As the replacement Moderation page has developed the old bug so that permalinks no longer navigate to the appropriate comment, so here is yet another page for continuing discussion on moderating issues. The Rules can be found there so anyone with an issue should check that they are familiar with them.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Thanks Rich.
@Sal
Would you care to make an opening post out of this? http://theskepticalzone.fr/wine-cellar/comment-page-21/#comment-99616
Some of the aspects of your personal dirty laundry are interesting enough so that I would like to examine them closer. Such as biblical doctrines and information theory.
LoL. Effectively banned but technically not banned.
Sadly, like Patrick, you were not banned for abusing your priviledge.
Sweet comfort.
I repeatedly asked you to clarify whether your departure from UD was voluntary or forced. AFIAK, this is the first time you’ve stated it was forced.
How do you feel about that email, Mung? Happy to be on that bus? Are you the ‘good guys’?
Well, from where I stand, it completely missed the point.
Over at UD, Salvador changed the content of my posts to make them appear as if I had written something that I did not in fact write. Barry extended to Salvador a grace that was not warranted. But then, that’s grace.
Given the grace that Barry extended to Sal, in spite of Sal’s violations of Christian charity, that Sal now decides to whine when called to account is just, well, Sal.
Don’t be an ass if you’re not the Master of deciding who is an ass.
I agree. And it was shitty. I believe I’ve told him so.
But you’ve gone off on a fairy story tangent, Mung. The email gives very explicit reasons you’ve not addressed and makes some admissions about the true nature of UD/ID. It’s already up at the Pandas Thumb: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2015/12/the-war-before.html#comments
So I’ll ask again, Mung:
What did I say that was not true?
Barry’s Grace. Fancy addressing the content of the email / my questions? Or you can dance some more. You’re not very good at it, but it is funny. And you wonder why folks won’t help you code…
A drowning man ought not be condemned for grasping at straws.
You are referring to Captain Barry on the SS UD, telling the band to play on?
Yes, I am, Erik. As you know, I don’t log in to TSZ every day, and even if I did, I couldn’t possibly read all the posts and comments. I do my best to read a representative sample, but I simply can’t do more than that.
So I’d be grateful if you would provide me with the links.
Ah, sorry. Working through this now.
Please don’t assume deliberate oversight though. Being “active on a page” doesn’t mean I read all the posts, unfortunately, and even if I had done, I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed. As I’ve said before, I meet criteria for ADHD (no formal diagnosis, but it’s my field and I know the criteria!), and my working memory capacity is about 2 items. And I’m horribly over-stretched at work, which doesn’t help (nor does the ADHD help with the over-stretching).
I will take a look now.
OK, thanks Erik, I found the post and I do think it was borderline (because Patrick made a general comment about intellectual dishonesty, but it was clearly intended to apply to the person he was responding to) and moved it to guano.
I think there is nothing against the rules in asking someone to support or retract a claim, nor in drawing attention to the fact that they have done neither, but implying that doing neither is necessarily dishonest strays over, IMO, although it’s kind of a grey area I’d normally stay on the conservative (small c, as in conserve the status quo) side. But as you’ve brought it up, I’ve moved it.
So let me now address your other points:
I disagree. Guanoing is the only thing we do here, and only to posts that violate the game-rules of the main page. Anything else is outwith the bounds of what I even attempt to maintain control over.
And character is not an issue I am the slightest bit concerned with on this site. People can make their own minds up about character, and can even express their views outside the main page, but not in main page threads, which are governed by “parliamentary” rules of discourse.
And I stand reprimanded. But it makes no difference to the rules or the implementation of the rules of this site.
Can you tell me what his “mom rule” is? Sounds interesting.
Exactly, Sal. I’m not sure how I can make this plainer: I am not attempting to turn you all into nice people. I am not forbidding you from being assholes to each other on this site. I like assholes tbh.
I’m simply trying to implement, in a fuzzy kind of way, a set of game-rules for the main-page discussions that foster focus on the content of the issues and not on the perceived motivations of those making their case.
