You paraphrase incorrectly. Dan only ever referred to “people”, not “blacks” as you have it, so when he said “they’re now sub-human”, he was most likely referring to all people.
As others have pointed out, he was making an absurd argument to mock the racist arguments, not to join in.
When did “paraphrase” start meaning “lie’”? Is that some new hipster slang I’m not up on?
Dan,
Is it possible that you were drinking or already drunk when you wrote this?
For anyone who CANNOT see this as racist, I can only believe that you guys have just become so callous and apathetic or that you allow your biases toward the people you like to rule your mind to the point of being/becoming mindless. This is pure racism.
Dan, even if you said this JUST in jest, in a sense it would make it even worse than if you said it in ignorance. A person who is truly ignorant hasn’t as of yet learned the difference.
Racism IS ignorance and trying to be cute with our racial slurs or worse is ignorant, thoughtless and callous.
I think that moderators need to hold to disinterest in threads. They are there to moderate - not to join in the herd mentality and to be swayed by it. If they want to win friends and influence people, they need to influence people in a more positive way.
People try to be such objectivists in these places but really all they are succeeding in doing is giving that word a really bad rap and a malodorous environment.
I can’t for the life of me understand how some of you people in here (not all) can find such garbage to be funny and reasonable and philosophical.
GROW UP ALREADY and think with your heart and feel with your mind - since you seem to have it all a _ _ backwards anyway.
THINK AGAIN!!!
Read my post above (and his quote) and hopefully you will not make excuses for him.
If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.
What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
– Christopher Hitchens
[quote=“phyllo”]
There are a number of questions raised here:
Do certain beliefs automatically disqualify a person from being a moderator?
No,I would say no, Otherwise that too would be bias. BUT not as long as the moderator shows complete disinterest in the thread - as long as the beliefs do not get in the way of his doing his job - as long as those beliefs are not voiced. Not an easy thing I suppose to do or not to do but still…that’s what moderating is about - not pushing the tipping point but keeping it balanced.
The way I look at it, the moderator is like a guide, a sentinel, a beacon, a compass might be a good word for it, to keep the thread on track in ALL WAYS or as much as is humanly intelligently possible - but it is not his/her job to go romping with the herd, to create more chaos through bigotry or bias or ignorance. A little innocent side-bar, what have you, a comment here or there, fine but remaining disinterested/unbiased.
Keep all the moderators as moderators but perhaps it would be a good idea to inject some new blood into their veins occasionally - in other words, moderating the moderators. Even teenagers in HS halls sometimes make better monitors.
So the moderator is supposed to be disinterested in the very thread he is participating in, and shouldn’t voice his beliefs?
Are you fucking retarded?
No I’m not retarded. Are you?
I don’t think that a moderator should voice his opinions - I mean his personal opinions, beliefs, idealogies about what is being said, about the subject matter. He is there ONLY to moderate.
BUT of course the moderator needs to be INVOLVED insofar as the turn in which the thread is being taken, I mean about ad homs, civility, et cetera and bring it back to normalcy - not allowing the lunacy.
He might be really interested but what I mean by “disinterested” is not taking part in it. Look up “disinterest”.
My apologies - you are right about that. I confused disinterested and uninterested. Everything else, you are wrong 
I would always prefer a moderator to be knowledgeable and opinioned about the subjects taking place in the forums he/she moderates. The reason being is that he/she would be better able to tell what bits were bullshit or ad homs, and he’d be very interested in keeping the crazy down to a minimum so that the discussion could progress and not have to be eventually flushed because it was weighed down by too many idiots.
I’ve seen far too many moderators who didn’t care about the sections they moderate just generally ignoring forums or not caring or even worse, ones that were completely ignorant of the subject matter try to navigate the discussion and have absolutely no clue.
Man, Arb…I can’t express how much I’m looking forward to you becoming more educated. You’re just so full of fight. Didn’t you say in some other thread that you’re a freshman in college? Dude in a few years you’ll be all grown up and you wont seem so silly. I can’t wait.
Yes, such great education I’m receiving, from a professor who thinks differences between races are only skin-deep, and that all races have equal intellectual potentials. But I guess I am just too young and stupid to realize that.
If I were old, then I would be a conservative old retard from a time long gone, if I were middle-aged, then I would simply be having a middle-aged crisis… must find a way to discredit my person, somehow, so as to avoid addressing what I say. First rule of philosophy. Or was it the reverse, and one should address what is said instead of attacking the person?
You are right, I did not see his later post. Only his first two posts in the thread had been flagged using the ‘report post’ feature.
I agree that the later post looks every bit like racism, and I am disappointed in that.
This isn’t how moderating works, it isn’t how it should work.
For one thing, moderators are volunteers, making moderation into a gag order would mean severely limiting the pool of people willing to moderate; it’s hard enough to find trustworthy people willing to moderate without such a restriction.
For another, we generally ask the best members we have to moderate. If that meant they couldn’t participate in discussion any more, every moderator we recruit would be cutting the top off of our discussion, it would be completely counterproductive to what moderation is supposed to achieve. Dan was chosen democratically, and I don’t think the people who voted for him were attempting to communicate that they wanted him silenced.
It is troubling when the opinions expressed by moderators are distasteful, but there’s seldom an idea that some user doesn’t find distasteful. If the concern is partiality, it’s certainly better that Dan should be encouraged to share his ideas; if he is targeting black members for moderation, it will be significantly easier to spot if we know him to be a racist.
