Amadan
More equal than others
No bio...
User ID: 297
What the hell? You two are behaving terribly. I just gave @georgioz a one-day ban for his "FUCK YOU" crash-out, but your much calmer but just as unnecessary ad hominems are no better. You're not arguing, you're just trading sneers and seeing who can out-condescend the other. You can take a day off too.
FUCK YOU.
I don't know why this topic got you so emotional, but even with your long record of AAQCs, this is not acceptable. Take a day to cool off.
I find your view abhorrent disgusting and I would strip you of citizenship if I could.
Are you young? Are you white? You seem like you are from a foreign culture? You talk like your Indian.
You've been warned to stop doing this, and as I noted last time, every time you are warned you cool it just long enough to hope we'll forget.
We don't forget.
Ad hominems like this are about as clear-cut a violation of the rules as you can get without a straight-up "fuck you."
One month ban. Next time probably permanent.
ETA: Extended to two months for post-ban edit-arguing.
Do not throw your two cents into a slapfight that doesn't involve you because you are harboring a grudge.
You posted this in two places. If you hadn't already gotten multiple responses in both places, I'd delete one. This post is borderline in itself; we try to give lots of leeway to people bringing their best and most interesting/borderline-crazy ideas, but I am already frowning at all the posts that amount to "We lost/We are in trouble/this is a disaster for us" and your entire post amounts to an appeal to a consensus that does not exist here. Since you are also a newly-rolled account, almost certainly a sockpuppet, and very likely a ban evader, consider yourself on notice and on our radar.
I'm gonna let that go 'cause it's funny, but really, not appropriate for a top-level post.
I see once more we have thought of the novel idea, "What if we could make it so our enemies don't get to vote?"
I'm sorry to inform you that if the American people want to vote for communism or Shariah law or the Hunger Games, the Constitution does not in fact prevent that.
Tried reading it once. Bailed after a chapter. I seriously do not get the appeal of some of the works recommended in rat-spheres.
Past that time, Shai LeBeouf, Shai LeBeouf, Shai LeBeouf.
Would you be kind enough to explain this to those of us who don't want to read horrible web fiction to get the reference?
Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa. A heavily fictionalized novelization of the life of Miyamoto Musashi, the "Book of Five Rings" guy. Yoshikawa originally wrote it as a serial, which shows as there are lots of tangents with side characters. It's obvious Yoshikawa just made a lot of stuff up, but it's great soapy fun.
Freddie at least claims to believe that genetic racial differences don't exist and all disparities are because of historical disadvantages and social inequality. I don't know what his answer would be to "Why shouldn't we research it" but I assume he would assume no good could come of it. Maybe because like Pinker, he secretly knows what the results would be, or maybe because he assumes the research would be done in bad faith and produce untrustworthy results.
Do you or @TheAntipopulist perceive any irony whatsoever when you realize you are defending Darwin and insisting he was treated unfairly, but complaining that we put up with TrannyPorn too long?
Well, of course I too think I am open-minded and available to be persuaded, and that you are not, and there we are. But to break this down to the fundamental point of disagreement, I dispute that in order to mod "fairly," one has to share political opinions with the person being modded, and therefore leftists can only fairly be modded by (or in consultation with) other leftists. May I remind you that Darwin got argued with a lot, but was actually rarely modded here?
You should know that most people aren't available to be persuaded on most things.
This may be true, but then why the fuck are we here?
No, nobody gets persuaded in one thread to change their worldview, or even their opinion on one topic. But I do think my opinions on a number of things have changed over time, partly because of my participation here. In some aspects, I have become more liberal; in other cases, much less so.
but your responses are still dripping with contempt with the "(yawn)" and the "Jesus". I have a feeling that if darwin did that to other users then he absolutely would have been told to knock it off by the mods.
Not really. It's true we discourage sarcasm and snippiness, but if you've been paying attention as closely as you claim to, you also know we generally have a pretty high tolerance for it and only mod when it does cross over into obvious antagonism or an attempt to derail threads into "Nuh uhs."
Yes, I will own that sometimes I am sarcastic and jaded. Mostly I keep it in check, but sometimes my exasperation shows. I cannot honestly say I feel much guilt over this, because I do not censure people for things I would not censure myself. Could I be more dispassionate and a model of toneless civility? Yes. I am sorry not to be able to conform to your customer service expectations. The expectation that mods are never allowed to so much as yawn at a tiresome critic is not a reasonable expectation.
Your claims about why leftists are being banned and rightists are not: well, I flatly disagree, I think you are wrong, I think you are arguing that the sky is green and gravity is sideways, and I think nothing I say is going to disabuse you of this because we had almost this exact same exchange a year ago and nothing has changed. Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic and jaded with my "sky is green and gravity is sideways" crack because I am exasperated.
But as per your suggestions:
Hire a genuine leftist or two into the mod team and then consult them when issues arose in regards to modding leftists.
