It has recently been suggested to be more polite,
Re: May I say "more friendly please"?
but what does it mean?
This is an issue that I have struggled with for as far back as I remember, primarily because the usual way to be polite is to be dishonest, to refrain from telling the whole tuth and nothing but, in order to accommodate the addiction to ignorance that a subject is known to be afflicted with.
If then philosophy is anything to do with knowing the whole truth and nothing but, this tends to be problematic from the start, to be forced in effect to abandon a personal moral philosphy of "do as would be done to", in favor of "do as he wants to be done to, even if he is not going to do the same for you"
In practice, on a forum such as this, there is then a terrible tendency toward a precarious game of moderator roulette, to second guess what a moderator may consider to be polite or not polite, with posters pushing to the brink of acceptability for want of a sufficiently clear rule to show them where the limit is, for in practice this is inevitably, a question of perception and personal values.
A moderator may be more impressed by style, or more concerned with content. With others one never gets to know what was going on, with no explanation provided. Moderators too may be prone to childish tantrums when shown to be wrong. Moderators, strangely enough, may be just as annoyingly inconsistent as the rest of the World we have to cope with.
If it is simply that criticism per se is unwelcome, then for me at least it ceases to be worthwhile to post. If it is more a matter of being pertinent to a topic, to exclude the ad hominems and straw men arguments, that again is a notoriously grey area, and not least when the postings of a moderator happen to have displayed an attitude that posters would think unworthy of itself, but with no names mentioned for the sake of being polite.
I could go on at some length about this already, with an abundance of anecdotal experience to cite, but I would rather see an intelligent analysis of it in philosophical terms, in so far as it may be polite to venture the attempt.
Possibly somebody really does have something enriching to say about it, please, and not least for the sake of the moderator, whose job is anything but easy.
Constructively, what would the rule book consist of?
-- RH.