Charlatan

Here is a list of "fallacious arguements":

http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/s...arguments.html

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smooth

well, for clarification, I don't mean that moderators should have to memorize a slew of formal and informal logical fallacies and apply them to each and every conversation. But there are at least a good dozen or so that are intentionally employed often enough to derail conversations in this section. especially the ones that explicitly or implicitly attack any member of tfp, which seems to be the primary motivation of this change in moderation.

but yeah, if people are still trotting out the more than tired response of clinton did it too, that person obviously needs to be reminded that they need to put more thought behind their response and try again. raising the discourse in tpolitics is also desired from what I'm reading. but why this is news to so many members is bizarre to me. tfp has never, as far as I can remember, been about numbers of posts but rather content and thought.

here's another list with more meat in it:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/

but I just googled that. probably better out there somewheres.

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Aladdin Sane

I believe we should also enforce Godwin's Law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies)

In case you don't know, Godwin's Law is an adage in Internet culture originated by Mike Godwin on Usenet in 1990 that states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

To quote Tim Skirvin:

"There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread in which the comment was posted is over and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress."
Tim continues:
"In case your head has been buried in the sand for the last sixty
years or so, the Nazis were a German political party lead by Adolf Hitler
that slaughtered upwards of ten million people that didn't meet their
standards of "ethnic purity" and set off to conquer Europe and the world
in World War II. They are generally considered the most evil group of
people to live in modern times, and to compare something or someone to
them is usually considered the gravest insult imaginable.
As a Usenet discussion gets longer it tends to get more heated; as
more heat enters the discussion, tensions get higher and people start to
insult each other over anything they can think of. Godwin's Law merely
notes that, eventually, those tensions eventually cause someone to find
the worst insults that come to mind - which will almost always include a
Nazi comparison.
The Law is generally used on Usenet as an indicator of whether a
thread has gone on too long, who's playing fair and who's just slinging
mud, and who finally gets to "win" the discussion. It has, over time,
become the closest thing to an impartial moderator that Usenet can get."

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roachboy

occasionally in here--and in other forums---people float arguments that are rooted in or that reproduce racist assumptions.
i see no problem with saying as much.

with some boundary understandings in mind:

there is a huge difference between saying that an argument is racist and saying that the person is--first it is stupid to move from what you read to what you think the person writing *is*--second it is often the case that the racism in a given argument is not taken on as such, or not seen, because that argument enables an ordering of information that is thought about in wholly different ways--that is the racist component of an argument might operate as a linking term and not as the center of an argument.


in the present context, particularly with reference to arguments directed at muslims, i see no problem with linking american arguments to their neofascist analogues in a western european context. same distinctions as above apply in that case--often the repetition is unwitting--the implications are not seen or thought through because the american political context does not name arguments in the same way or stage their implications in the same way.

to link an anti-muslim argument to western european neofascist organizations, to show the parallels, is often simply a matter of fact. dont believe me---look for yourself. the front national website is mostly available in english.

i try to keep the seperation of critique of a post from a critique of the person making the post strict--but i also know that it is difficult to maintain in the writing and is probably even more difficult to register if your post is the object of this kind of critique. so this is not a route i go down without cause. in this kind of situation, it is an abuse of that goofy godwin thing to try to shut down a whole range of critical responses to particular types of post. it seems to me little more than a call for censorship of such critiques to try it.

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shakran

Except that I haven't really noticed a whole lot of threads that would fall under Godwin.

tecoyah

It comes down to the skills of Moderation. Much of what is discussed in this thread is judgement call, and I have great faith in the combined abilities of those monitoring this forum to diffentiate between intent, and insult. We will do our best, which will not be perfect, but should be enough.

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