Did Mod cause the collapse of evcforum?

I think you'll find that I did, Paul. Please go back and read more carefully. Then I apologize, since someone must be twisting your arm and making you participate in this thread.Oh, what's that? No, they're not? Nobody's twisting your arm at all?Then why are you here?

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Always treat other members with respect. Argue the position, not the person. Avoid abusive, harassing and invasive behavior. Avoid needling, hectoring and goading tactics.

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Er, no. Intent is irrelevant, we're talking about the action of comparing someone to a rapist.I don't need to speculate on intent to know if one person is bashing someone else with a baseball bat. I don't need to get into their head to know if that action is being taken. I just have to observe the bat in their hand, rising and falling as it is used to beat the other person over and over again. At that point it really doesn't matter what's going on in anyone's head, we're talking about actions, not intent.We don't need to know NJ's intent. His intent is irrelevant. We observed that he was taking the action of comparing consensual homosexual relationships to rape and bestiality, suggesting that they were morally equivalent. That action violates the forum guidelines and should be subject to censure, but for some reason moderators uniquely took NJ's supposed "intent" (which they could not know) into account and let him continue to do it.It was a gross injustice and the most shameful episode of moderation in the life of the forum. Full stop. CS, I've told you - it was never a matter of what NJ was thinking. It was a matter of what he was doing. We don't need to have read his mind to observe what he was doing. Well, no. That's false. Berb was never insulted by what NJ was thinking, he was insulted by what NJ was saying. Just as I don't have to read your mind to know what you're saying, neither Berb nor anyone else had to read NJ's mind to know what he was saying.Intent doesn't matter, but for some reason moderators decided, in NJ's case, to rule from intent, and then use the fact that they couldn't know his intent to justify inaction.

I don't know about now, where it's apparently acceptable at EvC forum to call your opponent a "child" and tell him to "grow a pair", but back then, yes, it was against the rules to make insulting, offensive imprecations against people. And look! Like a shriveled appendix, that rule survives in the forum guidelines, apparently as a disregarded atavism:

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Always treat other members with respect. Argue the position, not the person. Avoid abusive, harassing and invasive behavior. Avoid needling, hectoring and goading tactics.

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Well, let's be perfectly honest. The reason that offensive ad hominem attacks were against the forum guidelines, back then, wasn't because forum participants were shrinking violets who needed to have their feelings protected from mean people on the internet.It's because, back then, it was felt desirable that discussions remain on-topic, and take the form of (largely) dispassionate evaluation of evidence and response to argument. But when your opponent gets personal, that's frequently an excuse to avoid addressing his actual argument and start playing the game of "who can write the best insults".I dunno, I thought it was a good rule, even though I ran headlong against it all the time. I'm dismayed to see it no longer in effect, apparently.

I'm sorry but that's simply not the case. It was always very clear precisely to whom NJ was directing his comments. Frequently he was replying to Berb's posts.If you want to get technical, after all, at no point did Dan say "Mod, you're a retarded monkey." He simply offered helpful advice on how to peel a banana.

It's you being honest, for once, which I appreciate.So, take it a step further. Is it good for the board when moderators persist in folly? (Here's a hint - according to subsequent events, no it was not.) You weren't a third party. You were the "moderator party", the one who was having trouble accurately apprehending disrespect and therefore were having trouble executing your duties effectively. So Dan set up an experiment to see if you would recognize the same kind of disrespect when leveled at you.Which you did! You even recognized that's what he was doing, asked him to confirm, and he did. You passed the test and displayed that you could accurately apprehend disrespect. It's just that you only cared about it when it was directed at you. Certainly Dan had reason to critique more aspects of your conduct, yes. Mostly because you kept dong and saying the wrong thing. Yes, but I thought I was clear - you were either lying or engaged in false consciousness out of a desire to uphold "the thin blue line." (You never actually told me, and I'm curious - do they say that in the UK? Do your police have "the thin blue line" over there?)I can only judge you by your actions, Mod. If that's what I was doing, no, that would not have been the best reaction. But there was nothing about my posts that should have been perceived as "shit-throwing", and if hysterical moderators are in the throes of a delusion where they perceive restrained, constructive dialogue as a torrent of shit, I'm not sure what course of action to take except try to be more reasonable, more restrained, more constructive, and keep talking until they calm down.Was I wrong? I don't see how I can be. Letting NJ run rampant ultimately resulted in The Great Purge. Percy says exactly that in the Purge thread. Were you guys going to take action against NJ until Dan, Rrhain, and I told you to take action? Did us telling you to do that convince you not to do it?If that's the case, then I really do apologize. I thought the way to convince you to do the right thing was to convince you to do the right thing. If I'd known you were just about to figure it out, but then decided not to out of spite, I would have told everybody to shut the fuck up. "Who knows" implies you don't know why you posted that. Generally people take actions they can't justify when they're acting emotionally.Mod, I know why - I still know why - I posted every single message in that thread. Because I was engaged in deliberate, constructive dialogue. When you say "who knows?" what else am I supposed to derive from that but an admission than you weren't attempting to do the same?

