TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Kinda missing the part about backing away to a claim about Biden specifically that they think is more defensible, it turning out to also be also be false, and then saying "it doesn't matter" even though they started the conversation.
The 2A advocate would back up to claiming that Biden probably did want to take everyone's guns away, and that his more mild political positions were just a way of being palatable to the broader populace. And even if they don't then Biden's at least carrying water for the more extreme factions that want to do so. This is symmetrical to what Darwin is claiming with JK Rowling.
It's not false at all that at least some factions of the Republican party want to eliminate trans people, although this need not necessarily mean "death camps". For some it probably does mean death camps though.
I don't really see your issue with Darwin here overall:
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Is it that he didn't explicitly admit he was wrong about the point on JK Rowling? Nobody every does this in debates, especially once things get heated. At best you'll get implicit acceptance as they move to different points.
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Is it that his original post had an offhanded bailey in it that he abandoned to focus on defending the motte instead? See my prior post: yeah, it's a bit annoying, but it's very common.
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Is it that he didn't bother to defend the bailey even though that's a prime area where Amadan wanted to press him on? You mentioned him saying "it doesn't matter" was a problem, but obviously people shouldn't be forced to defend dumb positions if they'd rather give up and just implicitly accept an L on a given topic.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
But this is madness, and I do not believe that you would ever accept the framework off aggregating assholes by ideology, and deploying moderatory actions adjusted for that
I'm not asking for that. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to it for genuinely woke people as a form of affirmative action for opposing views, and it should be noted that I wouldn't see myself as being a beneficiary of that if it were implemented since I'm not woke myself.
What I'd like as a baseline is consistent enforcement across ideologies where things like personal attacks get a warning or a ban no matter who they're coming from. As it stands right now, we're in a regime where right-leaning people freely make personal attacks and only rarely get modded even if they're reported, while left-leaning people get banned off of vibes and convoluted notions that they're being "manipulative".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
If there's not a rule against attacking your opponent as "living in denial" separate from the actual arguments, there should be. It adds nothing to the conversation but heat.
The second one didn't receive a mod warning. There's a mod warning a different user downthread, but nothing to the post claiming the outgroup politician is a foreign agent.
Turok is clearly arguing against a line of though that, will not predominant, mostly certainly exists on the fringes of the Republican party. I don't understand how you think what he's doing is "performance art".
Great, because if his argument is valid, then it wouldn't be talking about anyone who's part of the conversation, just people like them. So none of what you said applies.
I don't think you understood what I meant on this part. My point was that the person you're directly taking to always deserves more deference than a public figure you're referring to in the third person to guard the light:heat ratio of the conversation. If you and I were talking about US presidents, and I called Trump and Biden pieces of shit, that wouldn't be great but it'd be much less bad than if I called you specifically a piece of shit. There's just no way we could have a conversation worth much of anything if attacks like that are getting lobbed at the person you're discussing things with.
For the JK Rowling stuff, again, I come back to the hypothetical of a 2A advocate:
-"Biden wants to take all our guns!"
-"No he doesn't"
-"OK but he's the Democratic president, and there are Democratic factions that want to do that"
Stuff like this happens all the time. People rarely get all that fussed over it. The fact that people are trying to attack Darwin for this points me to believe that they just disagreed with him broadly, and then went fishing for anything that could be described as "manipulative".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't. JK Rowling wasn't actively debating on this website, so things are different for her as a public figure than they'd be for a poster on the Motte responding directly to me.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong. This might seem utterly arbitrary, but I think Darwin's statement here is about on par with a Republican claiming "Biden wants to take all our guns away". In one sense, Biden was in favor of further gun control. In another sense, the literal statement of "Biden wants to take ALL our guns away" is clearly wrong since he never advocated for completely taking all guns away. If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
OK, thanks for an actual link.
I... don't really see what's so bad about this particular post. I disagree with Darwin since I don't think his points are particularly correct, but I really don't see how he's being "dishonest" or "manipulative" or "bad faith". The worst part he does is claim "JK Rowling wants to ... eradicate trans people", which seems like it was originally a throwaway line that Amadan obviously latched onto because it was both inflammatory and untrue. But then Darwin clarifies what he really meant, and it just came down to butting heads over whether that was reasonable or not. Nothing else Darwin said seems particularly egregious in terms of "this is a political debate". If anything, Amadan was a total jerk in responding with statements like these:
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll
you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.
