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
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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
9mo 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
5mo 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.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Man, you've been around here long enough to know that this doesn't fly. Three-day ban and frankly this is lenient because you've been here so long, but, like, that won't last forever, calm down with the accusations.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
This is both low-effort and building consensus. Put more effort into your arguments and avoid this kind of flat evidence-less claim, please.
ZorbaTHut
25d ago
Is this really where the bar of a slur is?
Yeah, frankly. We keep it pretty low.
Are you going to apply this level of sensitivity to everyone?
Yes. If you think someone's pushing the line, report it; if it gets approved and you disagree, you're welcome to ping modmail if you feel strongly about it.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
We’re supposed to check the history of a person’s consent to pronoun before we refer to them in the simplest way possible, come on. Just let the pronouns go free.
Honestly, if it's a legit mistake, I'm not going to care much. I'm probably just going to say "hey don't use that for that person, thanks". It's more when someone is doing it intentionally and repeatedly that I start telling people to knock it off. I'm not sure we've ever given out a warning for this, let alone a ban.
And remember that gender-neutral pronouns are always acceptable, as is not using pronouns - if you don't want to keep track of what people's identity is, there's two easy global solutions.
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
So, here, I'm gonna post this in the main thread, but I'll show it to you first (and I guess anyone else who checks my comment page, hi there!) Here's the current prototype for the single-issue-poster rule:
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're fine.
Does that work?
Is @fuckduck9000 correct that I should be more vociferously calling out apparent bad-faith posters who purport to share some funhouse-mirror version of my views?
Honestly I'd like it if everyone did that more often :V
ZorbaTHut
29d ago
Alright, I actually am going to push back on this. (Ping @AhhhTheFrench so you don't feel like you're grumbling into the void.)
Courtesy is the first section in the rules. That's not an accident, it's literally the first goal. And yes, this sometimes - probably often - means that we tell people not to speak as if they're in a group of friends, but rather as if they're in a group of professional colleagues. The reason is that incivility gradually corrodes what we're going for here. Not all at once, but one step at a time; it gets normalized, it gets standardized, and a significant part of the possible community finds that the place is now hostile.
From the rules:
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.
"Leftoids" is dismissive towards roughly half the population and there's just no good reason for it; you're not getting anything out of it for the argument, you're just using a slur against your outgroup.
Don't do that, please.
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
In short: why?
Because if I can prove it can't be done, then I can use that to explain why people don't do it. Because if I can prove it can be done, then I can do it and gently show people how to politics better.
Because to me, "the existence of trans people" isn't propaganda any more than putting angels or nazis or bikers or forest rangers in a game is propaganda. Having things in a game does not imply support for those things, nor does it imply disapproval of those things. Having a larger palette makes for more options, which lets me make better games. And the more ways I can use parts of that palette, the better off I am.
Because it's a challenge.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
I'm not sure we've ever actually had to enforce this, but the official policy with Motte pronouns is:
- You are always allowed to use the person in question's preferred pronoun.
- You are always allowed to use "they", regardless of whether the person accepts that or not.
- You are always allowed to twist yourself in knots to avoid pronouns even if it looks really silly.
- If you're doing something historical, you can also use the person in question's officially preferred pronouns at that time in the story, but don't cleverly split hairs on this one; if you write a story about the Wachowskis, and start out by referring to them as "he", but then switch to "they" when they transition, the Eye of Sauron may look down upon thee.
The good news about these policies is that everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable, which is probably about as good as we can get.
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
But are people wading through a dozen Jew-posts every time they visit this forum? The answer seems to be a definitive no.
The problem is that this pushing-the-general-community-tone behavior happens, to some extent, proportional to how often this sort of post shows up. And if we're not getting anything out of the posts - and I think at this point we arguably aren't - then it's a net loss.
Perhaps that you consider any significant amount of discussion on that particular topic to be a potential vector by which this sub becomes a true “den of witches”. If that’s the concern, then I have my own concerns about what that could mean for future crackdowns on certain topics if they fail the mods’ “annoying” filter.
Note that I'm not saying that any specific topic should be banned, I'm talking about people who seem to be here only to push a single topic. It's the "ugh, this guy again" subject.
Again, as I said above, I think it’s transparently the case that you would not be treating this as a serious issue if we had a prominent poster whose sole area of interest was something anodyne like AI safety.
Actually, if someone brought it up to me, I probably would.
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
What you have failed to adequately explain is why single-issue posting is inherently bad for this forum. Why can’t I just hide threads on topics I don’t find interesting or worth engaging with?
It's the Community Pool theory of community development. Every action kind of influences everyone to a small degree; if everyone's wading through a dozen posts of "the Jews did this" to get to the meat, it's going to drive away people who aren't interested in that, and simultaneously encourage people to jew-post. This both makes the problem worse and removes the mitigating factor.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Unless I'm misunderstanding, "You must adhere to progressive orthodoxy on pronouns or avoid them altogether" does not sound to me like the middle compromise position you're making it out to be.
There's also "you can use 'they' regardless of whether the person in question is OK with it".
I'd say the strong trans-approving position would be "you are required to use the pronouns they want, and if you try to avoid those pronouns, you're a bad person for doing so". We're providing two different ways to avoid that, both of which the extremist left would disapprove of.
I hope, for my unblemished account's sake, that some story about a trans person doesn't become the culture war topic du jour any time soon. I also think that you'd see immense pushback from the community if those rules you propose were actually enforced. I suspect people just haven't read your comment above because it's buried in the previous week's culture war roundup thread.
For what it's worth, this has come up a few times now, and trans has occasionally been in the news between now and then, and it's just never been an issue. I do think you're overstating the issue here.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
The general antagonism clause applies as it always does, as do a bunch of adjacent rules. No individual word is banned, no individual word makes you exempt from the rest of the rules.
I could write both bannable and perfectly-fine comments with any of those above phrases. If you want to come up with a more specific example, I can tell you how I'd judge it.
Yup, exactly.
(You could also use "she" for the entire history if you wanted.)
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
Thinking it over, I think part of the reason I don't have an issue with it is, ironically, because of the close working relationship. If there's someone I'm interacting with in a professional capacity every day or two, yeah, I don't have any problem making a little room in my brain for pronoun and name; hell, I'm already making some room in my brain for their name, I've just got to change which name is stored in there. (And for what it's worth, they passed reasonably well, so the pronoun wasn't a big deal either aside from the transition period.)
Whereas if it's someone I only intereacted with every few months and every time I talked to them they had a new pronoun/name, my answer would be "dude, pick one and stick with it, or at least stop bugging me about it". And I can kinda understand if someone who hadn't worked with her more closely had more trouble with the transition.
I think nicknames work the same way. There's a few people I've worked with who, quite frankly, I never found out the "real" name of, because they kept using a nickname. But that's okay! As far as I'm concerned, that was their name, so, hey, no sweat.
We're not asking you to not post about it. We're asking you to also post about other stuff.
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