This isn't a rant about the evils of online courtesy or the common fallacies made by aggressive arguers and if it turns into one, then stop reading. Instead, I'm trying to nut out my own problem of having to be polite (or at least not bite the head off) to people on online communities. This has come to a head because I've started posting at larvatus prodeo, a aussie political/cultural blog who's commentators and posters I like and admire, and I don't want to piss the people I'm arguing with off and/or come across like a jerk. But sometimes, oh sometimes, there are people I'd love to verbally thrash some internet sense into. Between these two instincts a sensible common ground must exist, and this is a long rambling attempt to find it.
Anyway...
Before there were blogs, there were forums and bbs', and the one that dragged me to it like a moth to the cathode was Portal of Evil's forums. They're a flamewar jungle, and gentler souls who believe in civility and moderation in debate if plunged into them by some strange mistake or fit of passion would be ridiculed and demolished. But if you look beyond the titanic clashing egos, and the 3dgy attempts at humour, they have a strange fairly stable community of highly articulate, educated and pisstakingly funny posters, who collectively have a huge knowledge base, humanities, sciences and the fuzzy shit in between (economics and social science, I'm looking at you). Or PoE-News does at least.
It does set a pretty intense level of argument, where ad hominems come out fast and stinging and the high-octane nature of debate can turn semantic differences or slight quibbles into huge festering branches of stupid inflamed argument, which has the effect of driving shy-er posters away and keeping lurkers from posting as well as encouraging wannabe posters to imitate or surpass the articulate, acerbic regulars.
But the one thing this environment does that I admire above all, is cut short political-partisan mudslinging and posturing - the people who post there are well-read and pretences and attempts at condescencion that would get past on other milder forums are called stone dead. Insults are a given and so articulation and evidence are what ends debates.
The posters are largely Yanks (though there's a small and trusty crew of Aussies to bring an antipodean perspective) and the political analogues are vaguely different (many more liberal democrats than social democrats) but the kind of stupid right-wing (death beast) name calling that seems to flourish on Australian blogs gets shot down in flames of ridicule and if the poster keeps up the tack they (usually) end up totally refuted at every point and trapped into saying dumb stuff they can't defend.
The reason I bring up Portal of evil is that for a long time I've wanted to emulate the posters there, at least as far as knocking really bad arguments apart with derision, to the point where I've ignored compromise and community and all the happy friendly non-biting people's heads off stuff that seems to go on on the Internet. But, sometimes as much as I like sociability and civility in debate and discussion there are times when I think you can easily go too far.
For example, another forum community that I visit semi-regularly is the Straight Dope boards, which tries to solve the civily-vs-flaming problem by having a fully moderated proper 'Debate' board with rules against Rude Words and Ad Hominem abuse and a 'Pit' thread for flaming. In this lurker's opinion, the whole arangement didn't solve anything at all, as people could get away with being apalling twats on the Debate forum by dotting every 'i' and 't' all the while taking disingenousity to great new heights, while other posters who tried to reason with them couldn't call them on it decisively - with derision outside the Pit.
This arrangement I find deeply unsatisfactory because the subject of the 'pitting' would often instead play high and mighty and not sink to the depths of the Pit and get the serve they sweetly deserved.
Urk, brain tired.
Post more when can think tomorrow.
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2 comments:
The only random online forum I post on, and the only one I ever really have, is still the Arcanum Inn, though I don't even post much there these days...
And they seem pretty much the opposite to the POE forums. I mean, there's still no moderation, but everyone is exceedingly friendly (You'd probably have to somewhat like the community for its own sake to hang around on a forum about a 4 year old game by a company that doesn't exist anymore... And all the angrier types who used to be there migrated to rpgcodex.com, the flamepit of the online CRPG world.) and there are pretty much no ad hominems... At least, not as a way to end an argument.
That said, pretty much the only arguments ever started are ones about gay marriage, morality, or creationism, usually started, or protracted, by the resident fundamentalist Aldin.
The one time I actually tried arguing about him, on the subject of whether the concept of morality made sense without the concept of God, I realised exactly how great was his capacity to consistantly ignore everything you say while making the same points rephrased and pretending to understand, but overcome your arguments...
It got really infuriating that he could just endlessly do this without anyone developing some witty barb to shut him up.
But that said, I'm no good at witty barbs myself, and, though I often occasionally lurk on them, pretty nothing could ever convince me to post at either the RPGcodex or POE-news.
What you're describing with Aldin is what sometimes makes me want to invent a device to stab people in the face over the internet.
His type of arguer can clog up forums for page after page at straight dope because the moderators are Americans and seem to work American-style courtesy, which can permit people to say incredibly witless, rude or outright condescending arseholish things and not get censured, while at the same time punishing people who let out a rude word in a moment of passion.
That always struck me as smarting of outright double standards - rudeness, name calling and bad-spirited debate are no less for being couched in dripping 'courtesy' and if you moderate against ad-hominems and abuse and profess to uphold polite civil discussion I'd argue that they're actually worse than the stuff that goes on at portal of evil.
But yeah, I rarely post at PoE-News, partially because what I want to say usually gets said better, and partially because I'm thin skinned and don't know how to cop the abuse.
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