No, that's exactly backwards. We're objecting to the position, not the person. The position that gay relationships are the moral equivalent of rape is an offensive position that violated the forum guidelines. No, to specify homosexual relationships and rape as being the same under a rubric of all actions being the same is still provocative and offensive. After all, if all actions are the same, morally, why be specific about rape and homosexuality? Why not, say, whisting and bank robbery? Or tying your shoelaces and genocide? Or cooking and murder?Let me leave you with the words I originally said to NJ, because I think they apply to you, too:

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At the very least, using trigger language like you did makes people respond to your language instead of your argument, so you should reconsider making such comparisons simply from a practical standpoint of not giving your opponents an excuse to avoid your points.

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If I say something like "a nigger leaves a train station going south at 50 mph, and a spic leaves another station 50 miles south, going north at 30 mph, how fast are they going when they drive-by each other?" it doesn't really matter that I'm trying to make a point about algebra, not about race. I've been deliberately offensive and opponents, obviously, are going to ignore my much less interesting point and react to my bigotry. Why should I expect them to do any different?

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I invite you to use other comparisons in the future, if only out of self-interest.

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NJ never had any reply to this, and continued to gay-bait for months. I think that made his intent perfectly clear, but again - his intent was never relevant in the first place. Try to remember the history, though. Nj was repeatedly and politely informed that, regardless of his intent, his comparisons were insulting and he should discontinue them. But after being informed that they were insulting, he magnified them.Regardless of the relevance of his intent, doesn't that make his intent pretty obvious? If somebody pokes you, and you tell them "oh, ouch, that actually hurts, could you please stop?" and they say "oh, that hurts, does it?" and you say "yes, it does!" and in response they dig in even harder, isn't their intent pretty clear?NJ wasn't jumped on the first time he made the comparison. It's not like he just blundered into it, accidentally, and Berb exploded at him. He was repeatedly told that people were insulted by the comparison, at decreasing levels of circumspection and tact, and then after a few weeks of it moderator attention was requested, and then the moderators acted like they'd never seen him do it at all. After a week of non-stop gaybaiting directed at Berb, that's when Berb blew up at NJ, NJ responded with a quip, Berb and NJ were suspended for a week, and Modulous shortened NJ's suspension to a day.Like I said, even though we don't need to care about NJ's intent, his intent was quite obvious. But the Forum Guidelines weren't administered based on intent back then, they were administered on the basis of people's actual actions.And independent of his intent, NJ's actions merited a suspension, and when his behavior was not interdicted it resulted in the crisis of confidence in moderation that ultimately led to out-of-control bickering, the firing of the moderators, and the permanent suspension of the most vocal critics.You can say "no you're wrong" again, CS, and that's fair - I guess defending your arguments with evidence is something that simply isn't done around here anymore, either.

Hyro, go back and take a look at my posts in the thread, which you show no indication of ever having read. Here'sa convenient link. I first get involved in message 22 where I'm the one telling Berberry to chill the fuck out, and rethink his approach. Then I agree with Berberry that it doesn't look like the moderators are going to come down on NJ at all.And then I literally said nothing until a hundred messages later, after Dan and Rrhain had been suspended for their objections. (Dan's suspension we've been arguing about, but I notice nobody has even tried to defend the suspension of Rrhain.) That's when I got involved, but when Percy asked us to drop the discussion, that's precisely what I did.I voiced my objections, was never disrespectful, and followed all moderator requests. I never participated in GenDiscMod14 nor in "Changes at EvC Forum" at all.So, yeah. I'm willing to consider the possibility that I was somehow "the central cause of the controversy", but what is your evidence that I was?

