The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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AsSalaamo Alaikum,

I, and others may have noticed that all of us are guilty of name-calling, mudslinging, defaming, and slandering others for their policies vis a vis politics of the country. The question that arises is, and it’s a question that I ask myself and request you all to ponder over as well because it concerns us all. The question being, how many of us feel like we are perfect in every aspect, and in a position to mock others? Is that because we feel others owe us something personally, or because we justify it as a moral thing to do? Being muslims, isn’t it against the spirit of the religion we hide behind when others slander us, but feel perfectly fine doing it to others?

Lets please be mature about this, and adopt a mature approach to discussions. The more we slander someone, no matter who it is, the more we expose our lack of civility and display the ugliness within us.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

Qur'aan says...do not say bad things about another religion because they will say the same thing against your religion...i think this holds true with any kind of verbal, emotional and psychological abuses including mudslinging, name calling, defaming and others.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

Yet we all still do it because some of us don't agree with someone's political tone, policies, or just simply do it for the sake of doing it out of habit.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality


then we'll be responsible for our deeds on the Day of Judgement. that will be a terrible experience for all of us who indulge in this kinda activity.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

I think GS is microcosm of Pakistani society & if you ever watch Pakistani tv shows you will see exact same thing on tv. This is part of slowly maturing democracy & is not necessary a bad thing. And as long as people have opinion, we all do, you will see people disagreeing with others.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

This is the thread we need here :k:

I am a silent reader of PA and very sorry to say that sightlessly hates / love proves the immaturity of the people. Everyone thinks that only he & his leader is genius, honest, capable and never accept a single quality of other politicians. Even they think their leader is a Holy Cow and can’t bear a single comment on him. So these types of people are Zahni Ghulam either they are from PPP, PTI, MQM or PML N.

I feel sorry when one’s party supporters show -ve attitude even on +ve step of opponent party. At least we should have moral courage to accept other good work rather just to bash.

When they have no answer, they start giving personal comments and abusing members or their leaders.

This is not a good practice at all and we should try to avoid it.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

We are all grown ups and hold specific political and religious beliefs. Its positive to have a debate to get your respective points of views through, but name calling and slandering degrades the over all environment of the forum and derails the threads. To maintain the standards of the forum its necessary to discuss with decency.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

It is quite possible to disagree without resorting to personal attacks, name-calling, or mud-slinging. These things are a sign of immaturity and are detrimental to a discussion. When people resort to maligning others, others feel that they must defend themselves and this often results in mutual mud-slinging. This diverts attention away from the actual issue at hand, which gets lost in the chaos. Besides that, I do not think that it is too much to expect that adults behave like adults and make their point without resorting to insults like grade school children.

Exhibit A:

  • A poster in the thread regarding the presence of foreign fighters in NWA commented that rather than maligning Imran Khan and blaming him for everything under the sun, it would be more effective and fruitful to focus the actual issues and attempt to find practical solutions to said issues. Rather than disagree respectfully several posters called her an Imran Khan fangirl. Surely, they could have disagreed with her assessment without the name-calling? What did calling her fangirl actually contribute to the discussion?
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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

^^^ What you are asking for is this…>>> a polite cultist dictatorship.

What are trying to create is this…>>> a noisy democracy.

BTW people are not robots & not everyone reacts the same way & some people will be polite others wont be polite.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

How is asking that people voice their opinions respectfully asking for a dictatorship? Where did I state that everyone must agree on everything? People can very well disagree and voice their differing opinions while remaining civil.

Given the current mud-slinging in Pakistani politics and the fact that politicians and agencies were too busy maligning each other to decide whose job it was to protect an airport and do their job, it would seem that this noisy democracy is not working very well.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

^^^ How do you define what is respectful and what is not? The forum has explicits rules governing what can/not be be posted & mods are empowered to enforce them. Btw, being from UK are you ok with this?

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

^From what I see, there isn't any name-calling, mudslinging, defaming, and slandering in that video clip. Both parties made their points, albeit with a bit of sarcasm. More importantly, the discussion was not derailed by the hints of sarcasm and remained about the issues at hand.

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The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

One important thing that GS leadership should take into account is that the mods should be completely unbiased.
It's clearly noticeable that some mods are clearly politically biased so they become a party in any ongoing argument and if there are personal attacks from someone they agree with, they ignore it while get unnecessary hyper if it's other way around. Everything goes out of proportion after that

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

^ Could you give an example of what you are alleging?

I thought the moderators have been extra tolerant of the posters who do not politically agree with them. They have to suffer extra because I see a lot of dirt thrown at moderators just because they are moderators and they hold political opinions.