If instead the concern is that he will reflect badly on the site, I’m sure that is the case. But as much as I think Dan is wrong, and as much as I hope to find out that we are misunderstanding what he wrote, I take a very hard line when it come to the freedom to express ideas: I won’t decide what people have to believe in order to participate here, not as members and not as moderators.
If Dan is abusing his position as a moderator, I won’t hesitate to remove him. If he just has bad ideas, he is free to express those ideas, however wrong, however backwards, however that makes us look.
Well, then, lol, I really don’t know what to say here. If the below is not racist, than something is wrong with my brain. Somehow though, to me, this reaks of racism. Maybe you need to read it a few more times.
EVEN if he felt he was making a joke, being casual about this, to me, it’s still racist and even more so tragic because racism still runs rampant in the world. In my view, it is way out of line. Now you may not see it and I don’t know what else to say about that, but I’m more concerned with Dan seeing it anyway.
Having said that, I don’t want him discontinued as a moderator but I do think that even moderators need to be called on the carpet for certain things they say.
[b]by Dan~ » Tue Apr 14, 2015 6:15 pm
The problem is that blacks are chimpy and that they don’t believe it, when they should believe it, since we are supposedto be truthy moreso than chimpy.
If not for truth, then for what else should we post or think about?
Either they are going to help keep the store prices medium high for bananas and popcorn,
or if they leave the country, they will stir up antinigs elsewhere, then go on matches,
break coffee shops, eat each other, etc.[/b]
As far as being wrong about other things, though in this case, I don’t see something necessarily as right or wrong, but I was actually re-considering what I said about a moderator and their involvement in the threads.
Maybe I was confining them too much outside of posting. I think that an occasional post or more so to push a thread forward, to make some comments – but comments which do not speak of and further their own opinions, beliefs, idealogies – would be permissible. Now i know that would require some finesse but nevertheless…within the forum where he’/she moderates, I still personally feel that disinterest has to be maintained.
I don’t know what the rule of thumb is in another moderator’s thread - if a moderator from Religion let’s say, can post what they want (within reason and without ad homs and insults) in the Philosophy section.
Hi Carleas
I didn’t see this. Actually, our posts were put in here simultaneously.
I was actually going to apologize to you here so I will. I am sorry. I came on a bit too strong with my THINK AGAIN. I might have toned it down a bit. Believe it or not, as I was posting that to you, I almost felt like a raging she-dragon so I did tone it down a bit but not as much as I would want.
As I said, I don’t want Dan expelled from being a moderator.
I also will not bother to take the time to explain my thoughts and feelings about how I see a moderator interacting in here. I did bring them up with AofC in my above post.
But bottom line, this is your forum and your choice of how the moderators will be. Reading what you wrote, I am capable of seeing the practical wisdom of allowing the freedom which you do.
At the same time…
lol Spoken like a true lawyer 
Hope does reign eternal doesn’t it? Insofar as the quote which I inserted in here, for me at least, there can be no misunderstanding.
There is a difference, Carleas, between the freedom to express ideas (in this case demeaning racist ones) and the freedom to believe them as long as those beliefs are not expressed and do not infringe on the individual, human equality and rights of a person.
Freedom of speech in my book doesn’t mean total freedom to say what we want - it carries a responsibility with it and within this forum it is up to you to judicially discern and say what can or cannot be said - albeit you did see what Dan said as being racist.
Just as little sidebar here…
lol 
I thought that our posts had been put in here simiutaneously For some reason, I read 10:10 on mine too.
On another note, i meant to say judiciously not judicially though both words maybe work.
I don’t plan to be back again for another correction. 
Absolutely no need to apologize. I missed perhaps the crucial post to understanding this whole topic, you were right to point it out as forcefully as needed, and I appreciate it.
That the post should be read as racist and upsetting is clear. But the extrapolation from that to what Dan was thinking as he wrote it is must less so. Was he seething hatred, or just too drunk to see how inappropriate a bad joke was? I think there’s a difference between these, and I hope, eternally, naively, for the latter.
I think that’s true in many contexts. In a school room, in a workplace, in a church, there are lot of things that shouldn’t be said, and it’s reasonable to restrict people’s speech. On a philosophy forum, I don’t think that’s the case. Questions about what makes a person a person, what gives them rights, dignity, moral worth, when and why should we treat them equally – those are all the domain of philosophy. To restrict what can be said here is to say that we can discuss those questions only so long as no one offers the answers that the majority of the western world finds to be really, really, obviously bad answers. But the majority of the western world has been wrong frequently, even on these very questions.
In the search for truth, we must have the courage to look at repulsive ideas long enough to explain why they’re wrong.
I suspect shortly after ILP opened. :-"
Actually, I am a bit disappointed. I was expecting someone to complain of his absenteeism (but then FJ would have to be included). But I guess there is no rule that says that moderators have to actually moderate. That would be silly.
I keep an eye on R&S in Dan~'s absence, and to a lesser extent on SS in FJ’s…
Yeah … that’s why we need an actual moderator … or not.
… doesn’t really matter that much any more.
Face the facts. White people look different than black people, and white people are on average better at math than black people. Does this make me racist? No. I believe that both white people and black people are worthy of some sexi 'lovin.
I vote Trixie as moderator. Noble, just, great, and powerful.
As Satyr says