"Free Mexican Jack Squint" Topic

<sigh>

I don't do these posts but really, just because he didn't use the quote function?

Depending on the device he used to post it might have been difficult.

So Free Mexican Jack Squint! It is, after all, Independence Day.

Howard was quoting somebody. He wasn't breaking the no politics rule because he himself was not making the statement. Howard would not incur a Godwin loss. Free Mexican Jack Squint.

If it is in fact the case that Mexican Jack Squint did not post a statement that broke the rules but simply quoted someone else who did in his post, it seems rather dangerous and scary that Mexican Jack Squint would be published.

Just saying, if you can't cite someone else's wrong doing because you'll be punished for it yourself that creates a real head-in-the-sand environment.

Cheers,

The Bandit

While I don't agree with the Editor's decision to DH MJS (which may be coloured by my existing relationship with him and admiration for his work), I can't disagree with the policy.

If you allow quoting material that violates the rules, you are creating an end-run around them. If I wanted to post bile about "Politician X", all I would have to do is find some outlet on the interwebs that s all over Politician X, and quote it, complaining about their misuse of the apostrophe.

This is a well established journalistic trick. Journalists will find a position they want to advance, but either lacks support to be published under their journalistic standards or they simply know to be out-and-out wrong. So they find some other source that says it and report the "news" that "Source Y said Thing Z". Usually the Thing Z is repeated in all its resplendent glory, multiple times and in large letters while the citation is in tiny print in italics.

FTR, I don't think MJS was doing this … I think he was genuinely set off by the lack of any type of rationality on the part of the poster he was quoting.

Thus, while I might suggest time served, a yellow card, and a very stern look as adequate punishment, I support the policy and know its implementation isn't my call.

If you allow quoting material that violates the rules, you are creating an end-run around them. If I wanted to post bile about "Politician X", all I would have to do is find some outlet on the interwebs that Bleeped texts all over Politician X, and quote it, complaining about their misuse of the apostrophe.

If I can't quote it then I can't (on this forum) usefully cite it, if I can't cite it then I can't usefully refer to it.

It seems to me that if someone says X, where X is disallowed by the rules, and I quote X, when the Editor removed X from the first poster's post, he can also remove it from mine. It would seem to me that whether I am then penalized should be based on the specifics of my post, not just that I quoted an inappropriate one.

So while quoting can be used for evil it can also be used for good, if we begin getting rid of things that can be used for evil but are themselves not necessarily evil we will soon find ourselves without many things.

Cheers,

The Bandit

"Dangerous and scary"? Really?
It is part of the capricious and arbitrary editing we all love so much about TMP.

If Dear Editor did not DH people for reasons that have us scratching our heads, he would not be Dear Editor.

Seriously, my "Hitler" thread got 5 people thrown in the DH. What happened to the 5th? There are only 4 in the DH now. How did one get freed, and Howard, who did nothing but lampoon the behavior that got one guy punished for, is still in?
Inconsistent, capricious and arbitrary.
Apparently, we cannot make fun of fools by quoting them.

"Inconsistent, capricious and arbitrary"

I.C.A., it would perhaps be a more apt acronym for this website now than T.M.P.

Yes, definitely free Howard.

Apparently, we cannot make fun of fools by quoting them.

No, we can't make fun of fools by repeating their foolishness that is specifically forbidden here. Howard wasn't DH'd for quoting someone or ridiculing him(?).

Inconsistent, capricious and arbitrary

All rules are arbitrary.

They derive from some vision of the way things "should be", which is inherently arbitrary.

If you agree with that vision, then rules are common-sense; if you don't they are capricious.

Rules are pretty much always inconsistent. In fact, that is a fundamental property of (Hilbert) formal systems. Since we are talking about a natural language ruleset, even moreso.

if we begin getting rid of things that can be used for evil but are themselves not necessarily evil we will soon find ourselves without many things.

The slippery slope argument is generally accepted as a logical fallacy.

So, here's a gedankenexperiment. Mediate on the value and meaning of the quoting material that is explicitly against the rules from the standpoint of quoting some material (probably) no one wants here:

"I wasn't posting pornography. I was quoting it."

Does that make the issue take on a different timbre?