fuckduck9000
3mo ago
It’s a common progressive talking point. Is the author of the article he cited also putting on an act?
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
And of course sure, sometimes arguably civility can be dispensed with--but always at a cost.
I see it the other way. Civility is often helpful, perhaps even necessary, but as a filter on the truth, civility has a cost. Ideally, we should all be capable of hearing the hurtful antagonistic truth, and just keep cooperating, or here, discussing. Of course, in the real world, without the filter, people will fight or walk away. Civility is therefore just a compromise to our weakness and egotism, like you say “our very human tendency to bridle when we perceive we are insulted or demeaned“.
You can have too much civility, blocking out the truth and leaving only platitudes. Our club’s informal norms are cordial enough, its members stoic enough, that imo we don’t need a strongly enforced filter.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
You have to take responsibility then, and endure my tedious metaphors, like I endure your knife on my throat. The fact is, with the centralisation and censorship on large platforms, there aren’t many available alternatives anymore, so a long ban does represent a significant infringement on a commenter's freedom of speech, more than it used to.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
If somebody at your job, church, or hobby shouted out people's attractiveness ratings, do you agree that would make the community a worse place, regardless of whether they believe it?
First off, not really. Is he like shouting during the sermon? Then okay, that's disruptive. But if someone was just radically honest, I wouldn't ostracize him. Some people might learn something.
Secondly, our little club is far more committed to the pursuit of truth than they are.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
And even then, as you have observed yourself, it's pretty easy to come back as an alt as long as you don't make yourself too obvious.
This solution filters out good faith participants who will just leave as directed, while the worst stay. But if you tell me it’s unofficially tolerated, then I have to agree that a long ban is no big deal for freedom of speech purposes, but then, what is even the point of handing it out.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
when they are constant over a long period of time.
That really doesn’t qualify. Capped means constancy over a long period of time is tolerated indefinitely.
It's always amusing (and eye-rolling) to me that so many people think we do this because we get that sweet, sweet taste of "authority."
Well, you’re only human. You don’t mind having more power rather than less, do you? You could use your power for the greater good, so says the voice in your head. Even from nearly incorruptible demi-gods, some abuse is inevitable.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
I think the punishment for minor, occasional infractions should be capped at a few days ban.
But if you want to keep the system uncapped, your authority unbounded: when you refer to a permaban in a warning or day-ban, it’s such an outsized threat that it comes across as a taunt and a dare. Like a cop pulling a gun after he caught you speeding.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Different issue, that's not a problem of number of moderators. They knew about that, but extended charity to obvious ban-evading bad faith trolls. I referred to that discrepancy in my OP.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
I don't want them shot in the head. Mods are janitors, mall cops, their use of lethal force should be strongly restricted.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
That’s an entirely different matter. I’m talking about censorship/power, you’re talking about status/information/truth. One could even say that through censorship, we lose the valuable information in the use of banned words (that the speaker is possibly low-status, etc).
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Thanks, man. I don’t want to be the guy who uses his theatrical exit to make a grandstanding argument, but I gots to be a little. Besides, if they keep to the same trajectory, I’m getting long-term banned anyway, and I feel I owe you guys at least a heads-up before I leave. I don’t want to, I had a great time here. We can have quick friendly sparring because I know most commenters’ disposition & allegiance, and would have to relearn all of that somewhere else, even if I could find similar quality.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Sure, if by ‘consequences of warnings’ you mean a few days ban to cool off, a slap on the wrist, that’s fine, mods need to work. But I have a problem with weeks-long, month-long bans, they’re pseudo-permabans. You don’t send a guy to the chair for accumulating parking tickets. Near permabans are a far graver violation of someone’s freedom of expression, and should be reserved for grave faults like clear bad faith, constant disregard for the rules, or so thoroughly disliked that the sub produces 6000 shards of pottery with your name on it.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
I don’t mind if they dance on the ban line all their life, I have a problem with the actual banning. You ratchet the punishments automatically, so their days are numbered – as you sometimes remind your victims, like Hlynka here, which is hardly helpful.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
I’d say what distinguished the forum originally was more a commitment to free speech than to civility, though it had both of course.
I don’t think it’s possible to create an Internet community where everyone engages charitably but people are also free to call each other or their outgroup stupid, evil, or faggots.
They believe it though. The illusion of censorship is that hiding something makes it disappear, like a hand in front of a baby.
