Baiting

I've also seen comments that I'd consider baiting be given the green light.  Clarification would be appreciated on all points.

I would say to provoke specific members or elicit an inflamed reaction in general. And it has to be deliberate. In a thread on the NDP, someone saying I dont like the NDP because they are not anti-nuclear enough for example, would not necessarily be deliberate, its an opinion on topic in a thread. Starting a thread or throwing out a line that is calculated to get someones goat, is deliberate

I supposed its like porn; I cant define it but I know it when I see it

That's why I got tired of text sparring here. It is bait or be baited. Plus, a pile up that follows you from thread to thread and animosity for indeterminate amount of time. I don't have it happen a lot to me (but again, I've been around for a fair number of years and my fellow babble warriors have read my posts for years and I don't think that anyone really thinks I'm some sort of deeply embedded CPC-CIA troll (which I am)) but I think that some contributions are limited by a perceived (and often all too real) unfriendly environment.

That isn't to say that you shouldn't call people on ridiculous bullshit when you see it and I think that babble is awesome at saying 'fuck off, that is some pretty _________ bullshit' - be it misogynistic, sexist, racist, homophobic or whatever else someone can be called on. But if someone doesn't toe the NDP party line or something it is no reason for a pile up - and vice versa. I'm pretty sure that allies shouldn't be out fishing to pull up each other hook, line and sinker. No good can come of alienating one another.

Frankly, I'm usually listening to CKDO or another oldies station while posting, so I'm usually pretty chilled out.

Hm, one definition by Catchfire.

Dare I try another?

I'll start with....what Catchfire said.

And I'll add:

Baiting to me has intention behind it. Intention to raise shit, cause a fight, incite a freak-out in an arch-nemesis or a meta-issue.

How it reads can be anything from perfectly politely worded prose to more in the "fricken fracken" range. And yeah, some people do this and claim humour, or it really is funny to them, as a side effect of the baiting. It makes it that much more lovely to moderate, let me tell you.

Is there a bias in who gets noticed by the mods as baiting and who doesn't? Probably. If there is something that strikes anyone as unfair, or something that needs addressing, flag it.

It's "clear as mud" because the concept is highly subjective.  Or, as Bacchus said:

A determination of what is or is not "baiting" becomes even more amorphous when a reader (or moderator) deviates from just reading the actual words that are written in a post and claims to be able to divine the hidden intent behind a writer's words.  This latter element is captured by the words "meant solely to" in Catchfire's definition - because the only way know what is "meant" by a writer is to divine the writer's mental state.  Which is, of course, impossible.

Putting aside for a moment the mental state of posters, Catchfire sets the bar rather high for what constitutes "baiting": If a "gratuitous" comment is not meant "solely" to provoke other babblers, then the comment would not constitute "baiting".  In other words, there may be a multitude of reasons for a post (to inform, to question, and "to inflame, enrage or provoke").  Such a post would not constitute "baiting" under Catchfire's definition because the post was not made "solely" to "inflame, enrage or provoke".

With respect to provocation, is a post which "provokes" others necessarily bad?  A post might provoke anger, provoke laughter, provoke thought, or provoke a wide variety of other reactions.  So, prohibiting provocation, per se, doesn't make much sense on a board meant, among other things, to provoke thought.

What is the best remedy for baiting (however that term may be defined)?  Ignore it.  If a poster's principal objective is to simply get a rise out of others, then a non-response makes the poster's objective unachievable.

In the post you linked to, I was parodying your repeated use of a particular term.

Now, back to the definition of "baiting"...

Sven, I've been thinking about this since I was rash enough to raise the question. I think the answer to your first question is that it kind of depends on the site.

There are blogs and forums where all the regulars are pretty much engaged in a common enterprise (and I'm not talking just about BnR, which is little and has dancing bunnies; I'm talking as well about places like emptywheel, a mid-sized Merkin blog where the regulars are legal and tech and science specialists and detectives of various kinds). On sites like that, although people often disagree with one another, the courtesies get observed because everyone recognizes that there's a common purpose and it's not all about moi or vous -- it's about the project. Those sites tend to attract very few trolls, and no serious regular would do shadow moderation when trolls turn up -- either they get ignored to death, or a mod finally comes in and zaps them.

I think it has to be recognized that babble is too diverse to work like that. There are major disagreements among the regulars here, from topic to topic, and then among topics. I don't think there are many who can cover the waterfront at babble. Some people do nothing but electoral politics; others of us almost never go there, a major split right away. And then within that single category, people disagree, a lot and profoundly.

I think that is all legit. I'm not sure it can be moderated to a level of senatorial colleague-ish-ness. You don't want trolls or flame wars or provocateurs running wild, but there must be some way to acknowledge both the adulthood and good faith of the regulars here without making them feel fearful that anything they write, especially if they're disagreeing with someone else, could be taken as baiting.

I fully endorse the special status of some forums -- the feminism, anti-racism, and aboriginal forums. Being yanked back to first principles is especially offensive in those forums. It's often a bother everywhere, but it can't be permitted there.

It's probably improper of me to have started this thread. I feel very lucky to have been welcomed back after my absence, and there are discussions here that I find invaluable -- people as well of whom I'm very fond, very glad to talk to again. But something is kind of jangled and nervous among many of my old friends.