And if NJ had ever given any indication that he actually wanted to talk about them, those valid questions might have begun an interesting debate.But what did NJ actually do? He "raised those questions" in unrelated threads. He opened new threads to "raise those questions" and then never, ever responded to them in any way but to repeat them and re-assert that homosexual conduct was the moral equivalent of rape and bestiality.If he'd just done it once, and then Berb had thrown a fit about it, your justification and the moderator actions of the time would have been reasonable.But that's not what happened. NJ kept at it, with exactly the same language, long after he'd been informed that he was being insulting. He responded to the information that he was insulting people not by apologizing and promising to do better, or by trying to make the same argument about "moral relativism" using different examples - after all, you could use any two things as examples in that argument - but by being even more direct about how he thought homosexual conduct was exactly the same as rape and bestiality.Reasonable people, at that point, have to conclude that this is no longer an inept attempt at moral philosophy but an offensive vendetta.If he'd just done it once, it wouldn't have resulted in anything at all. NJ did it for months after he'd been informed it was insulting.

Dan gave links to examples in that very thread which Modulous ignored.Seriously, Hyro, these issues were amply documented at the time. I mean, you could just click Nemesis Juggernaut's name and see every post he ever wrote. Why don't you go read through those and see if you can finally arrive at the conclusion that everybody, including Percy, arrived at three years ago?Just a thought.

Again, exactly backwards. Arguments hold water only when they're directed at the position, not the person. Argumentum ad hominem is a logical fallacy, CS. Er, but what he really did was submit words. It's the words he submitted that are the problem. Again - Berb never objected to what NJ was thinking, he objected to what NJ was saying. And we know what he was saying because that's what he typed into the message box and then clicked "Submit Reply." You're right. And reasonable people who feel offense, like Berberry, politely inform the other that, probably without intending it, they've been insulting.Like Berberry did. NJ responded by doubling down on the offending behavior. For weeks. True, but it's simply a matter of practicality that people who want their arguments understood should avoid inflammatory and offensive speech. Even if that's not the intent! Indeed, that used to be a forum guideline. (Doesn't seem to be, these days.)Ultimately, both speakers and audience have to work together to ensure clarity. When a reader finds that unintentional offense is obstructing their ability to understand an argument, they should politely say so. Writers who find that they've been unintentionally offensive should use alternate language so that their meaning is not obscured. That's how adults communicate when they're not trying to insult and offend each other.NJ, instead, doubled-down on the offensive language and refused to engage with people who were grappling with the underlying argument. That made his intent pretty clear - he wasn't interested in the moral philosophy, he was interested in insulting homosexuals. Ok, now I don't understand. Are you saying that NJ didn't actually write anything at all? That someone else was posting those comments under his name?I took it as assumed that when post appeared under NJ's name, those were the posts where he had entered words into the text box and hit "Submit Reply." Are you saying there's some reason to believe that's not the case?

Ok, but then Dan corrects Percy:

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The thread is about homosexuality. The response (originally someone else's, but NJ picked it up and ran with it) was that since bestiality is not okay, obviously neither is homosexuality...In both cases, he's ignoring the sticking point, that consent is the difference between these acts. Whether he phrases it as a slippery slope or as moral relativism, he's making the same argument and ignoring the same rebuttal. Both arguments hinge around a lack of any context with which to morally seperate homosexuality from other sexual acts, and the response in each case is the same.

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Changing the dressing slightly doesn't mean he's not harping on the same point.

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And then Percy (as Admin) says he doesn't agree, and by then Dan has been suspended so he can't reply. Of course by this time it's obvious that the moderators have decided to close ranks and present a unified front, so absolutely none of them can admit that NJ has been presenting an equivocation of homosexuality and bestiality and rape as though its a technical argument about moral philosophy and then refusing to actually engage in a discussion about moral philosophy.Months later, Percy seems willing to recognize that MJ has been involved in a months-long campaign of gay-baiting, but he describes it as "unconscious", as though NJ's is getting up in his sleep to unwittingly equivocate loving gay couples with rapists and horse-fuckers. (Ambien's a hell of a drug, I guess!)