To the extent such a community does exist, it’s living on borrowed time as one group leaves due to asymmetry in hostility (if your community is 80% Packers fans and 20% Bears fans, then Bears fans are going to see a lot more hostility than Packer’s fans).
If you think it was bad before, wait until the packers fans get mod powers. The minority is always going to be perceived as more hostile. ‘Bears are the best’ – ‘what are you, trolling? You knew an inflammatory statement like that would generate a lot of drama’. On the motte, you’re obviously going to get a lot more reports for an equivalent sneer if you’re woke rather than anti-woke.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
I'd consider myself a left leaning authoritarian neo-liberal if anything.
I don’t think it’s liberal of you to support the punching of innocents.
Aren’t authoritarianism and liberalism usually opposed to one another? Authoritarian neo-liberalism sounds like the ultimate booword every political party says they oppose. Or maybe it’s Pinochet.
Reddit should do what the owners of Reddit want it to do, that is the point of ownership.
Cop-out. You have no opinion on the choices they made, and the state of our old home? How would you, as the legitimate owner, moderate it?
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
The ways of the world are mysterious, my friend. You’re somewhat progressive. Do you approve of what has become of reddit? They certainly ‘keep up’ with 'what people find offensive', but people who hate each other's ideas can't seem to talk there. I don’t want this model of discourse applied here, no matter how popular or historically inevitable it is.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
At any rate, it would be a bit awkward if adding more mods didn't result in more moderation decisions
Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary. If the previous state was decent, it’s now overpoliced. I’ve always preferred even less moderation, and I complained occasionnally, especially when those getting moderated were arguing against me at the time.
I find Kulak and BC entertaining, they even have a point at times, I am studiously mute on certain others, but Kulak didn't get banned (last time I checked), merely warned
But warnings go on the record, then when you ban them you implacably cite the warnings in some grand narrative of misbehaviour.
BC is an out-and-proud fan of drama who got away with a lot before a time out.
His opinions are merely a mirror of extreme pro-white viewpoints that are popular here. There is no realistic way to present his honest opinions in here without coming across as hostile, ‘baiting’, ‘trolling’, etc. Not that I endorse his opinions in the slightest: they are probably the furthest away from my own than anyone’s here (my last ban was for a blasphemous response to him).
I think you mean rdrama.net
There’s gotta be more. Are all the forums dead, do people just comment on substacks, or youtube?
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Many moons ago, on old reddit, when the ultra-progressive subs like SRS started banning certain words like ‘retarded’, everyone laughed at the futile attempt to stop the euphemistic threadmill. Now, even here, new words are regularly put on the index.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
He gets only the moral benefit of avoiding needless suffering, which is a lower bar of morality, applicable to animals. And he probably has people who care about him, like family, or catholics, so his value by proxy cannot be ignored by other humans.
Would you say that an intelligent alien has less moral worth than a retarded human? On what basis, genetic kindred? The alien can understand cooperation and retaliation, while the retard is morally incompetent and therefore cannot be trusted to cooperate. His own behaviour is random, morally meaningless, so our behaviour towards him loses moral meaning too. It is futile to wait for a dangerous wild animal to ‘defect’ before killing him, as we would if he were intelligent.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
I suppose you can just marry the first four (or ten). You can fuck them as children, or murder men to marry their wives. Plus all the sex slaves. That would be the honourable thing in your religion, as per your prophet.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Probably best, because I’m very annoyed that I apparently can’t point out a double-edged inconsistency without being accused of left partisanship. If the blood spilled in avdivka is on ukraine’s hands, then the blood spilled in kenosha is on rittenhouse’s hands. I oppose all of these ‘utilitarian’ ‘yielding to the unrighteous’ arguments.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
What do you mean? I don't have a database of everyone's arguments, I just have knowledge of both side's common arguments + sporadic recollections of commenter-specific ones.
I am pointing out an inconsistency in a hypothetical left-wing commenter who supports trace's argument here but denies it in ukraine's case just as much as his right-wing counterpart who does the opposite.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Trace’s argument is similar to the pro-russia argument that if ukraine had simply rolled over and surrendered itself into russia’s power, a lot of people who did not ‘need to’ die 'probably' wouldn’t have, even if ukraine had the right to fight. Although I don’t recall you or @FCfromSSC making that argument (as opposed to other pro-russia commenters).
I think it's a dick move to go straight to the police without mentioning it once. Polite note on the gate.
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