In the post I linked to you got banned. Why did you get banned (for a while)?

Was it for "baiting" or "spamming"? Are you a baiter or a spammer?

I'm going to start with the last paragraph of your post and say that I'm glad you came back to spend some time here again, skdadl.  You are an unpredictable (and therefore interesting) participant here.  Some babblers will opine in a manner that is as predictable as the sun rising in the east.  But the babblers who are most interesting to me (and the ones whose posts I read most carefully) are those who make observations or draw conclusions which I can't be certain of predicting.

Disagreement -- and the provocation of disagreement -- is healthy because it makes thoughtful people...well, think.  But, some seek comfort in The Orthodoxy™, in a manner indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christians insisting on the infallibility of the Holy Tome.

One of the many characteristics that I associate most with progressives -- and which draws me to discussions with them -- is their general thoughtfulness.  Unfortunately, there is a significant percentage of progressives that reminds me of the automatons at the other end of the political spectrum -- where all deviations from The Orthodoxy™ equal "baiting" (and those who espouse such deviations are heretics).

I think that there can be a certain level of friendly competition when presenting facts in building a version of the truth at the centre of past and current events. And there can often be slightly different versions of the same truth. As Raoul Duke once said in Fear and Loathing, history is hard to know because of all the hired bullshit.

A catholic range of opinion is hardly tolerated among us.

This is getting Kafkaesque.

skdadl, for the record, this is all your fault.

Yeah, I know. *cough*

Nothing daunted, however, and because I think it might bring a reflection as well from Catchfire (how's that for baiting? but I say this because of his background in lit theory), I would like to reflect on Sven's statement about hidden intent, which he and others, sometimes including me, consider to be automatic baiting.

All of us hate having words put in our mouths by others (there-- see? I just put words in everyone else's mouth). So ok, many of us hate having words put in our mouths by others. When someone says "Aha, what you really mean is X," or even worse, "and that, I suspect, is your real agenda," many of us want to snap back right away, "No, I mean what I said, and don't put words in my mouth."

But anyone with experience in any field -- political struggles, practical science of many kinds, literary analysis -- becomes over time very good at detecting underlying arguments that she's run into before, that the speaker or writer may not be aware of herself. Literary analysts aren't usually seeking to prove such underlying structures to be fallacious or dangerous -- they're just excavating familiar tropes that fit into historical or other kinds of significant patterns. But on more practical territory -- politics, eg, or epidemiology -- people with experience often are seeing patterns in the arguments of others that worry them.

I guess there are more and less useful ways of arguing with someone who you think is running on a fallacy. What does work? "But don't you see, what you're really arguing for is ...?" The truth is that you're thinking either that this guy doesn't realize the implications of what he's saying or he is pushing an agenda and is willing to fix the facts to fit the policy, as the saying went in the Downing Street memo. You may suspect innocence/ignorance, or you may suspect intent, but either way, you see a semi-buried argument/position that needs to be excavated and analysed and argued against.

Intentionality is an entire field of philosophical inquiry. Most of us have a hard time much of the time figuring out our own intentions, much less the next guy's, although that's why the reflections start -- because we know it's not entirely unfair to "suspect" that a speaker or writer or actor hasn't yet confronted or admitted some underlying commitments.

Anyway, my $0.02 (Can), fwiw.

Honestly I came close to closing this thread a day or two ago because I couldn't see it coming to anything constructive--the impromptu cataloguing of various examples of baiting, volunteered by intrepid babblers about those they generally don't see eye-to-eye with seemed to support that assumption.  But it's hard for me to deny skdadl.

That's a good close reading by Sven of my post @#2. "Meant to." Heh. Parsed for intent (although the quality of the close reading declines as it progresses from there). I actualy try not to do intent. A more accurate construction would have been "which has the effect of." People have tried to get the "intent" of authors and poets for years by reading secondary material, historical context, biographies and autobiographies, all with various noble failures. "Rather than being anti-Semitic himself, Shakespeare meant to mock anit-Semitism in Merchant of Venice." In the final analysis, it can't be done.

But rather than guess what a writer wanted, we can say what they do. Aside from taking the guesswork out, this also moves criticism from the past into the now. What do these words do now? They're out there, in this moment, doing things--to us, to others, to words elsewhere--while the author's intent is circumscribed and irrelevant. "I never meant to offend anyone."

If a post has the effect of enraging babblers or inflaming the rhetoric with little to no discernable positive influence on (you'll note that "influence" includes humour, levity and, occasionally, sobriety) or contribution to the discussion, I'd call that baiting. But, with all interpretation, it's subjective. Which is why what I call baiting, what Maysie calls baiting, and what everyone else calls baiting, is going to differ; even if we operate from the same definition which, to be perfectly frank, doesn't happen at the best of times. I'm not sure what prompted the OP, but the most important thing to glean from this thread is not what defintion I may or may not use, but that moderators listen: if you think you see something offensive or disruptive, tell us and explain why if it's not immediately clear. It's the only way to build consensus and a community moderation model. Otherwise, it's just a dictatorship, eh? Not that I necessarily have a problem with that...