You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit
Like, yeah, I think Darwin is wrong too, but I certainly wouldn't want to interact with a person who responded like that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Ah, OK, fair point on that. Thanks for the link. Now if anyone can point me to anything particularly egregious he posted on that alt I'd accept it as a point where darwin himself was egregious.
I'll admit I'm only somewhat familiar with his postings instead of intimately familiar, yet everything I saw really didn't strike me as the kind of poster who'd post obviously egregious things. This notion has been moderately reinforced as I've consistently requested an example of such behavior and people haven't been able to give it to me.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
I didn't interact with him that much since I didn't share his views. He was far more left-leaning than I've ever been.
Again, I request examples of your claims. If he really was as bad as you claim, you should have no problem posting examples of where he was particularly egregious instead of just broadly motioning at it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that? Can you link me to where he said that? Also, I'm reading through it and nothing really seems that bad at least without diving more into the context.
you've also said elsewhere that plenty of right-wingers have resorted to making series of personal attacks on you without getting modded. Do you have any examples of either?
Sure, in this interaction the guy claimed my arguments were so bad that I was "living in denial", and he repeated this over and over and over. Then we have Gattsuru who did this. Then we have Zeke who continuously accused me of being "dishonest".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
What? Can you link this so I can see it in context? I just don't understand what I'm supposed to see here.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Do you have an actual point here?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.
Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole
This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Darwin had a particular style of bad faith
appear dishonest and manipulative
Do you have a clear example of this? Because every time I saw people get into heated arguments with him and accused him of "bad faith" or being "manipulative", it was mostly just the two sides not understanding each others' positions. I didn't follow him super closely so maybe there are some clear counterexamples, but I have a somewhat strong bias towards the null hypothesis that people just didn't like him because they disagreed with him, so they claimed he was "bad faith". Every time someone has accused me of being bad faith on this site, it's been exactly that: a stronger, somewhat more intellectual way of saying "I disagree with you".
Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.
I don't understand how the use of quotation marks in general would be worthy of a ban, or what you mean by "scare quotes". E.g. writing HBD as "HBD" probably just means he thinks it's a euphemism that he doesn't really agree with, but he's using it here for the sake of clarity as that's what it's often referred to. None of his other use of quotation marks seem bad either.
This seems like a ban based on vibes alone. Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.
... while right-wing posters get to regularly accuse people on this forum of being delusional, claim outgroup politicians are "foreign agents", claim that anyone who holds specific positions is "too dumb to vote", etc. without even getting warned most of the time.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
AI is not sufficiently advanced to replace senior programmers yet. It's also not making them particularly more productive such that orgs could forgo hiring junior developers.
AI is the current hype bubble so every executive that wants to be thought of as "forward looking" will broadly gesture at it, and news orgs are chomping at the bit to get any scraps of stories that AI is replacing workers. In this environment you should dramatically downgrade your notion that much of anyone is being replaced, and your null hypothesis should be that any stories alleging it are dressing up normal corporate moves as "AI induced". Don't deviate from that understanding unless the evidence is very high-quality.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
I'm not saying what you're saying doesn't exist, but I haven't really noticed it that much on this site. Maybe my radar just isn't attuned to that sort of thing. Can you point me to some examples you think demonstrate that? The best example I could think of this is Curtis Yarvin whose prose is meandering and often difficult to parse, but he doesn't post publicly on this site that I know of.
I don't see how Turok would really pattern-match to that sort of problem in this specific post.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned
Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements, which was what AlexanderTurok did here. Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
"Ownership of the means of production" is a niche academic definition that typically isn't used in real-world contexts. Example: Bernie Sanders is a "Democratic Socialist", and most people no matter whether they're for or against him think the label is reasonable. Yet most of Sanders' proposals have nothing to do with the means of production, and are rather just the standard "spend more on social services" like Medicare For All.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
The statement "happened to get away with it" seems like it's doing a lot of work here. My entire point is the right-leaning posters seem to "get away with it" quite regularly in ways that functionally give them a different set of rules.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.
Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5d ago
socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.
It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.
Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work. Zohran's idea for city-run grocery stores is very dumb and will probably be dropped or completely overhauled after a few pilot programs demonstrate how silly it is.
Agreed. We need Critical Age Theory
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