ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
From the topic text:
Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
- Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
Please don't post things like this.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Those are definitely the worst parts, but the rest of it ain't great either - it appears the entire point of this post is to complain about someone doing a thing you don't like. What's the point? Why are you posting it? If it's "these people are doing a bad thing", then it's not a good post; if there's some other reason, go into that.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I recently played through A Short Hike, originally just to see if it was appropriate for the kids (conclusion: "more reading than they're really ready for, but we'll see how they do" - Alex has gone absolutely wild for it), but then afterwards just because it's a good cozy game. Fun times.
I think next up is Monster Hunter.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I'm testing it out in the UI and honestly 25 characters is already a bit longer than comfortable. I think I'd prefer to stick to 25 characters.
Maybe someday this'll become a Trusted User thing.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
The ethics of euthanasia are an interesting topic
Then write something about that, not just "look how bad these people are".
and discussing a general topic through a recent example is a very common thing here
Then start a discussion, instead of just dropping "look how bad these people are".
This particular rule isn't new, it's existed before this branch of the forum has.
https://www.themotte.org/post/757/israel-gaza-megathread-iv/158907?context=8#context
Three most recent posts in the Gaza megathread:
Someone writing about an event
A specific set of four questions to people
A specific single question to people
If anyone's just posting "boy look at how bad these people are" then report them, please.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
It might just be an early-entry age thing. Alex is the old one and she's 4 years old; she loves unicorns and sparkles and bouncing and talking to literally everyone. She also likes video games because I kept showing her what I was playing ("see, these are bugs! they're trying to stop us from getting all the gold") and sitting her down with a controller until she started Getting It.
Cass is 2 years old and sometimes I can convince her to hit buttons on a controller, but that's where Alex was at 2 years old also.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I definitely plan to go over the comment theme and make a bunch of changes. It wasn't the priority - the main page was worse - and then I ended up not getting to it before the launch.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Huh, neat.
But yeah, I'm fine just telling that person to come back with a better name.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright, I am just going to go ahead and say that this is not the kind of username we want around here. I'd offer you a username change but we don't have a way to do that right now; instead I'm going to ban you and tell you to make a new account.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
There are literally people disagreeing with you in the replies. Read those, and don't make universal moral statements if people are going to disagree with you, because then it's not fact, it's opinion.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
What about, you know, having the grandparents living with their adult children, maybe unmarried siblings as well, or at least extended families living in relatively close proximity so you can go visit your sister/aunt/cousin and their kids and you get advice, help, and child minding where it's not you and your partner on your own with your first baby and only freakin' self help books to tell you what to do?
Sure, you could do this.
But this only kind of helps in some ways, and really hurts in others. Kids play well together; like cats, the difficulty of taking care of kids scales up nonlinearly. And many many people have iffy relationships with their families. One of the strengths of US life is that you don't have your parents breathing down your neck, which lets you make your own life and forge your own path and not constantly be taking care of your elders.
Finally, this exists in many parts of the world and empirically it is not working. If we're trying to solve the fertility problem, then I don't want to waste time and money on solutions that already aren't working.
The idea of "solve this problem" by making it so that a bunch of unrelated strangers all live in an apartment block is making me shake my head here.
The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It doesn't take too much raising-children-together for those people to start feeling a lot like family; the tricky part, I think, would be figuring out how to match those people up in the first place.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
The Motte is not on Reddit because they couldn't read the room. Don't you think that ship has sailed?
If I thought the ship had sailed, I would just shut this place down. The entire goal is to not do that.
Not until you fix (not saying you should);
"diverse opinion" haver joins Motte -> expresses opinion -> gets dogpiled -> leaves (after flaming out and letting us know that we are nazi shitlords)
Yep, one step at a time here.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright, after some mod discussion, we've decided we're going to ask you to change your nickname. Note that you can do this on the Settings page (kinda near the bottom, weirdly) and don't need to make a new account.
We're already seeing some moderate red flags here, and I'd request that you not pick another trolly/obnoxious name. We can and will ban you if this keeps being an issue, so, seriously, knock it off, yo.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Mod intervention here, I'm afraid. From the rules:
Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
"As everyone knows . . ."
"I'm sure you all agree that . . ."
We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.
Please avoid stuff like "this is something that anyone interested in literature has known for a while". Phrase it as an opinion or bring up evidence, don't just insist that everyone agrees with you.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Probably, yeah. Nobody reported you, don't worry about it too much, we'd appreciate picking one of the other options next time :V
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
As I said, "everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable". I'll take that over "one side is perfectly happy with it and the other side is not happy at all".
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Mod intervention!
It's totally fine to express disagreement with the general concept of trans. It is less fine to make statements that flat-out imply trans is a thing. Not everyone agrees they're "male", and I think this falls under the whole building consensus rule.
ZorbaTHut
8mo ago
Eh, this really depends on the person. About ten years ago one of my co-workers announced they were trans and asked us to use new pronouns and names for them, but acknowledged that we'd been working together for years and we'd slip up occasionally. So we did our best, but we slipped up occasionally, and she corrected us when we did, and we said "shucks, sorry", and she laughed and said "don't worry about it", and we gradually got better at it.
There's definitely people who are dicks about this but there's also people who are not dicks about this.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
It's varying(20000), which basically means it's a length indicator and a big variable-length blob, but limited to 20,000 characters. It should be really easy to change - it's literally just relaxing the size limit - but not a change I wanted to mess with right now.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
I'm willing to use it during periods of high new-troll activity; if there's a bunch of people making new accounts just to post bad stuff then I'll simply remove it. In a day or two we can turn the standard activity filters on, though, and that'll help things enormously.
actually maybe I should just turn those on now.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Because people tend to use these things as a way to reinforce their beliefs and make it a hostile environment for others.
I think this falls generally under the "don't be antagonistic", "don't enforce ideological conformity", and "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan your claim is" clauses.
We're not asking you to not post about it. We're asking you to also post about other stuff.
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