What if addressing the argument relies on pointing out inconsistencies with previously made statements?

That's what pointing to a poster's savage hypocrisy is. He didn't point to the poster, he pointed to the hypocrisy.

That's about the poster.

By 'he' I assume you mean Trolly and

is most definitely pointing at the poster. It's also the same old forum noise being rehashed again. It may be Trolly's opinion of what Foldn does and he is welcome to bring it up in the low content threads if he wants to.

Sorry, which is the moderated thread where we talk about moderation decisions? I'm sure you could see how I'd mistake it for this one.

You mean this:

Sorry maybe I misunderstood before.

It's most definitely not allowed in content threads.

That's fine as long as it's a reflection of what the posters says they mean/believe and not what others insist they mean. Attempting to understand what the poster means/believes by having a dialogue with them is also fine.

@chezlaw: I think you're missing something here. I tried to chat about this before you were a mod, without getting any traction.

We got this thread about the PC Police running amok. This whole genre of the "PC Police running amok", "Why can't they be civil", how we can't use the r-word like every other word in the English language, "Being shouted down". "Why do they have to bring race/sex/whatev into everything", who's the real racists, "yelling and screaming", etcetcetc... all this shiz is Tone Policing.

We can't talk about the PC Police Running Amok without talking about Tone Policing... because that's what's actually going on.

That's not rehashing old arguments. To make the jump from how bad the PC Policemen are to how bad the peeps Tone Policing the PC Policemen are ...examples will always be needed. Quoting such examples is not name calling the posters so quoted.

It's absolutely fine to talk about all that. I'm not sure how important examples are but where needed there's plenty of examples without making it about the posters or this forum.

The problem with making it about posters is when, as they usually do, they dispute your claims about them and what is going on. The thread then degenerates into being about what you say about them, what they say about you etc etc. On the other hand, if they agree you are representing them fairly then it's absolutely fine.

It's okay to point out a poster being hypocritical as long as you don't mention any posters and as long as they agree with you.

Just try to keep the thread and conversation flourishing for all those involved and you'll be fine.

Examples are definitely needed.

We always hear these loltastical claims that these peeps won't do their tone policing derail thingee if only other peeps would post "that's r-word" instead of "you're a r-word-er", etcetcetc. Which are demonstrably false. But demonstrating this falseness requires quoting.

So if I say "Someone is talking utter nonsense" that's fine, but if I say "General Pinochez is talking utter nonsense" that's a personal attack regardless of whether you are in fact talking nonsense and it's been explained why? I mean, rehashing how you talk utter nonsense seems relevant when you talk utter nonsense even if it's news to no one.

It's going to be hard talking to each other when we can't say who or what we're referencing, but if them's the rules.

Not to try to understate OrP's lengthy posts too much, but he's explained in great detail the problem with Foldn in that thread, and then when another poster said it with much more brevity you kicked in with "Nope, can't do that".

I think chez's goal here is fairly clear and pretty reasonable. It's to avoid this:

I think anyone who has been reading Unchained for a while will agree that this happens a lot, i.e a lot of the content of Unchained was just people calling each other out with fairly little substantive discussion. I agree with chez that this is not all that interesting and I'd love to see less of that. The difference between OrP and other examples is that OrP's posts are not just calling out posters, there's a lot of actual content and argument.

There's obviously some flaws in the way he's writing the rule to prevent this ("don't call out posters" is probably too broad) but the thing about written rules in forum moderation is they are pretty much always insufficient anyway and moderation is always a bit subjective.

So, I think chez should just state that the rule is that you shouldn't post about posters in a low-content way that's likely to devolve into purely worn-out personal disputes. And then he should just accept that it's going to be subjective to enforce.

And posters in the forum should just accept it's going to be enforced subjectively?

They can always march on ATF? But I mean, yeah to some extent that's just like, how it works. Sort of like the usual complainers should accept that Wookie's moderation is enforced subjectively.

It doesn't mean there isn't better or worse moderation. Maybe it will turn out that chez is hopelessly incompetent at it. I dunno. Before we evaluate his execution I'm curious if we can arrive at some mutual understanding about his moderation goals...

In general there's a lot of bringing up posting history that isn't helpful to the topic at hand (although it's always got merit to remind everyone that Wil advocates punching children). In this case we're talking about someone's hypocrisy with regard to the specific topic of the thread.

All moderating is subjective but my view is that moderators should be prepared to defend their moderating and that becomes difficult with Poster A makes some claim, poster B restates A's claim and Poster B is moderated for it while poster A isn't.

The usual complainers should point out cases where Wookie is moderating inconsistently not subjectively. Liberals are regularly suspended from 2p2 due to infringements in P but you never hear that from the usual suspects unless it's a case of goal post shifting where all of a sudden it is something else that warrants criticism as being inconsistent.

And to be clear I'm not interested in re-litigating previous arguments but OrP making some claim about FoldnDark's arguments and it being pointed out that his position is consistent with previously stated remarks doesn't seem to warrant moderating, in large part because OrP is perfectly capable of answering any relevant comments himself.

Right. I was too glib. I don't mean that people don't have a right to discuss the moderation. Only my last sentence is really important I think. I'm curious if P70a posters can come to some understanding with General Pinochez as to the goals of moderation, and if so will that make a conversation about how to achieve those goals or about the moderation in that specific thread a little more productive. It's not clear to me if Trolly or Shame Trolly or others even agree with the goal that chez has stated (leaving some wiggle room for implementation problems, of course)

The point about subjectivity is mostly just that I don't think we'll ever get to full agreement or to a set of explicit rules that makes every case clear. But I think we might be able to get close enough to be workable.

Since I'm offering my opinions all willy nilly this morning, I'll just say, re: this post

I think it's probably a mistake to mod it in context. I get what chez is trying to do, he's trying to avoid the derail before it happens. But it's probably better to let it go because the post really is on topic and just moderate the derail when (if) it happens, and then you can tell both participants "OK, that's enough".

I don't think hypocrisy is the right, and it's definitely not the best, word to use here. I'd suggest 'contradiction' instead.

The peeps who do this kinda tone policing are not self-reflective. This is all trained reflexive behavior on their part. That becomes glaringly obvious when they start prating on about "yelling & screaming" and being "shouted down"... on an interwebs forum. These folks don't have some kinda intricate theoretical explanation about how wanting to ban the r-word and carrying on about "free speech" is a contradiction. They've never even given it any thought.

Hypocrisy implies self-knowledge. These fools don't have that. I wouldn't call them hypocrites.

Here's the thing I get what chez is trying to do here and I'm genuinely interested in the outcome. I may have mentioned this previously and being interested in the outcome I'm not intending to game the result.

I generally agree that the goals of moderating is more important, to the extent that anything here is, than the rules by which it's achieved because at least if you have some idea of the goals you have a means to test the mechanics and so I would probably have preferred to see chez's outline for what he wants the forum to be before a set of rules outlining how he wants to achieve it.

Yes.

I know what chez's goals are, but explaining them would involve bringing up the SMP invasion backstory and a bunch of topics that are explicitly out of bounds for P7.

Ah, so hypocrisy will plausibly become described more accurately in content threads as it will pertain to inconsistent ideas of the content instead of mixed with statements about screen names.

And people can also call out and respond to hypocrite in yellow caution threads.

Can we have pie too?

I know the entire backstory. I was there for all of it, including in the mod forum! I think you're kind of silly to think that chez's entire motivation for moderating is the exoneration of BruceZ, or revenge on the politards (or whatever exactly it's supposed to be), but I'm not really interested in trying to talk you out of it.