The problem with the question
MetaKron said:
So how do they explain baiting people or allowing other users to bait people?
Better examples than the ones we have so far would help toward a specific response.
To the other, a general consideration would suggest that diverse definitions of baiting present specific challenges to addressing the issue. For instance, some members post according to what appears to be a general principle of antagonism; they aim to be as offensive as possible, and then complain when people respond—to various degrees—accordingly. Of late, I've been keeping my eye on a discussion in EM&J in which a particular member repeatedly posts denigrating fallacies and which he apparently refuses to support. Faced with the criticism that he was a bigot, the member made an abstract appeal to the rules and people calling each other names. The problem there is that a negative characterization is fair game when it's true.
The moderators are, quite frankly, accustomed to this kind of split-tongued bullshit.
And then, among the respondents to that bigotry, some do cross the line. And here is a point our moderation process begins. Every once in a while, a respectable member violates a boundary. Rather than keelhauling that member, it is generally sufficient to make a couple of edits and then post a general note in the topic about proper conduct. The question then becomes one of who backs off and who presses forward. We notice when members properly back off. We also notice when members blindly or recklessly press forward.
The fact that people are entitled to their occasional outbursts without heavy-handed sanctioning from above
does not mean that those who thrive on antagonism and bullshit get free rein to pinch a loaf on the carpet or spray logical diarrhea on the walls. This point is not lost on moderators when complaint topics such as this one arise. We try to account for credibility in much the same way as anyone might view conflicting stories in a domestic violence dispute. If, on the one hand, we have an unscathed party with a history of violence and deception, and, to the other, a bruised party with no record of crossing the law, who gets the weight of credibility? If you're the responding officer, and the violent liar is telling you a story that presents his or her role as a magnanimous victim, free of sin, and the other tells a reasonable story of how a disagreement over a credit card bill escalated to violence, who are you going to believe?
We have plenty of members around here who are consistent antagonists, and their complaints, when we can manage to get something resembling specific details out of them, don't match the record insofar as the posts in question don't support their tales of woe. What are we supposed to do? If we try to address the situation reasonably, we are often told to fuck off and stop playing favorites. Life goes on.
In this light, the question of what constitutes baiting becomes even more of a mess. In EM&J earlier this year, we had an episode involving misogyny that you, MetaKron, might remember. Would you assert that a member with a poor posting history that includes misrepresentation and melodramatic hyperbole should be viewed as a tabula rasa every time he or she complains? Would you say that a demand that a distorted argument be supported in a way that doesn't rely on what a disreputable member calls "common fucking knowledge" is a form of baiting? Does the principle of evidence to support contentious and extraordinary claims amount to baiting?
This sort of general consideration can go on and on.
Thus, turning back to the examples we have at hand:
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Pronatalist — I generally don't follow this member's exploits, but I confess it is hard to be sympathetic to the injection of religious balbutive into a discussion in Science & Society. At present, the only question I can think of regarding the situation is relatively minor, and has nothing to do with the complaint of provocation.
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Shorty 37 — I cannot tell, by the topic post of the thread she refers to, what the hell she's talking about. There are 383 posts in the topic she presents. Before I can understand what she's complaining about in this discussion, I need something more specific. I did, however, search for the word "trick" and came up with a few posts to go by. Indeed,
Shorty herself introduced the word "trick". And she
tried to put that word into another person's mouth. Unfortunately, my experience with Shorty includes both her histrionics and frequent misrepresentation of facts on record. The proposition that deductive reasoning is some kind of "trick" is rather silly. But eventually the "trick" was
acknowledged and, as the point goes, "So what?" It doesn't seem much of a stretch. In truth, Shorty lacks certain credibility because this sort of hyperactive tantrum is part of her history. So is her failure to give us anything to work with; the topic post of the thread she linked to doesn't tell us anything about where she got the quotes she's using, so I can't dig back and figure out, from the context of the "original" (as such) dispute what she's on about. At least, for the present thread, she bothered to give us a link. But, as she also has a history of misrepresenting facts—so that when we finally track down the source material she refers to, the situation reads considerably differently than her angry descriptions—it is a hard, even counterintuitive, proposition to give her complaints any presupposition of merit. In the case of the now-Cesspooled thread she refers us to, the most I can say about it is that it is not what I would call a particularly dignified episode; then again, I've been through a few undignified episodes myself. With no specific history of events to examine, there's not much more that can be said.
Neither of those complaints are particularly impressive. From them I've managed to draw one minor and irrelevant administrative question that has more to do with my curiosity than anything else, and a yet another occasion to dwell on the question of "Why?" And, hell, as to that latter, there are far more important contexts for the question.
To the other, getting back to your question noted at the outset, aren't you glad you asked? I don't have much hope the response will satisfy you, but maybe it will. Either way, though, please remember that these appeals are not simply ignored.
