Only Humean needs a 1 Week Cool Off Period from Mod Duties

It’s so nice you can reduce and limit human life, experience, or interaction in such small tightly controlled parameters. As for me I cannot and don’t.

If you feel your life and experience so limited by moderation, it’s an odd choice to sign up for and contribute to moderated forums.

A typical and expected response from you. tips his hat

The freedom of speech has never meant that everyone can do whatever they want all the time so long as their actions are speech-based. It couldn’t be, because certain speech acts are incompatible, so allowing one can mean tacitly preventing another.

In your case, you used your keyboard to produce strings of characters that technically qualify as language, and even, charitably, convey ideas. But the expression is corrosive to the speech of others, because you posted eleven times in a row, offering little more than one-liners, and peppering them with personal insults irrelevant to and distracting from the topic at hand. You made a negative contribution to the net supply of speech on the forum. So warning you for it, and banning you for a period during which you can’t make such a contribution, is actually speech protective, by removing from the forum an impediment to speech. Namely, you.

If you value the freedom of speech (and not just invoking it as a way to moralize a tantrum), then post in such a way that you use your speech to effectively communicate interesting ideas, and don’t disrupt conversations or turn them into shouting/dissing matches. If you value the freedom of speech, value all speech, and consider how your speech interacts with the ability and desire of others to continue speaking.

Your dodging the actuality of what he said Carleas. It is easy to hide behind abstractions, then call it negative, when they go unnamed.

Actually quote what he said, and tell me the founding fathers didn’t specifically protect that form of political expression. He vehemently rejected Satyr and his group on ideological grounds. This is the primary speech they were protecting… the most important aspect, no form of speech is more important than this as far as America is concerned.

If there is any structural incompatibility that can possibly flow as suggested by your position, it is the actions of your moderator, and the foolishness he engaged in. That Carleas, is incompatible with free speech, that Carleas, is incompatible with Democracy, that Carleas, has fundamentally gone against every good and just tradition we’ve preserved in philosophy. We have had tyrants bite out their own tongues and spit it in the face of tyrants. They had lead just rebellions, have stood up in senates denouncing the obscene vice of tyrants and autocrats.

Joker has a point to make, and made it. He is partisan, opposed to Satyr’s world view, and he participated fairly in philosophy by stating this emphatically, in dialogue… but he used dialogue. He wasn’t the twisted son of a bitch that turned his back on dialogue, and therefore philosophy, by banning Satyr.

Joker isn’t the one who shoukd of been banned, the offendibg moderator should of been, he committed the crime against out true institutions, which do not flow from your insight and reasonings, but the ancient institutions of philosophy and conscious. Institutes we were so very careful in this proudest of republics to emulate and preserve. You have turned this poor boy and fool into the very image of Martyrdom of conscious and free speech. In your stupid brutality of thought control and contortion of free expression, what is the difference between your actions and that of the persecution and execution of Sir Thomas More for his? Do we not hang his portrait in the Supreme Court to remind ourselves of this patron saint of lawyers, to remind ourselves not to repeat that heart wrenching injustice against free speech and rights of individuals to affiliation?

What we have at root here is just that. If you dared to quote what he said you would instantly see that, it could be nothing more, nothing less than that… there is no fucking around around and side winding on lawyeresqe sophistry to try to distract everyone. What he said was conceptually reasonable, and in magnitude and character of daily speech seen on this forum, not unusual.

I submit therefore it was a persecution, against him, not for any element at play on his part, which is fully protected but the traditions of philosophy and free speech, but by the shitheaded and dimwitted outlook of a moderator hopelessly over his head, upset nobody ever discussed things in ways he desired, and had to crush the personalities that most offended him and his own personal outlook. He confuses being a justice of the peace with justice of peace of mind… we do not elect and justify coercive force for the latter, but the former. We expect those frictuve elements, and reserve our force for more serious mortal matters, of the physical and not of the spirit. We should look back to Marsilius of Padua on this, and observe such frictions are not unnatural or even undesirable, but evidence of the need to balance coercive force in ordering the loose ends of society by making a society that can encompass all loose ends justly, where there is a place for everyone, and everyone has a place.

Currently in the structure of your pan-philosophical website, too many people stand out as loise ends,andare repeatedly hammered for no reason. People are tolerated till a vreaking point us reached, then arbitarily banned without just reasoning or furtherance of discourse or insight of reasoning, where rules are put up in mockery of due justice. These breaking points are purely based on oersonality and afflicted histories, not the substance of arguments. Anything can be found and hammered, and thereafter hidden behind as objective action. “Oh… we have a methodology, we only followed the rules, look at the rukes for why you were banned”. Such arguments are why mobs chase tyrants out if cities, why escape tunnels have to be built out of white houses and presidential palaces. A rwasonable society has no need for such recourse, yet we find you here in your arguments mining ad hoc in unison underground digging your escape. There is no place to run to, there is no place to hide within the realm of ideas, to ehich you perpetually offend against. We will see you anywgere, grab you by your collars and yell to the crowds “we got you now you scrondrel”.

