Room Rules for my chat room -- "Good Faith Debates and Discussion"
Good Faith Debates and Discussion
Room Mission
We’re here to foster intelligent discussions sprinkled with light-hearted banter now and then. Intelligent discussions about what? About all manner of things, including culture, philosophy, theology, politics, the arts, etc.
A Note on the Key Word of the Room Name: “Good Faith”
Good Faith is one of those concepts that is rather elusive and vulnerable to subjective opinion. While one may be able to Google some definition, that definition is not carved in stone like some scientific formula. I would define it incompletely as, foremost, more of an attitude rather than a procedure per se. The attitude includes the following:
Talk normally.
Be relatively unguarded and without guile.
Try to be self-aware of your anger being expressed in passive aggressive ways. Better to be directly angry in an honest way than in a serpentine way by which a pretense of discussion proceeds while the ulterior motive of attacking your interlocutor is the main intent. Best of all, of course, would be to put your anger temporarily on a shelf while debating or discussing.
Be willing to change in mid-stream — and to allow your interlocutor to change in mid-stream.
Refrain from weaponizing what you perceive to be weaknesses in your interlocutor’s arguments. Instead, simply point out what parts of their argument you wish to dispute, and get on with your disputation. Or you can try asking them what they mean, or paraphrase what you think they mean and ask them if that’s correct, then refute it. These are preferable to playing elaborately sophisticated Polateralitarian head games deploying a mesmerizing array of logical technicalities with them.
No doubt there are more qualities that could be mentioned (and I may include them in later edits). However, I don’t want to be overly rigid in prohibiting bad faith, such that a person might feel they can’t exhibit impatience at an interlocutor they know from past experience is going to misunderstand, strawman, or indulge in any number of logical fallacies out of stupidity or a combination of stupidity and attempts at guile. Sure, in an ideal world it would be nice to try to be nice to everyone. On the other hand, I don’t want people to feel they are obliged to be like Gandhi all the time and hold their interlocutor’s hand at every step. If one is going to succumb to one’s impatience or anger, at least do it in a direct manner, instead of in a serpentine manner using a passive-aggressively sly approach.
Overall, if a chatter violates these impressionistic principles I’ve listed above, I and my admins may dot them and remind them to behave (and if that doesn't work and they repeat their bad behavior, they may get bounced). Otherwise…
Room Rules
Try to keep your mic time to a reasonable limit — maybe 3 minutes tops. Admins will try to ensure this with dots for going over time, but this will likely not be perfectly enforced.
Death threats, doxxing, and obsessive personal attacks will each be punished with dots (possibly extending to bounces & bans).
That’s it—enjoy your stay!