Author: Roger
Date: 13:39:37 01/25/00
Go up one level in this thread
On January 25, 2000 at 12:31:48, Bruce Moreland wrote: >On January 25, 2000 at 03:52:29, Roger wrote: > >>Banning someone is so extreme...Banning is to CCC what the death penalty is to >>society at large. Effectively, a person is being put to death, relative to this >>forum. > >This is rhetoric. You are associating these two concepts, and they are not >associated. Killing someone is killing someone. Banning someone is not even >close to killing someone. It's an analogy for sure. What I said was that banning someone was equivalent to death relative to CCC. When society puts someone to death, it is saying that we must expunge that person from our presense. Sending someone into exile does the same. Banning does the same thing. I never said that the moderators had the power to actually end biological life. > >>History has shown that Freedome of Speech is so valuable, and the price of >>censorship so high, that we resist censorship whenever possible, the wisdom here >>being to err on the side of liberalism. >> >>I wonder, then, whether we ought to entertain alternatives to banning. >> >>First, A GROUP VOTE ON BANNING SOMEONE: Are there ever cases where the >>moderators should defer to the group before banning someone. In other words, >>rather than the moderators taking all the heat for what might be an unpopular >>decision, the group would have to assume responsibility for its actions, and >>vote on banning someone. There would be no specific person to blame, the group >>having spoken democratically. > >A representative system is fine. The idea is that we vote for moderators, and >they do approximately what they said they would do when they ran for the job. > >When moderators ban someone there is typically a lot of discussion. Do you want >that discussion to take place here? I think that most people wouldn't. > This makes it seems like we want the moderators to do our dirty work, so that the group can keep such nasty affairs out of its awareness. Before someone was banned permanently, I would certainly want a group discussion and a vote. Having to ban someone is uncomfortable, but it's necessary from time to time, and that's life. >>Second, it seems to be that before someone is banned, they ought to be >>SUSPENDED. They ought to see their posting privileges revoked for a specific >>period of time. A week at first, perhaps, followed by two, then a month, then >>cast out. > >This has been suggested repeatedly, and I believe that some moderator candidates >have made it part of their platform in the past. > >There is a problem with this. You give people a free pass to say whatever they >want to say a few times, because they know that what the moderators can do to >them is very rigidly defined. > >There are also cases where someone appears and makes clear their intention to be >a problem with their very first post. We had a guy last year who wrote a post >entitled, "fuck you", and the body of the post consisted in total of the >sentence, "no really, fuck you". This guy had never posted before. You mentioned rhetoric earlier. I think it's always possible to present extreme cases in order to support, but I don't find that persuasive, because it relies on the assumption that there are no borderline cases, or that there will never be a borderline case. We already have borderline cases, and for those, my opinion is that we should have group process. > >What would the point be of sending someone like that a warning that they need to >post with a civil tone? Why should effort be spent suspending that guy for a >week, and notifying him at the end of the week that he can take another pass at >us? > Let's not forget that the guy has to actually want to come back and take his swip. I wouldn't have any problem with the suspension being proportional to the crime. A month for the "Fuck You" guy, for example. >We elect three people to moderate. Sometimes it doesn't work out perfectly, but >I'd like to take my chances rather than have everything go through full group >discussion or have everything defined rigidly. I certainly would not advocate having every tiny thing move through a group vote. That makes the representative system redundant. And that is NOT what I am advocating. My argument is simply that banning someone is so extreme that it deserves group process. > >>Seems that the moderators would assume the power to suspend someone >>automatically, but that a group vote would be required on banning. This would >>give some middle ground between banning and not banning, and might well let a >>rowdy poster adjust to the group, and the group to the poster. > >Not necessary. > That's your opinion, Bruce, and I respect it. I do, however, disagree. >bruce > >>Roger Roger
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