No, exactly backwards. Again - nobody was objecting to NJ personally, to his beliefs, to his thoughts, or to anything like that.They were objecting to the words he was entering into the text box and submitting.You're getting this consistently backwards. Nobody had any objection to NJ's thoughts, because how could they know what they were? The objection was always to what NJ was doing, which was doubling down on language he had been informed was hurtful. No, it's not. It's a judgement on what he did. No, you don't. You just have to read it and take it personally. Of course, it's relatively easy for people who aren't gay to shrug off offensive slurs against gays, but who cares? That's not the applicable standard. You don't get to call black people "n*ggers" because you think it's a funny word that makes you laugh when people say it to you.If you're not the one being insulted, you don't get to determine what gets to count as insult. And, again, it doesn't matter. NJ might certainly have done it by mistake - the first time. Adults who are trying to prevent their language from being an obstacle to debate modify their language when they've been unintentionally insulting.That's not what NJ did. He repeated his language. He got even more direct. He began following Berb around to completely unrelated threads to call him a rapist horse-fucker. There was no legitimate reason for moderators to allow that to occur. I mean it's not like we have free speech here. And if NJ wanted to have an argument about moral relativism there were a dozen open threads he could have done that in, some of which he himself started and abandoned. That made his intent abundantly clear - but again, his intent didn't matter. Berberry wasn't insulted by his intent or his thoughts - he was insulted by what he said. Your standard where you have to read someone's mind before you can read their words is an absurdity, and it's certainly not the standard you would apply to someone who was engaged in a campaign to insult you. (And don't think we can't find some threads where you object to being insulted.)

His intent doesn't matter. Percy made it abundantly clear that enforcement of the Forum Guidelines isn't based on intent, but on action. I quoted the message, remember? You keep making that statement but it doesn't make any sense. Again, nobody objected to the fact that NJ had bad thoughts about homosexuals, only that he repeatedly took the position that they were the same as rapists and horse-fuckers.It was the position, not the person, that was being argued. It's not "argumentum ad hominem" to be the victim of a personal attack, CS. Jesus.

I never said it was an exact quote. And "more than the text" doesn't mean the person, it could mean the subtext.Subtext isn't "the person". And, again, objecting to a personal attack isn't arguing the person. They're made their position a personal attack, so when you object, you're arguing the position. They argued the person, by attacking you. But you're wrong. That's the position we thought he was taking because that's the position he took. If he had been taking a position about moral philosophy, he would have participated in the discussion about moral philosophy.But he didn't. QED.

Because he was a homophobic asshole. But who gives a shit, why? Nobody objected to his thoughts, his morals, his religion. The only objection was to his arguments. But he didn't pursue the moral relativists. You think my version of events is skewed because you're making up events that never happened to support yours. When the moral relativists turned up to engage his arguments and defend moral relativism, he abandoned the discussion entirely. He opened up literally dozens of threads about moral relativism that he abandoned on the first page because he wasn't interested in responding to actual argument. He just wanted to bash gays and then run and hide.The only person he actually pursued was Berberry, and he didn't pursue him making moral relativist arguments, he pursued Berberry by re-iterating that morally he was no different than a rapist horse-fucker, and "gosh why are you getting so offended when I call you a horse-fucker, horsefucker? It's just an argument about moral relativism, honest!" Nobody did that, Straggler. NJ asked what the difference between a homosexual and a rapist was supposed to be, and he was told "consent." He never asked why that difference mattered; he never asked anything! Once he was told he basically abandoned the thread, and then a few weeks later he'd post another as though the first had never happened.Having a discussion about whether consent is actually an important moral principle could be interesting. But NJ never once was actually interested in that discussion. He was interested in slandering homosexuals, especially the ones who would respond vocally, like Berb. Asking Berb to respond to a weeks-long campaign of personal attacks and hounding by doing and saying nothing was too much then, and it's too much, now. And anybody who sided with NJ instead of with Berb has ample reason to be ashamed of themselves. Because I have two eyeballs, a functioning brain, and I can read and interpret statements in plain English. That's how I can arrive at the conclusion that I'm correct and others are wrong - because I'm right, and they're wrong. How else would I get there? Mod's wrong. Full stop; he was wrong then, and you and he are wrong now. Mod occasionally asked me to speculate on how he could be wrong, and I obliged him.Honestly, I don't care whether he's dishonest or not, or whether he's insincere or not, or whether he has some kind of organic mental disorder or intellectual disability. I don't know, I don't care, and it frankly doesn't matter. But he's wrong. Clearly, objectively, wrong. He was wrong then, and subsequent events proved it beyond any doubt. If NJ's conduct had simply been Guidelines-appropriate discourse that had been misinterpreted, if it had just been a matter of making an argument that was being misunderstood, it never would have resulted in crisis.But it did. NJ's campaign of unalloyed insulting nonsense, when allowed to run rampant and unchecked by moderator sanction, ultimately destroyed the board. It's never been the same.I mean, Jesus Christ I've only said it a dozen times already. If what NJ was saying had really been so harmless, letting him say it as much as he wanted wouldn't have resulted in crisis. But that's exactly what happened.