasions and is a last resort. My experience on this forum also tells me that it is unbelievably the lies that people come up with for reasons that they were banned and how it is often a literal trail of bullshit. It's extremely difficult to be permanently banned from here, in fact looking over it the amount of people permanently banned who weren't new members on the WUM/people who requested to be permabanned/people who came back quite sharpish/previously banned users hiding under new accounts is about 0. Since June. Not permabanned by me, I mean people permabanned by anybody.
You'd imagine that would stop any accusations we have to put up with and spend time discussing but alas you don't have this information so weren't aware of that. Which is a fundamental flaw in the argument of every single poster on here when discussing this, you literally have no idea what the moderation is doing at any one time. There was a discussion about this and whether it should be changed and the general consensus was that it would make our lives unbearable because we'd have to spend hours upon hours in threads like these all the time justifying every possible decisions to people who aren't stakeholders in that decision, also rendering us not actually able to moderate the forum. Again, we aren't PR people and the expectation that we will break down every single decision made by every single mod and then discuss it, usually at length with people back and forth would paralyse us. Even now when we warn somebody we set it up to automatically start a PM conversation with users. Now 75% of moderation time is spent listen to users explain how despite breaking the rules quite clearly they didn't actually break the rules and you're just a **** with a vendetta against them or the mod team are all fascists. Adding that but with an outside spectacle to it would probably mean the resignation of every moderator here.
It already IS equal. You just cannot see that it's equal. Again we're not even arguing over reality here we're arguing over perception of reality
"Ignore my insults Mr Science Man, you should just take it because you're into science and stuff"
Ok cheers.
No I'm saying Bluemoon is part of British society and as part of it will automatically reflect the views of it in the main.
No, we are going to be perfectly representative of the instructions of Ric. You seemingly do not get the point here - it's that as Bluemoon is part of our society and carries its attitudes/topics of the day, then a suppression of those topics constitutes political modding. Again, I was talking directly to the owner of the forum and referencing conversations that you were not a part of using the same phrases used then. This is another example of just because you do not understand the decision or the logic does not mean that none of it exists.
BM is a mouthpiece for anybody and everybody under the cavaet that you stick within the rules that you agreed upon as a member of this site. There is no inconsistency here, only people being frustrated that the rules they agreed upon are being enforced.
My point is that there's about 9 people who possibly have anywhere near the information to make this sort of judgement and you are not one of those people and neither are the many others. I don't really care for example what you believe about the current state of my back garden and whereabouts the tulips should be planted. Because you lack all of the relevant information to make any sort of rational or informed judgement so therefore aren't worth listening to about it. Even if you really desperately believe they should go next to the gnome with the big red hat to tie it all together.
I didn't say that. You thought I've said that and spun this into a long conversation but nowhere did I say that BM should represent society. I said that it DOES represent society. That's an important difference that you've seemingly missed.
My problem is that I lack the tact and grace to deal with stupid comments by people who cannot see that they've made a stupid comment and somehow attribute their stupidity to me after I point it out. The bit of the post you quoted was a stupid comment because you don't see the difference between philosophical consistency which no ruleset has and logical consistency which the CoC has in spades.
So you can't find the Code of Conduct, don't actually know what it says despite it being recently updated but have wasted all of my time talking about the moderation of this site? This actually sums up my issue with this almost perfectly.
I'm sure you feel your opinion is more important/has wider recognition than others but it isn't and doesn't. This is NOT a place where we say nobody will be offended. In fact we specifically state in the CoC that you WILL be offended by content on here and you read it at your own risk. Considering the membership of this site has consistently grown including the amount of posts in the Off Topic section then despite your objections we seem to be doing something right that the majority find acceptable.
My views are irrelevant because the Code of Conduct does not accurately reflect my views. It does however accurately reflect the views of the owner of the site and that's what we mod against.
Oh, and inaction is never ever ever ever action despite what you are trying to suggest through the political modding idea.