I’d be absolutely delighted if Gregory would use the same skill-set he uses in academic discourse on the main page of this site, to discuss the issues he is interested in – I’d be interested too. But it is absolutely ridiculous to have to tell a grown-man and a competent academic that if he wants to denigrate another member of this community, that he has to do it in a different part of the site. It’s not as though we don’t provide one even!
Nah. Noyau is good enough. If people want more functionality for howler monkey discourse they can start another site and someone else can pay for the bandwidth.
Obviously not. I’m a psychologist ffs.
blimey.
That is quite extraordinary.
(the idea that posting at TSZ would be grounds for banning at UD is itself extraordinary, but it pales into insignificance against the other stuff. I’m gobsmacked).
Blimey, indeed! 🙂
Extraordinary enough to warrant an OP, I’d suggest. If you had the time, I’d love to see one from you.
ETA: It’s front page news at The Pandas Thumb
Yes, with Sal’s permission, I thought I’d do just that. Sal?
It would be interesting to know when the email was sent. Barry seems to have got his tail up recently – he genuinely seems to think that Larry Moran “gave away the store” when he said that it was possible to infer design without knowing who the designer was, or whatever it was Larry said.
Or it’s just more whistling past the graveyard.
My complaint isn’t (only) that he is accusing me of dishonesty, but that – by the time of the particular post – he had been doing it for weeks and he kept up with it until yesterday. We’ll see about the immediate future, but this has been a character issue with him. By character issue I mean a character flaw that should disqualify him from admin capacities, if he is to repeat the same trolling/bullying experiment on someone else. Perhaps he already has in the past. I am a fairly recent participator here.
This is actually a wise choice, to divert cockfights to a specific area, such as Noyau. This way you don’t have to waste your nerves on boyish games. However, I brought the issue to your attention for these reasons:
– Patrick was doing it in a main thread
– …for weeks (months now)
– …in admin capacity, referring to his allegedly superior command of rules
– …and then he began renegotiating the rules with other admins, apparently in order to enjoy even greater bullying freedom
Understood. However, no matter how sweetly touched I may feel about your admission of lapse, you are not the one who should apologise to me. For the sake of other members, both current and potential, Patrick’s character flaw needs some actual treatment. It’s overdue. It’s a good start when you say that you have the ability to diagnose stuff like that.
I think it would be welcome for Patrick to apologise for the repeated imputations of ‘bad faith’, ‘dishonesty’, ‘lack of integrity’, ‘moral shortcomings’, etc. against Erik. This is the least he could do. For Lizzie to reprimand herself, when really it is Patrick who should be reprimanded (by Alan or Neil or Lizzie) is not a display of justice or attempt at reconciliation.
Sending one or two posts by Patrick from that thread to guano is not enough of a ‘fix’ in this case, Lizzie. There are probably 30-40 posts that contain the same imputation. This is why Patrick was proposing to change the rule. I’m not going to take the time to dig them up, but I’ve followed the thread more or less closely for its duration and also been on the hypocrisy end of his ‘moderation’.
The only one other than Erik who has made a decent and sincere (on-topic) contribution there imo is KN. Otherwise, it’s been an atheists/agnostics bashing religion festival of anti-theism and empirical demands on ‘spiritual’ Scripture.
Yes indeed. I hope I have now clarified the rule criteria. He can ask you to support or retract, he can comment on whether you have done so, but he cannot, under the game-rules, suggest that you are being dishonest by not (in his view) doing so.
Yes, I’m pleased with how that is working out, and I’m glad of my decision not to have “moving to noyau” as an option for rule-violating threads. If people want to continue a conversation in Noyau, they can do so under their own volition, and their co-cockfighter is not obliged to follow them.
But TSZ is a therapeutic resource 🙂
I’m not even going to commit to any view as to whether character therapy is required. Not My Problem.
