To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛.
What’s the point of writing down rules, if mods just do what they want? But I suppose that’s the risk you take when you call someone a liar in a small community; they might be a mod.
Edit: I’m not trying to say that mods suck, they perform a useful and often thankless job. Just that it can be difficult for small communities to get a healthy number of good mods, which can become a problem.
Lol perhaps 😅
It was a small community dedicated to shit talking another community, neither of which I was part of. A few posts showed up in my feed and one had a take I thought was kinda unreasonable, so I commented. I had a nice discussion with one community member, but OP came in hot. After a half-hearted effort to try to defuse, and being blatantly lied to in a few replies, I just told him he was a conniving liar.
A few days later I tried to comment on a different post, but I was banned.
Not a big deal, I’m not invested in either community, but it made me think of the struggles growing Lenny from these small nascent communities, into more more mature communities.
Lemmy is riddled with echo chambers, most of which are people that love calling out people in echo chambers.
Circlejerks. Circlejerks everywhere.
That was pretty much exactly the case here, afaict.
Ad hominem attacks generally result in bans in most communities from what I’ve seen. This is the way it should be.
That’s not an ad hominem, though. If someone says something, and you dismiss it and call them a liar, thats an ad hominem. If they tell a bunch of lies, and you label them a liar, that’s not an ad hominem. That’s accurately describing the person based on their choices.
Calling someone a liar is absolutely and always an ad hominem, because it labels their character rather than pursuing their argument.
You can call their words lies and attack those words and their intent, but once you start labelling you are looking to subvert it and attack character by assuming malicious intent.
Which you’re free to assume, but that doesn’t excuse you from the fallacy.
I’m ok with that.
If someone repeatedly and probably tells untruths, and then doubles down when confronted with evidence, I’m ok making that leap to calling them a liar.
Sorry, but that’s crap. Questioning the credibility of a liar is not automatically fallacious reasoning or an ad hominem. Attacking their character instead of arguing against their points is an ad hominem fallacy. Pointing out the consistency of lies from a single source and then extrapolating out to question the validity of future statements of fact is rational, logical, and reasonable. It’s perfectly valid to label a liar when they repeatedly tell lies, as long as you can support the label by proving they are lying.
I mean, if some lies, and I come with receipts and tell them that they’re bad for doing so, I should get a ban? That doesn’t seem right.