Tolerance and breadth of categorization matterrs in philosophy. It is our city, the foundation of our every great building, what our streets are paved in. We expect qualitatively like to back like, similar ideas to form together into areas of dedicated philosophy overtime, so we can refer to types of philosophy, and have a good idea of the ideas within it, but we shouldn’t hold too cloosekly to the logical rigors we derive from this phenomena. Philosophy is still very much the construct of the individual mind, and not all mind see the pattern as others do, some stick out as awkward thornes and refuse to accept the layout as others see it. So be it… the mind is a mix of feedback loops, every aspect worthy at least of consideration. When men cone along who simply cannot fit, let them be. Some of our greatest minds have been like them, and we should fear their seismic character. They aren’t capable of doing any great harm to our city, to the architecture and forms we have developed, but rather strengthen every stone, smooth the way of our rough streets, by adfing to the strength and insights of anything and everything they touch.

Certainly as the First Amendment to the US Constitution has been applied (and it’s worth noting that the application is among the most speech-protective legal principles the world has ever known), it has made exceptions for ‘fighting words’, i.e. words that incite an imminent breach of the peace. In the microstate of an internet forum, Joker’s posts, which I’ve already quoted above, certainly rise to that level. The collapse of a discussion into vitriolic shit slinging is a breach of the peace in a virtual state whose only existence is in the flow of the discussions it houses.

So his actions are rightly punished, that punishment does not infringe on the freedom of speech (and is indeed protective of it), he deserved a warning and he got one. And receiving his warning, he received a ban, according to the schedule we have in place to prevent single overreactions: even if Joker were being unfairly targeted, he has been on notice for weeks about the standard to which his conduct was being held, and he’s made no attempt to meet that standard.

It would be one thing if he were making an attempt to participate in civil discussion here. If he were actually trying really hard and just chanced his way into several rules that weren’t very well specified, maybe you would have a point. But he’s here to present the too-cool-for-school, badboy persona. It’s destructive by design. There’s no coherent freedom of speech that requires putting up with that kind of tedious and caustic bullshit.

It’s no use Turd Ferguson in trying to persuade the inner party apparatchiks of ILP. They will come with various excuses and justifications for their censoring and intimidation tactics on forum members here even calling their actions ridiculously civil or moral ones.

Case in point:

There’s no indication here that the arguments presented were even read, much less understood, and there’s no attempt whatsoever to rebut them. Instead, they’re dismissed because of who they come from. This is philosophy 101: it’s an ad hominem fallacy in the sense that it is simply attacking the speaker as a person and concluding that such a person could not present a valid case.

A comment like this in the context of a philosophical discussion just ends the discussion, it’s purely noise to any kind of conversation because every followup or attempt to get back on track is dismissed as coming from the same, tainted source. And it tends to provoke responses in kind, further degrading the quality of the debate.

This is a mild example, both because the insults are mild and because this thread is administrative. But when the same pattern is repeated endlessly and in threads that are intended to be philosophical, and when the insults are more personal, it’s speech destroying. To prohibit that kind of activity is to protect the conversations, to protect the speech.

Protect free speech by censoring others so that only your own point of view or those like it prevails…

Only those kinds of speech or expressions are allowed freely…

Golf clapping

There is a distinction between viewpoint discrimination and what’s known in US law as “time, place, and manner” restrictions. For example, expressing the viewpoint that politicians are corrupt is protected; expressing it by spray painting it on a campaign billboard is not.

You were moderated not for your viewpoint (to the extent that your single lines of text effectively convey one), but for the manner in which you express it: by insulting the people you’re talking to and not responding to what they say. And speech is protected when that manner of speech is prohibited, just as speech is protected when you’re prevented from spray painting over someone else’s speech.

Always the lawyer Carleas and your moderating style illustrates just that. Whatever, it’s your forum and you’re going to do what you like with your hired help anyways. I’m familiar with your perception very much even though I don’t agree with it.

Always arguing ad hominem…

Shouldn’t moderation be law-like? Shouldn’t we be a board of laws, with a robust law-like justification for our interventions? Clearly I’m a partisan of law-like systems, but a system of rules that are applied legalistically seems like the ideal form of moderation. If it isn’t, what would be better? Arbitrary intervention? Subjective evaluations of quality?

I post mostly on the Philosophy board, and I can tell you that OH is exceedingly frustrating. He’s fairminded, calm and is constantly demonstrating a keen understanding of any and all fields of Western Philosophy. And he’s tolerant of the most feeble attempts at making anything remotely like a recognizable philosophical statement. These boards have had some very good mods over the years, but many have given good reasons to complain about them. There is absolutely no good reason to complain about OH.

Which is frustrating.

Maybe because he’s a better mod than I ever was.

Crap.

Well, I run my own forum just fine without trying to constrict or limit other people’s abilities to express themselves and converse.

You’re obviously not going to listen to anything I have to say, so why bother?

That’s some fine dandy towing the party line there Faust. I’m sure Only_Humean reading that post of yours smiled and appreciates you all that much more…

I’m equally sure that what I say here is of no real consequence. Just my opinion.

Conceded, but it’s a lot easier when you are your only user.

What makes you think that’s “obvious”? I’ve read and responded to everything you’ve said in this thread; you’ve yet to give reasons for your positions, or to even attempt to respond to my points. While I’m certainly subject to all the failures of the human brain, I make a sincere effort to change my mind in the face of good arguments. So make an argument that isn’t just attacking me as a speaker, and see how it goes. I can’t promise that I’ll change my mind, but I’ll certainly read and reflect on what you say, and if I disagree I’ll tell you why. Can you say the same?

How can you say that? After all, as ILP goes, so goes the world. Your words have been etched on history!

I try not to think about that…

Right…

Great forums are not built overnight. They take time to develop where I am very patient.

SickSadWorld forum is not even a year old yet.