Kane Starkiller wrote:The "no swearing" policy would work a lot better if mods on this forum would clamp down on dishonest and fallacious debating tactics as forcefully as on naughty words.
There isn't a "no swearing" policy, actually, and I have let some relatively appropriate swearing slide without even tsking the slightest bit. However, there's very little swearing you can do that contributes constructively to discussion, so I would discourage you from swearing. Usually, when you're swearing, you are posting in anger; take a deep breath, wait five minutes, and then rewrite.
At best, when you call someone an idiot, you're making an unsourced assertion of dubious truthfulness. Were I to strictly and literally enforce truthfulness and adequate sourcing for statements, calling someone an idiot would be a bannable offense on those grounds.
Any policy on fallacious debate techniques would ultimately be subjective in its application, as seen on SDN, strek-v-swars, SB, et cetera. While I may actually
know precisely what I'm talking about when I speak of fallacy and logic, I'm sure that at the least, the same people who allow fallacious arguments to fly and claim solid ones to be fallacious elsewhere would complain most loudly about my refereeing. As I've
also pointed out, many of the bones of contention are not actually issues of hard logic, but of judgment calls from inconclusive evidence.
Think someone is making a fallacious argument? Say so, and explain without vitriol precisely why you think it's fallacious. That's much more convincing than calling for a moderator or simply making the blanket claim that your opponent has no idea what s/he is talking about.
Kane Starkiller wrote:Of course this will inevitably lead to admission that Federation fares much worse in comparison to Empire
IMO, it would not. Those making that claim engage in a lot of fallacious reasoning to support that conclusion.
Cpl Kendall wrote:Can you point to the thread where he did it?
Sure:
Thanatos wrote:The fact that its utterly retarded and wouldn't even remotely work. It would be in the ST side's best interest if you just shut up.
This, of course, as I explained in reply in that thread, compounds with his several prior offenses, as he had not had a week of active good posting behavior to bring him down a warning level, as outlined in the policy. If you don't think that's clear, enough, I could potentially install a warning level plug in, or put up a tracking thread, to make this more transparent (and less subject, incidentally, to my simply forgetting prior offenses after some time of inactivity).
The post Thanatos made is pretty clearly rude and crosses the line. There's nothing wrong with saying you don't like the idea (several others did so) but Thanatos is clearly not reasonable, polite, or informative when he tells GStone to "just shut up" and that what he's said is "utterly retarded." There is no constructive function to that post, unlike other posts in that thread criticizing GStone's attempts to explain why widebeam mode isn't seen in, say, the battle of AR-558.
Cpl Kendall wrote:Expecting that peoples internet behaviour will carry over into in person behaviour is unfounded.
Actually, it's perfectly well founded. Habits act independently of their source, and the line between internet life and real life is very frequently found to be fuzzy. Some people can do a very good job of compartmentalizing their lives and pretending to be entirely different people with wholly different habits, speech patterns, et cetera.