First of all, I reject your implicit assumption that the mod team is all rightists and we are biased against leftists. You are simply - pardon my exasperation - not just wrong, but fucking wrong. Maybe none of us qualify as "leftists" nowadays, but we are definitely not all rightists. Honestly, I think only one of us identifies as rightist and one another identifies as moderately conservative. Like, that's it, man. So how "leftist" do you think your proposed sensitivity consultant mod needs to be to restore fairness to moderation?
Have stricter rules regarding tone when it comes to users interacting with other users.
We could do that. Back on reddit, we'd occasionally have periods we tongue-in-cheek called "reigns of terror" where for a week or two, tone moderation became much stricter and bans were handed out more easily. Usually this was when we sensed the temperature going up and an increase in antagonism and low-effort sneering making conversations less pleasant. There was, unsurprisingly, a mixed reaction to this, with some considering it a needed corrective, but most thinking it was just mods going off on a power trip (and of course, always, always, we were persecuting viewpoints we didn't like). We haven't done it since coming here because the community is smaller and we really don't want to hand out bans like candy. But honestly, I just mostly disregard your opinion of the tone here since you're clearly only seeing meanness in one direction and you only care about meanness in one direction. I will say that most of your proposed rules from NeutralPolitics are more or less the rules of the Motte. You are not wrong that we don't enforce them that strictly, and perhaps not as strictly as we used to. So it is worth discussing amongst ourselves. Maybe it is time for a "reign of terror" or at least a "reign of increased strictness."
But here is the problem: none of that would make you happy. Because you are the kind of person who will never believe that we are being fair, no matter how we adjust the dials. So, there is that.
As the "bad mod" (yawn) who "chased Darwin away," let me point out that no one is keeping him away. And I personally have committed to not trying to rub my last post that apparently shamed him into silence in his face if he ever returns, even though I absolutely do not respect how he tucked tail and ghosted when finally pressed on some bullshit he'd been saying for a long time. But I cannot promise others will not.
About liberals: you are right and you are wrong. Leftists do not get extra mod scrutiny. Jesus, how many times do we have to go over this? Once again, in the same thread we're being accused of being extra-strict with leftists and also of giving them too much leeway because we don't want to drive them off. Look, it's a known problem. The site has converged mostly to the right, and leftists get reported more, and the mods are very aware that a leftist is going to show up in the mod queue more often and thus we cannot help but be hyper aware of leftists who are annoying people. And we have to balance "Is this person really out of bounds?" with "Are we just seeing this person more because everyone reports him?" It's... the Darwin problem, basically.
We still have some liberals here (raises hand) and even a few leftists. Yes, I get that it's hard to be a leftist here. I sympathize, but also I don't. This, also, is old ground I'm repeating for the umpteenth time, but the convergence here is not because we drove away all the leftists. It's because leftists drove everyone else off every other site, and we still see the pattern here where sometimes a leftist will show up and participate for a while, and then leave in a huff when they realize they're not allowed to just call people Nazis and that we don't ban leftist-feeling-hurting viewpoints.
That was a ramble, but I feel like a lot of you are just rehashing things we already know. So, like, what are your concrete proposals?
Man, I know you love dredging up old shit, but if you want to relitigate threads from eight years ago, talk to the people who were mods then.
Look, we do our best. I can't say anything that hasn't already been said. The next time @guesswho or someone like him goes on a tear, there will probably be discussion about it in the mods channel. There already is frequent discussion along the lines of "This poster is super fucking annoying but he's not reeeeally breaking the rules, what should we do about it?" And usually the consensus is "Let him have his leash." Is that the wrong consensus? Maybe it is. Maybe we should just start dropping banhammers the moment someone becomes super fucking annoying. But be careful what you wish for, as they say.
Yes, how many times do we have to distinguish between de jure and de facto applications of the law? You're just repeating the same point for the fourth time. What I asked for was very specific, not yet another example of "Well, we know it's usually men arrested for abuse."
Also, from my understanding, more and more police departments are in fact treating allegations of abuse from either sex seriously, to the point that now it's sometimes the husband or boyfriend saying "Wait a minute!" when the cops arrive, hear both sides, and put cuffs on the woman because she put hands on him first. (Watch a lot of police body cam videos and you see this often - the cops are no longer ignoring it when a woman slaps or scratches or throws things.)
Perhaps I responded with too much heat, but it is tiring being constantly accused of playing favorites, privileging certain perspectives, or just being unreasonable and unfair when every single one of us tries our honest best to be as fair and impartial as we can humanly manage.
"Animal Farm" to me suggests an Orwellian hierarchy where we make a pretense of equality but are actually treating one group as clearly more equal than others. Hardly a method of rewarding good behavior, but merely an arbitrary caste system.
That's not the intention with the policy of granting more (but not infinite) slack to posters with a positive record over posters with a negative record, but I suppose if you must see it that way, fine. I disagree because basically anyone can join the ranks of the "privileged" by being a good poster and not being a bad poster. But I realize there will always be people who see themselves as being persecuted, and rather than observing the consequence of their own actions, it must be because the mods are unfairly twisting the rules to punish people they don't like.
