No reply news item on contentious topics?

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Under my proposed privilege I would not expect the entire thread to be recreated just add an “update” post and relock. This is the last time for a good long while you are going to hear me advocate for this. It is becoming obvious that at this time it is too complicated of an ask.

As far as creating another thread from a locked topic ie what I did with Amy Cooper(sorry about that) should not be allowed, those threads should be deleted when discovered no exceptions. We can’t expect the moderators to always catch these so members should be encouraged to bring these the attention of moderators via PM or the moderator attention thread. It sucks and is frustrating that certain topics need to be off limits but at this time we as a group have proven there are certain topics we are not able to handle in a mature manner. You still have the option of every day googling the topic and seeing if any news about the topic pops up. After a few months some leeway can be returned to see if people have rid themselves of bad habits. Of course as a group does not mean everybody and you do have the issue of a few ruining it for everybody. While not fair there are times in life where everybody has to suffer for the errors of a minority in the short run to benefit everybody in the long run.

Instead of locking or deleting threads, how about doing something about the trouble makers in it than ruining it for the rest of us.

That point is an interesting one: The original thread was created about an incident, and closed (at originator's request) once the legal actions stemming directly from it was resolved. The problem is: when a subject is still "news", with more information coming out\"related" legal action underway, should the original thread be permitted to be closed purely at the request of the member who initiated it, knowing that people are interested in the subject, and more news\information is still appearing in connection with it? Were someone able to initiate a thread on a contentious topic, make some judgemental\controversial\etc. comments, then request it be closed, this would prevent open discussion and make any further discussion on the subject "taboo", which does not seem consitant with the aims of the site\forum.

In this specific case, seperate topics may have been the best option: one for the initial incident (which could be closed once charges dropped\verdict delivered), and another for the current case, with discussion solely focussed on this new case\information that comes out, and not trying to relitegate the earlier case, where a legally binding outcome had occurred. Alternatively, maybe the "news" section should be limited to actual news (quotes and links to sources) with debates requiring a similar (linked?) thread in PPR, rather than its current "PPR Junior" treatment?


Isn't that what "reporting posts" is supposed to do?


What I find has become common of late is a person to jump into a thread, and make posts which demonstrate they have not read\watched\listened to the original material being presented (or claim to know exactly what an individual - either member of the site, or subject of the topic - was intending\thinking\meaning\etc, and that their claim is infallible and should not be questioned) or what others have already contributed, while posting in a way that is designed to be confrontational. This happened in:
The Andrew Cuomo thread, where we had a person jumping in to an ongoing discussion and making accusations regarding the OP's motives - when the OP had merely posted a video of a press conference that made no reference to politics - as well as making accusations that those discussing the topic were "politicising" the subject at the same time as trying to redirect the thread through introducing "whataboutisms" into it in order to inflame what was a civil, politically neutral discussion to that point.
The Arizonna senator thread, where a discussion about a news item had someone come into the thread and try to force it from an apolitical discussion about the individual into a politicised\polarised discussion about political parties.
As well as your Amy Cooper thread, where a discussion about the new information was derailed by someone jumping in without showing any evidence of having read earlier replies or viewes\listened to the source material and attacking the actual source (claiming there was no information regarding a specific point which was contained within one of your links, for example, and later coming back to debate some information for which very specific timestamps were provided to them in a manner showing they had not listened to the information, preferring to ignore this in favor of arguing about it) giving the appearance of not being interested in respecting those having a civil discussion, and instead being confrontational with those who present views that they disagree with.