Not Judging is precisely what I want to happen here, and I am not going to regard myself as an exception.
I’m not trying to “fix” anything except current main-page discussions at TSZ.
If people want fixing, or if they want other people fixing, then this is not the place to get it done.
To be clear: I’m all for making judgments about whether an argument is well-founded. It’s the people making the argument who are supposed to be off limits for judgement here. Well, on the main page.
You can judge people here – it’s partly what it’s for – so people can criticise, for instance, me.
Elizabeth,
Like I said, Lizzie, if you really want to ‘fix’ the ‘main-page discussion’ in the Varieties of Religious Language thread, there are 30-40 (and that might be generous on the low end!) posts by Patrick that should be guano’d … according to your own rules (which Patrick has tried to ‘massage’ you about for his own purposes). If you do not accept imputations of bad faith, dishonesty, lack of integrity, etc. then you could spend a good chunk of time removing many of Patrick’s posts. Erik was basically assaulted there by Patrick’s arrogant sense of entitlement and only responded to the bullying after it became too gross and repetitive with no apparent value in conversation left to gain.
It doesn’t matter that Erik didn’t answer Patrick’s ad nauseam repeated 3 questions the way Patrick wanted them to be answered or not. The issue is how/that Patrick imputed character to Erik that is against the site rules.
Once you check the record, you’ll see the behaviour of Patrick was simply against the rules of the site. Patrick thus should be reprimanded (by you, Neil or Alan) or voluntarily issue an apology. Otherwise, no correction or reconciliation will be made to this unfortunate situation.
I moved a post.
Now move on.
Elizabeth,
So, it’s impossible for you to publically reprimand one of your administrators or request his apology? Moving one post is simply not enough. 🙁
ETA: If you’re not even going to honour your own rules, then Patrick should stay on as an administrator.
Lizzie’s response above reveals the atheist-biased ‘moderation/administration’ of this site. And what happened to JohnnyB supposedly becoming the first theist admin? Haven’t heard anything about/from him since Lizzie’s ‘prize’ was announced.
Elizabeth,
I’ll post some relevant e-mails with my responses. and Time stamps with some comments.
A lot of the admins here are quite opposed to my views, but they are committed to letting me express dissenting views.
I want to make clear, the issue isn’t about my banning. It’s how it was done and the changing stories and excuses made. There will be more e-mails. Excuses that made little sense were concocted.
Sal
One more crucial nuance though. His requests to support or retract, either with or without accompanying judgments and threats, have been disruptive spam in a main thread. This has been a prominent aspect of the problem, deliberate disruption of discussion, instead of advancing it in any way. In Noyau it would have been a non-issue. In a main thread by an admin it demonstrates the character of the website.
Erik,
Yup. Oh, well maybe Lizzie will make ‘Sal’ an admin here! Wouldn’t that solve her problems of not only appearing as, but actually being an unrepentant atheist-skeptic site with her 3 atheist admins who are left free to insult people and break the rules she laid down with impunity?
Sal, you were a poor admin at UD.
You also don’t make a very sincere effort to respond to people who rightly criticize some of your ideas. We can see that clearly here.
You also butt into others conversations and tell people to “be brave and answer the questions” when you have no such demands of yourself.
You even think you should be able to decide whose posts are relevant and whose aren’t here-as if you have some special authority.
If you are going to go online, and espouse bizarre ideas (like believing in YEC and NS) then you should at least expect some challenge to your ideas, without have skin thinner than Saran wrap.
Maybe the reason you were banned is simply because you are kind of arrogant and intolerant?
Well, as has been noted previously, the current rules do not prevent thread-jacking. IMO they cannot be modified to prevent thread-jacking without doing irreparable damage to the goals of this site, but I continue to be open to suggestions.
You, on the other hand, have falsely claimed to have answered the requests for clarification, and further falsely claimed that no-one has explained why your so-called answers were non-responsive. Repeatedly.