What would you tell the female voters who accuse you of misogyny for favoring the ability of abusive men to kick women out of the house?
I'm not a politician, so I am not concerned about that.
For someone who's the #3 He-man Woman-Hater on the Motte, I really don't understand your cringing attitude towards the prospect of female disapproval. I get that it's harder when you're out there in the dating market, and I won't lie, I am glad not to be there, but still.
Anyway, I admit to laying a bit of a trap because its been red states passing laws aimed at protecting female rights, Which do try to draw a very direct black and white gender distinction.
Yes, I figured that, but as I expected, they aren't actually what I asked for. And even by your own admission, they are actually "textually reciprocal" (i.e., de jure they apply both ways, even if it is pretty obvious that no one is worried about trans men being excluded from men's spaces). So... you gave me oranges and said "Look at them unfair apples! Gotcha!" Uh, right.
I'm not even convinced "normies" buy the "protecting girls" framework here. To the degree leftists are in favor of trans rights bills, they see trans women as an oppressed underclass, but I am deeply skeptical as to how many really and truly perceive them as "girls," in the way that provokes the male protective instinct you are so despairing of.
Can you point out any previous serious pushback against laws that explicitly favor women/protections for women?
No. But I can't recall any recent laws that made a black-and-white distinction like what you are hypothesizing. If you can show me a law (in the US) that literally says, for example, "Abuse is defined as a male hitting a female," or something like that, I will reassess my opinion.
Would YOU vote against that?
Would I vote against a law that explicitly defines abuse in such a way that men hitting women is abuse and women hitting men is not? Yes, I would.
The Darwin Question gets brought up over and over, but no one has ever offered concrete policies we should change, just "calibrate your tolerance" or "be quicker to ban people on vibes." There isn't a good solution. You have to think of it as a classification problem: moderation that allows some of the people you want to stay also allows Darwin. Moderation that would ban Darwin is also going to ban the sleazy tacticians, bad faith propositions, and devil's advocates for your side.
Irrespective of Dase’s ban, the motte is very much a case of an Animal Farm, and has been so for some time.
A lie I get tired of refuting. No one who claims this has ever been able to substantiate it with anything more than vague "You banned someone I like but you didn't ban someone I don't like."
To play the devil’s advocate, counterpoint: Darwin. Who’s behavior was so egregious
Darwin's behavior was of an entirely different kind. He used disingenuous debate tactics, he played devil's advocate, he would intentionally take positions and phrase things in a way calculated to rile people, but no one post crossed the line (there are many people who I think regularly use disingenuous debate tactics and are here more to stick thumbs in eyes than actually engage in discussion) so back on reddit, he only got banned after a very long accumulation of black marks when his mask slipped. He was sleazy. Yes, it was and is annoying, but Darwin didn't have special privileges. There are people I'd happily ban right now because I think they are sleazy, add negative value, and are extremely annoying, but we don't do that.
Dase, by contrast, very straightforwardly engaged in personal attacks on another poster over a disagreement.
The thing that is true is that some animals are cleverer than others and will game our moderation policy to get away with as much as possible. And it's not like we don't see this, and eventually we'll usually get fed up, but acting as quickly as you might like would not actually make you happy, because we wouldn't only being acting against the Darwins.
I don't think he was, actually. There are some commonalities, but TrannyPorn's writing style was quite different from Cremieux's, even allowing for the latter adopting a more social media-friendly persona.
As I said in the thread where I banned him, I am ambivalent, but it is being discussed by the mods, with most of us leaning towards reducing it to 3 to 6 months.
That said, here is where I am at:
The thread started because @RandomRanger came back to argue in a year-old thread with some new development. I don't have feelings (or opinions, really) on whose AI analysis was more insightful. But midway through the thread Dase went off with this:
My emotions are not so much Deepseek partisanship as cold contempt for you personally, your ritalin-addled writing style and attitude, you irritate me about as much as self_made_human, so I'm using grok to repeatedly mock your year-old prediction driven by faith in Musk successfully brute forcing problems.
Realistically, Americans will pussy out of trying due to the normal fear of retaliation.
Basically, raging out over a disagreement over the state of Chinese AI, turning it into a series of personal attacks, using the opportunity to take a shot at another person he dislikes who wasn't even participating in the thread, and then ending it with what has become his boilerplate sneering at Americans because he wants to make sure we know he hates all of us.
Nobody is allowed to behave like that, no matter how entertaining and readable they may be when they are on point. I am willing to cut some slack for regulars. I am willing to let anyone have a bad day. I am not willing to say "Sure, you're allowed to sperg out and behave like an angry child because someone disagreed with you and you think you're too good to treat other people like human beings, and you're allowed to do that every time someone commits the sin of having an opinion you think is wrong." So if we do unban Dase, I expect he will do exactly the same thing five minutes after his ban ends, and I will ban him again for a few months. Though I would be pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

That logic is not in the Constitution. You may believe we should "respect the Founder's intent" (and that only Christians should be allowed to hold office) but that's not what they wrote.
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