There should be some way to differentiate the actions of those interested in a discussion, from those who act in a way that will "inflame" the discusion:
Making a "controversial" comment shouldn't be a problem, if the poster can substantiate their claims\provide evidence to support what they are saying, ideally making their statement in a way that permits it to be politely qusetioned\contradicted, rather than in a "black and white" format.
Making a "controversial" comment for the "shock value", or of which the person doing so provides nothing to support, and refuse to respond to requests for information supporting them should be sanctionable (if another person has no way to determine what a conclusion is based upon, there is no way that those involved can converse from an equal level - How does a person know whether the "facts" being used are supported, or merely figments of another's imagination used to support a conclusion that would fail without them?).
Similarly, the "attack the messenger" style responces should also be sanctioned: At best they demonstrate the person doing so has no interest in the discussion\topic, and at worst they are used as a way to derail the thread, or try and initiate a flame war.



In contentious topics, there will always be "conflicting views\opinions"...The problem is seperating the people (who may have divergent views) who are trying to discuss the topic, introduce information, explain reasoning, etc. from those whose posts are contentious, merely for the effect they will have - introducing claims with no source\explanation to allow others to debate (in a civil manner) what was presented, arguing about the source rather than the content of the material contained within it, presenting opinions as statements of fact in a manner that seeks to prevent polite disagreement, etc.

An interesting point is that while we have "site rules" as a pinned post in "news", there are additional rules which theoretically aply to this area but which are only shown in "PPR" and should probably be transcribed across, namely:

Source: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=204613

The problem seems to be people taking a "PPR" style (almost anything goes) approach to a section of the forum which is designed for sharing information, and often appearing to be trying to trigger events that will have "disagreeable" subjects (to the person) shut down or taken off-topic...

I try to ensure I provide any information along with the opinions\views I present (which are not always those I hold personally), to show respect to those who take the time to read what I post and allow others to disagree in a civil manner, having the foundation information available to them so that they can provide "counter facts" to fill in gaps\correct misunderstanding in the reasoning behind what I had posted, but too often see categorical statements made - with no supporting evidence supplied to allow the reader to determine the accuracy (or truthfulness) of the foundation for the claim, which are what tend to cause the conflict.

Would that, by any chance, include those who ignore the site admin's very clear and specific instructions to "create no further threads on or relating to it", or those who encourage rule-breaking by participating in ilicitly created threads that breach this directive?

A few points and observations:

Of late more threads are bring locked for bickering and discussions turning into repetitive claims.

Of late long youtube videos have been used to convey a point of view and start a discussion. One can assume that that many replies to these videos are being made by people that have not watched the video, or skimmed through it. One obvious reason is time, many of us have other things to do, or want to do instead of spending all day watching PPR videos. Others are very familiar with the topic or the vlogger and thus can quickly form an educated guess as to where the vlogger “is going with this” and thus does not feel the need to sit through the whole video or podcast. I was lucky in that there was an article that summarized what Amy Cooper said in the Podcast.

Related to the above there seems to be a consensus that discussions here are online versions of a High School debating club with winners and losers instead of a space for outliers. Thus is needed evidence from “reliable sources”. This is not a peer reviewed journal but a web forum. It is fine for members to sprout opinions based in common sense and life experiences but the members should note that this is where the opinion is coming from. Many things that do end up in reliable sources come from very unreliable places. Outlier opinions are not likely to have many if any accepted sourcing.

This sounds eminently sensible, to me.
I have always preferred segmentation.
That is why I am not keen on joining replies together in one big post.

Agreed.
And if you question this, it is called, falsely, a personal attack.

Making observations such as faulty reasoning and/or non-sequiturs is *not* a personal attack.
It is pointing out, ummm, faulty reasoning and/or non-sequiturs.
Simples.

If someone lacks the skill in presenting a rational explanation of why they are presenting a concept, perhaps they need to develop their critical thinking skills.

There is a lot of misrepresentation in these forums, and when someone asks for clarification/supportive-evidence, in most situations, people simply refuse to comply, presumably because they can't.

There needs to be some accountability for those who act without due diligence and due process.
There really should be zero tolerance for the perversion of the Truth, surely.
This is an autistic website, after all.

Good point.

