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In reply to the discussion: This message was self-deleted by its author [View all]patrice
(47,992 posts)in TOS to get away with saying certain disrespectful things with enough ambiguity to make charges of misogyny plausibly deniable and, thus, to have their bigot-cake and to eat it too.
However, there's no ending that particular kind of power struggle and the alternative of just trying to avoid it, by not playing that game, allows it to proliferate around this community amongst subsets who may be interested in cultivating that sort of thing for whatever reason and that sets not only a bad public example of what DU is, but also propagates, in a rather subversive way, the very prejudices and bigotry and ignorance that opposition to which is very heart of this community and many of our relationships to it.
So, I agree with the usefulness of including that kind of specification in TOS; I just don't understand where we draw the line on those kinds of inclusions, nor how we avoid, then, creating this potentially kind of long list of kinds of language that are against TOS, a list that could subsequently then be manipulated against anyone who could become a target of certain kinds of efforts here, i.e., e.g. failing to constitute one case for a certain TOS violation, how about another, or another, or another serial nuisance accusations for however many anyone, who would want to do such a thing against DU or against another DU -er, would like to select from that longish list of prohibited language.
Personally, I have always found the TOS language to be rather too ambiguous to always be meaningful, but often useful in a generals sense anyway, so I get your point here, I'm just not sure how a list of prohibited semantics actually solves that and avoids just being a broader arena for what we have going on in the status quo now, which threads look pretty much like dogs chasing their own tails most of the time anyway.
All of which adds up to: how do you keep the inclusion of such TOS specific language from becoming long lists of prohibitions which list can then in turn become part of the problem?
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In light of these problems, shouldn't we be considering not whether TOS language needs inclusion of prohibited topic specific references, but, rather, instead TOS needs fine tuning of the current general TOS language to more precisely state the general value principles by means of which all such bigoted and prejudiced semantics can be identified no matter what their specific topic content consists of.