I would zone in the no zoning park.

That's fine. Leave my last paragraph out of it. Do you understand where this comes from? Obviously not expecting a reply now.

The most I can hope for comes from Futurama:

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

Return a tape without rewinding it.

All 20 somethings are reading this and going, "Huh?" :P

I couldn't care less what happens about this discussion.

GOG shouldn't get all the blame.

We do actually live in a society that promotes selfishness and stupidity. Am I too hard? Nope, I try too be realistic about the situation. Political correctness and so-called "snow-flakes" should be trumped, or it will be the downfall of us all.

It's madness and it spreads to people that have been giving their whole life on a silver platter, without the ability to think for and around themselves. That or being born on an amish pig farm.

There is difference being a certified troll, and being sarcastic, ironic, or even sardonic at times. Frack, censoring just because someone is a little butthurt and can't handle others opinion or humor, is NOT the way to get control. You end up being a political fascist, something every admins should stay clear of becoming. I left FB several years ago because it only contains idiotic rankings, psycho's, posers, cry-babies, and sheer stupidity, therefore I really hope GOG will try to maintain this forum with a strict hand, without ending up sporting (read snuggling up to) only the 5% cry-babies whom should be left under a rock with a psychiatrist. Putting cotton under them only legitimates their own selfish short circuitness.

That said, I certainly don't condone repeated assaults. Just kick out people who cry wolf-wolf and also those who cant behave civil.

Fine, fine, I'll take that bullet.

You have one more approval to post the rules.

....

Oh, you meant an approval from someone higher up. Ignore me then.

I'm getting this as a script neck tattoo in cursive font.

The Alt-Left is sure taking over all sorts of media *eskimo kiss*

THIS ^^!

It's just common sense, unfortunately common sense isn't so common. :/

I would argue that people tend to use the "it's just a joke" argument to get out of punishment. When the "joke" actively harms others, then that excuse should not be valid, and the post should be moderated, even if it's "just a joke". (So, for example, a "joke" about killing Jewish people, for example, would not be acceptable.)

There are plenty of clean jokes our there that wouldn't be offensive. In general, a joke that empowers its target, rather than denigrating it, is preferred.

"common sense" is sometimes outright wrong, so be careful. If you think X is true, and your reason is "common sense", you might want to look up whether it *is* true. This comes up *a lot* in controversial topics.

This isn't some philosophical thing. If you look at my whole post you'll see I was agreeing with a statement that said those who "cry wolf" all the time and those who can't be civil should be booted out. In other words the people who are causing much of the drama should be kicked out to make this a better place. I think that is common sense. If you have a rock in your shoe that's causing an irritation you take it out.

Seriously though, if a joke made by a random stranger on the Internet can actively harm you, you should probably get off the Internet and into therapy.

It always depend on context, unfortunately on the internet there is none. Yes, "humour" is often used in propaganda and in bullying for many reasons : the pleasure of laughter (like many other emotions) lowers cognitive defenses, and caricature allows for plausible deniability ("i didn't mean it", usually covering "i didn't mean it that far, but I mean the general idea and the premises that make the joke work"). But you can also find contexts where the same joke is used in reverse - becoming a caricature of a caricatural discourse and denouncing its ridicule. The line between a racist rant and its satire is a matter of shared background understanding. "Who speaks", "for whom", with what assumed agreement. Again, none of these agreements work at a large scale (which is one reason why the old Charlie Hebdo struggles to define itself nowadays : its public is too diverse for its jokes' meanings to stay well defined).

All this means that moderators have to take in account a lot of implicit, deliberately invisible or denied, factors. They are most of times (not always) pretty obvious beyond the author's denegations (because the author himself requires this obviousness, even if he then plays on formal technicalities, strangely hoping that his target public will be the only ones who won't be duped), but they will always offer material for bad faith arguments. Mods will be like judges having to navigate between the letter and the spirit of a rule, in front of people who'll more or less obfuscate the intent.

In the end, it'll all rest, on a case basis, on Fables22's own intelligence. Maybe she'll make the job easier by enforcing banket rules (some forums preemptively short-circuit such arguments by specifying "Not even ironically, not even for laughs" in their rules), maybe she'll take the risk to be more accurate than that, which will require solid shoulders ("i didnt mean it lol" - "yes you did, end of line"). It'll be a choice of strategy, with pros and cons. And potential collateral damages (but futile enough that it doesn't really matter - we can indeed sacrifice super meta jokes in that forum if it truly helps).

But the objective reality, no matter how closely the rules will try to follow its outline, is more complicated. There is no universal objective (decontextualized) humour "acceptability".

When tasked to perform a comedic speech in a show where the extreme-right leader Le Pen was the day's guest, Pierre Desproges (one of the best humans ever) famously said "Yes we can laugh about everything -we must laugh about everything- but not with everyone". It's now become a well-known saying in France, to the point of becoming a cliché. But its truth runs quite deep.