I think we tried doing the 'one post in News just to share the story, plus a link to the PPR debate thread about the topic' thing for a bit, and it didn't work cause people just debated in News anyway. I'm not sure how to fix that honestly, so much of what is news is political in one way or the other that debate is inevitable, I feel like the practice used to be to simply move the threads to PPR once a certain threshold had been reached, but I'm not sure how that's handled these days.

It happens.

The problem, to a degree, is that the debate tends to become "uneven", in that some will happily make observations and introduce information, whilst providing the source so others can evaluate this themselves, whereas others jump in without reading earlier posts\information, making statements of "fact" but not showing other participants the respect of allowing them to see the source of the information these "facts" are based on (often these "facts" contradict information previously in thread), or accusing others of taking the thread "off-topic", or "politicising" it and in the same post doing exactly what they had just accused others of doing (see my examples in an earlier post in this thread...).

One other point that may be important (or not) would be to look how the "tone" of a thread changes around the time that it becomes heated - Not just at those making heated posts, but also at new participants around that time, and how their entrance affected the thread...Perhaps the "troublemakers" aren't the ones making the problematic posts, but the manipulative ones who had just entered the thread in a manner designed to "needle" others to try and make them misbehave.

Yeah, this is a thorny issue on just about any forum of appreciably size, but I do think the AS element makes it tougher here because a lot of behavior that looks trollish can be someone having a genuinely difficult time comprehending what is being said or being naive to how debate is supposed to work, but it could also be intentional, which requires pattern analyses to determine and is really beyond what can fairly be expected of a volunteer mod. When I was more active on here, I would sometimes keep my own little bookmark collections of people who seemed to be "selectively autistic" for debating purposes, and sometimes action could be taken if it was really blatant, but again, that's super time and labor intensive and in the end it's still a subjective judgment call.

Now, the poster you're obviously alluding to falls into a different category, people who are hyper partisan but really poor at debating, but because they're so certain of their beliefs they'll use all sorts of, uh, "techniques", to steer threads, whether that's selective rule policing, non-sequitur, fire-hose of falsehood style BS (particularly ironic when coming from anti Trump people), mind reading, or other fallacious reasoning to "win" at any cost, including getting threads locked when they don't go their way. The problem is that being bad at arguing and very sure of yourself are not violations of the rules in the traditional sense, even though the effect is similar to trolling in that it makes it very difficult to have intelligent debate with these partisan flamethrowers mucking up the threads. I do wish they were occasional "encouraged" to post in a more constructive manner, but I'm not even sure what that might look like. I also think quite a few of these posters genuinely don't know any better, which again complicates how it should be approached and/or dealt with.




I think that would be a smart way to approach it, if the same posters poison threads in the same way over and over, even if the rules are not explicitly broken that can be treated as a disruption and sanctioned accordingly. I don't know if the tools here support it, but other boards I'm on can get very granular and suspend specific member from individual forums and threads, which they use to great effect as a measure between nothing and a ban for people who are just incapable of behaving on certain subjects. Given the aging software WP runs on, I kind of doubt they have that capability though.

Or they don't understand a different perspective. I have seen users here accuse others of being dishonest or accursing others of kafka traps and all because of a different opinion. I think it's pretty difficult to get banned from here if you are not a troll. Most users here can change their behavior after being redirected.

I used to "religiously" supply links to back up my "arguments" but have found it makes absolutely no difference to some/most people who are of a different political persuasion.

There was a very short period (a couple of posts) where I deliberately didn't supply a link because I was fed up with the usual "that is a biased source" response.
Rather than analyses the information in the article, it was summarily dismissed out of hand.

Doing the hard yakka like I used to do and the way Brictoria ( ) does, takes a hell of a lot more mental effort that isn't warranted, imo, because it is simply ignored or ridiculed.
As a result, I gave up being so meticulous because of the bad behaviour and lack of respect.
"What is good for the goose is good for the gander", right?

Extremely well said.

There are times when a skunk has to say what's on his mind.