You can cloak yourself in victimhood all you want, but you have always had available a really simple way of ending the diversion: clarify or retract. So long as you continue to dissemble, we will continue to point out your falsehoods. It’s that simple.
I’ve never doubted that you’re a reasonably intelligent person with a perspective worth taking seriously. I read one of your articles on Sorokin and Dobzhansky. I disagreed with all of it, but I also found it quite interesting. By which I mean that I can see how, if someone were to take Sorokin’s typology of cultures as a starting-point, then one would be inclined towards the assertions about Darwinism that you make.
My irritations towards you isn’t about your theoretical perspective or the work itself. I have immense respect for anyone who engages in the unforgiving discipline of scholarship. Rather, my irritation is based entirely on the fact that you never make any substantive contributions to TSZ. Your comments at TSZ consist largely of ad hominem invectives about how atheists are the most despicable sub-human scum ever to walk the earth and as many personal attacks as you can manage.
If your contributions to TSZ were anything like your published work, we’d all be better off for it.
I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something like No posts will be allowed that would be distressing to Alan’s mother. He could probably put it better.
(I’m sincerely hoping she has no problem with cuss words. Most of the words I know are those, I think.)
I have complained on a bunch of occasions that Patrick’s badgering was thread-jacking, since it was clear that Erik would never answer them.
I guess I can live with the decision to simply move objectionable comments to Guano, but….why just one of Patrick’s on that thread? If one was rule-violative, I believe there were about 699 others that said the same thing.
Gonna have to agree with phoodoo on this one Sal. What Barry did may be pretty low but what’s you’ve done when you have moderator powers is far worse. I’m talking about your cute little trick of changing your opponents’ posts without attribution. . You delete sentences when the opponent makes points you can’t answer. Even worse is you add your own words to make the posts say something the authors never intended. You did at UD, you did it at your old Young Cosmos blog, you did it at your new failed Creation Evolution University site. It’s hard to have any sympathy for you when you’ve consistently behaved far more reprehensibility.
People who are appointed administrator are still members of the site. Being an administrator does not cancel one’s participation as a member.
In my opinion, a small number of Patrick’s ordinary posts pushed the limits. But I did not see them as pushing the limits enough to warrant guanoing them. If I wanted to be a strict enforcer, then most of Gregory’s posts would have been guanoed. But, as Elizabeth suggested, we really cannot “fix” people. We just try to gently influence the direction of the discussion, making allowances for the people that participate.
As best I can recall, Patrick has been exemplary in his actions as an administrator. IMO, reprimanding and administrator should be done only for abuse of his administrator permissions. And I have not seen evidence of that.
It’s okay to be wrong. What I hope we can avoid, is the kind of tribalistic defensiveness that we see at UD.
That’s the problem with the “address the post” rule in a nutshell. If you’re going to enforce it as written, you have to eliminate about 95% of Gregory’s posts on this site and maybe 25% of all other posts. If you’re NOT going to enforce it as written, it’s arbitrary and capricious which posts get guanoed. That latter approach is the current methodology here.
The rule now reads:
Most of Gregory’s posts would, and should, still be guano’d, but most people have the sense to scroll past.
Hoping alone doesn’t seem to be working very well.
If they should be, they should be.
^this.
Well, one move will have to stand in for many. Moving is not even supposed to be at token of reprimand anyway, but at least now it stands in guano as an exemplar of stuff that is moved (although sometimes non-violating responses are moved).
The primary point of moving the post is not as a reprimand but to get it out of the way of discussion. Once the page has rolled over a few times it’s not in the way any more anyway.
So, let’s get this absolutely clear and transparent. Openly and directly accusing someone of ‘bad faith’, lack of integrity and dishonesty is not a post that should be guano’d, is that what you’re saying Neil? Just a simple yes or no to this question would be appreciated.
hotshoe_,
Darn, now I need to find the blush emoji.
Lizzie is playing an intentional blind eye in this case. Let’s just note that. (Wondering why would bring in her ‘motivation’ for doing so.)