@AndrewLeach I may have not made this point clearly enough, but pulling someone over because you don’t like the looks of them and only after having done so seeking pretexts to retroactively justify the act of prejudice is precisely the behavior which terrifies me.

In other words, you’re making my point for me. This mindset is insidious.

Well, actually, the police in the UK can pull anyone over for no reason at all. But in practice, they get to know who it's worthwhile using that power on. There is a particular class of driver who are likely to chance their luck (eg with drugs) or not know what they're really doing (eg illegally lowered suspension, bald tyres).

Any analogy is flawed, of course. But I don't see a great deal of difference between that and pre-emptive protection on questions which experience shows are likely to need clearing up, or getting people who just want an insult to sharpen up their act.

Good day to everybody.

I am a bit stuck with one work. verb. - add

Is it okay to say - addable? I did find, that it should be an adjective from add. But thought, that it is best to be safe, than sorry.

@AndrewLeach I'm less concerned with what the law is (in the UK or anywhere else), but if we want to extend the analogy: in, the US, pre-emptively pulling someone over based on them looking "the trouble making sort" (to employ police euphemism) is known as profiling. The practice is illegal because it has caused no end of injustice, not to mention ill-will between the police and the populace.

@Eugene I hate to be a bother, but if you'd like to ask for help on E.L.U. chat it'd be better to ask in the main chatroom.. This room is reserved for discussing policy.

@Tonepoet I think we are losing sight of the topic here and that the legal analogy is only an analogy that is used to shed light on that topic, as opposed to being investigated on its own merits.

At the risk of digging us deeper into that hole, .I think the probable cause analogy does not hold water, and the profiling does.

I say this on the strength of the argument that the reason the pejorative questions are being shut down is because the moderator does not like pejorative questions, he thinks they're mean spirited, and wishes they were never asked.

He therefore stops them in their tracks and retroactively finds a rules-satisfying cause to close them, or barring that, protect them premptively.

This is analogous to police pulling over certain types of people because he doesn't like those kinds of people driving on his roads, and once pulled over, looks for any minor infraction of the rules to cite them or tell them to leave his jurisdiction

Of course we are talking here about a vendetta against questions asked on EL&U, not police intimidating people on roadways, these are completely different levels and consequences of selective enforcement. Hence the risk of over-extending the analogy I am warning about above.

But it is a vendetta realized through selective enforcement nevertheless.

@DanBron The problem is that pejorative questions are (in the main) bad questions. That one person focuses on them is, I submit M'Lud, similar to targeting teenagers in Saxos. They are known to be bad, most of the time, and therefore a valid target for attention.

People can only look at a finite number of potentially troublesome things, and targeting such questions is one way, and I submit, M'Lud, a legitimate way of limiting oneself.

@AndrewLeach Again, at best, that seems to be backwards reasoning to me. At worst, it sounds like retroactive justification for censorship.

We should shut down questions based on their quality and adherence to our standards, not on their topic.

But we do. However, topic is a pointer to inspection for quality.

There are enough super low quality questions asked hourly with obvious concrete issues which would justify their closure without even having to think about topic.

We don't need a proxy for quality.

Any mod or high-rep user could spend 100% of as much time as he'd like to allocate in moderation simply on quality issues direclty.

We don't need an indirect pointer to quality issues. A proxy is superfluous.

And defending the proxy tells me that this witch hunt isn't directed at quality, as it is held up to be, but to attacking the proxy, and using quality as a post-hoc justification. An excuse.

No, this is all BS. If we want to make a rule that people aren't allowed to ask for pejorative language, let's make that a rule. But let's not hide our motives.

That's cowardly and insidious.

But I think many of us in this room are trying to defend this attack-by-proxy because we know direct attacks -- that is, establishing such a rule against pejoration -- will not withstand scrutiny or generate sufficient community consensus.

Hence the "selective enforcement" aka censorship.

But I have no interest in further discussing this particular aspect of the censorship until a new idea or objection is raised. I've made my point unquestionably clear several times now over several weeks.

I don't want to talk in any more circles. If community members wish to make a rule against pejorative questions, let them do that.

@DanBron whoa dude. Nobody is going that far. You're the only one claiming that anything like that far has happened. It hasn't happened. Nothing is banned.

Also nobody has hidden their motives. A meta post talking exactly about the problem with pejoratives was asked and answered and the community thought it was OK to tag them. -tag-. that's it.

@DanBron ARGHHH!! NO ONE IS DOING THAT! YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE SUGGESTING THAT

@DanBron You may not need a proxy. Others may need to target their time differently.

Also, a correlated situation, expletives, are vehemently allowed on ELU, despite the general SE expletives-in-titles ban. So in this very particular situation, pejoratives, there is a strong content reason that will keep them alive here

@DanBron I have no idea what this line is saying. It seems that you're calling your own campaign a witch hunt.

@DanBron (I''m only putting in caps because I'm exasperated and I'm exaggerating for fun)

If this were all about the mechanics of the 'protecting' ability, then this is really a meta.SE question (the entire system would have a problem with protection and its 'cowardly and insidious' manner. check there to see what others might have said about it)...

or it is about the specifics of pejoratives that you think are being censored (from what you've said I don't think this is the case)

or it is about tchrist himself (I think you've said it's not about him in particular, but you've said that he must recuse himself, so I can't tell)

or it is about censorship in general and the particulars of {protection/pejoration/tchrist} happen to fulfill the criteria for you.

From the above, I feel like only the overuse of protection (and excessive pre-emptive protection) is what you're worried about.

And for that I disagree with you in the facts: 1) protection is very very weak 2) it hasn't been overused by tchrist for pejoration and 2) also not excessively pre-emptively.

@Mitch I think you and I hashed out our personal takes on this topic yesterday or the day before. As I said immediately above, I'm a bit burnt out on repeating myself.

I've made my position clear. The rest is for the community's conscience to bear.

@DanBron my apologies for extending it. The points I just made I don't think I had made before

@AndrewLeach I was calling tchrist’s incessant and prejudiced closure (or failing closure, protection) of questions-seeking-pejorative-language a witch hunt. Not my own campaign.

Aren't lots of things incessantly closed? Like poorly worded or inarticulate questions? Is that then prejudiced against either stupidity or being a language learner?

@Mitch That’s precisely the distinction. Those things are closed based on be merits of the qiestion, not based on the ideal answer to the question or the area of English the question addresses.

Unresearxhed questions are off topic on ELU. Proof reading questions are off-topic on ELU. Pejorative questions are **not off topic on RLU*, but tchrist is using selective enforcement of other rules to tacitly and surreptitiously make them off topic on ELU.

I don’t know why this point is unclear or why I’m being asked to restate it or rephrase it so many times.

The only rationale I can think of is several other high rep members share this prejudice against pejorative questions and are with tchrist in his wish they are never asked on ELU.

If that’s the case, I wish y’all would just say that, rather than asking me to write reams of repetitive explanation.

Well, I don't share the prejudice against pejorative language questions. But they do need to be couched in non-trolling, language terms. And they shouldn't accuse named living people of the behaviour they seek to describe -- certainly that last criterion is something that I stamp on rigorously. Because they will inevitably attract low-quality answers, I see no reason not to protect them pre-emptively; and if they are of poor quality then I see no reason not to deal with that.