There was an ongoing bashing of a young moderator (of another forum) being continuously labelled 'deh jamaat paas moderator' and it was allowed to go on for months.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

You are right , Even our children are taught the wrong and maligning history . Biggest slogan of the Indian Muslims was " Lay lay rahain gay Pakistan , But kay rahay ga Hindustan' . Now our children knew that the slogan was " Pakistan ka matlib kia .........................." . Concept of Pakistan was making a separate states for the areas where Muslims are in majority . This was a regional approach not pure religious . Same happened with history of Pakistan after 1947 , THAT IS ALL FALSE AND MISLEADING

'

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

Sorry Bro, we are discussing overall attitude of people about name calling , Slandering etc. and MODs are also part of it. This is un-necessary to point out MODs here in this thread as it will become Complains Thread and another discussion will be started here. I am not saying you are right or wrong as its your thoughts and every one is free to give his opinion but in a right place. I hope you got my point.
Happy Posting

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

Islam do not like Name calling … but … not all that some people consider ‘name calling’ is ‘name calling’ that Islam prohibits, though those in power or position would like to portray such as ‘name calling’ to take cover of Islam to curb talks about their own wrong perception amongst public (real or imaginary).

There are basically 3 types of name calling (as far as I understand).

1: Name calling a non-public or non-relevant figure to demean, defame, humiliate, or slander that person.

2: Name calling a public or non-public figure related to their colour, cast, religion, birth deficiencies, illness, age, gender, looks, culture, etc

3: Name calling a public figure on the perception that got developed (real or created) due to their public actions and/or public behaviours that effect public, group, or persons.

It is first two mentioned above that (as far as I know) is disliked in Islam, for which a person would be answerable on judgment day.

As far as third is concerned, it is perfectly alright, though people who are public figures like to include that as ‘not like in Islam’ category … just to protect their own unlikable public perceptions (real or got created).

Since I have written on the issue many years ago on this forum … I am just putting down the post here.

http://www.paklinks.com/gs/pakistan-affairs/276057-taliban-factions-unite-to-battle-pakistan-3.html#post5635882

Note: Prophet (SAW) naming (and calling) ‘Umar bin Hashsham’ … ‘Abu-Jahal’ cannot be considered as ‘not allowed in Islam or sin’ … because Abu-Jahal was public figure with attitude and character that befits someone who can be called Abu-Jahal (father of ignorance). … Just like present day Pakistan so-called political leaders on whom befits names like crooks, thugs, looters, plunders, liars, deceivers and so on.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

Someone posted a clip from House of Commons before I arrived at this thread. Sign. Now I'm feeling so nostalgic on a rainy Saturday Morning. Those were days when Cameron was hailed as the Golden Boy of Tory Party, the only hope (apologies to uncle Pasha, but the phrase was already taken) for the Conservatives. Oh dear, I remember the days when I came so close to voting for Day-vid, now the mere thought of it makes me shudder. How quickly time changes, eh? I'm all for two way political banter and sledging as an occasional thing, and speaking of sledging, most people here act like Aussie cricket fans and players, they like to dish it out, but can't take it when the favour is returned. It's okay to make off topic, inflammatory, click bait posts full of self righteous fad, and when it gets picked up and responded in the same manner, the same people cry about prissy online manners.

From my time posting here, I can tell that most of the time its plain old language barrier, cultural differences/inappropriateness and even a generation thing. For example, on these boards, it's trendy to look like a political extremists and call anyone who holds a slightly different opinion from you to be labelled Taliban/Taliban sympathiser and supporter or whatever. In a mind of Pakistani, there's nothing wrong with playing with such labels, casually throwing these terms around. But all hell breaks loose, when a certain English adjective is used to describe a certain behaviour. So this is what I mean about language barrier. Apparently, there's nothing wrong with throwing fancy extremist labels for petty point scoring, but it's nothing less than a cyber crime to use a prickly adjective to describe something or someone. Frankly speaking, people who indulge in this kind of behaviour should be the last one to shed any crocodile tears about extremism and political polarisation in Pakistan. The practice of throwing damaging, illegal labels are ignorance and insecurity ridden tricks to intimidate and prevent the other person from expressing his policy differences. Luckily, such tactics don't work out for such posters, nor it'll ever produce the desire result. As people are free and they have learned to hold on to their opinion if they believe and understand that it's on the right side and it will stand all the tests of the time.

Don't get me wrong, you'd be surprised sometimes how much you figure out about Pakistan's social history by reading some of the posts by certain members. Without a doubt, it's always people belonging to certain age group and era who are prone to gossipmongering about a person's sexuality and hoping to expect extreme reactions, a severe punishment for a person in question. I'm sure mods can give you a better idea in numbers to tell you exactly how many serious threads were derailed and ultimately locked due to such trolling antics of some posters.

Mods can deal with personal insults, there's a procedure in place to deal with such things, but can they really deal with this absolutely crass, hate driven, opportunistic and bigoted generalisation, accusations and name calling of an entire group?

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

New York main TV par larhai. hahahahahahhhaa. By the way who were they and whom they were supporting? Looks like Texi drivers of New York appeared in third class Paki politics program on TV. Shame on them.

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Re: The Name-Calling, Slandering, and our sense of Morality

the guy who threw the glass was PTI and the one on the receiving end was PPP...