naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation. As you've been reminded somewhat recently.
Yes, even Californians. Yes, even your outgroup. While your comment is not entirely devoid of substance, it brings far, far more heat than light. Let's see, last time I wrote:
You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.
Two weeks this time, I guess.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Wow, so the ban on talking about Israel even includes sub-comments?
You haven't been banned from talking about Israel. It was just something you are pushing me toward contemplating.
The rest of your comment is sufficiently repetitious, uncharitable, etc. that I can see it was a mistake to attempt to have a productive dialogue with you concerning your bad behavior.
The threats or whatever are so lame.
My apologies. I will just go straight to a ban next time. Cheers.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Just say “fine, there is no evidence of Hamas employing preteen soldiers in recent years. Dean lied.”
There is no evidence of Hamas not employing preteen soldiers in recent years. Does that mean you are lying?
As far as I can see, Dean never specifically claimed that Hamas "definitely employed specifically preteen soldiers within the last X years," where X is whatever you want it to be. At most, Dean made general comments about the fact of Hamas employing child soldiers in the past (which they clearly have) being meaningful to Israel's military reaction (which is plausible, whether or not you would prefer they act differently). You are setting up your own goalposts (not unlike a statistician only writing about terrorism in America beginning January 2002) and then getting annoyed that Dean repeatedly declined to play your game. "Dean won't play on my terms" is not logically equivalent to "Dean lied," and to assert it that way is obnoxious and antagonistic.
According to the NYT Opinion team
That is not a trustworthy source, on my read. See? Two can play this stupid game. It's better if they don't, so that is why I'm telling you to knock it off. If you don't like the evidence provided to you, you can say, "well I'd prefer to see something clearer/stronger/whatever," but you cannot follow the comment to an AAQC roundup and start shitting on the process. It's obnoxious.
Just make a special rule on TheMotte that posters aren’t allowed to criticize Israel too much.
I'm not getting after you for criticizing Israel. I'm getting after you because you are grousing about someone else getting an AAQC, and you're doing it by breaking rules about charitable reading, responding to what people have actually written, etc. You're also attempting to rules-lawyer both that post and my moderation, which is obnoxious. That it also happens to be your hobby-horse topic is simply context. You even pulled the stupid language games trick here--"my last top-level post" throws in a completely unnecessary qualifier to determining whether you're a little too focused on something for the community's comfort. It attempts to set the goalposts in the place most beneficial to your preferred outcome. I'm not stupid; I can see what you're still doing, even after I've told you to knock it off.
I understand that it would not be a pleasant experience to put effort into making a top level post trashing Israel, only to have someone with a long history of excellent posts on military matters come along and utterly eviscerate your work--and furthermore, to do it to the overwhelming approval of the audience. So I'm actually gritting my teeth and being extra patient with you about this: stop it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk.
Your first comment got a lot of reports, which opened a mod conversation about whether to ding you for it. One mod said "not bannable, but warnable," another said "not even warnable." I tended to agree that it was not a great comment, but that it ultimately fell on the permissible side. The meta-moderation system agreed with me on this. However the low-quality responses you've generated certainly lend credence to the inclination toward moderation there.
This comment, though, fails the test of "write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation." In particular, "your ilk" is a quintessentially antagonistic framing; we're here to engage with ideas above people, and watch our tone in preservation of content.
It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.
And this, of course, is worth moderating all on its own.
You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation.
I think what you're saying here is that my explicit endorsement of Dean is a bad look and makes you feel like you might not get a fair shake at some future point should you disagree with the wrong person. If I have understood you correctly, then you have failed to understand the foundation, or the moderation system, or maybe both.
I am not an impartial arbiter tasked with tone-policing the forum. My task is to cultivate "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." To that end, I wield exactly one carrot: AAQCs. I have two sticks: warnings and bans. Community sentiment (via reports) drives both. The community also has a small carrot (upvotes) and a small stick (downvotes).
This is a reputation economy: the more carrots you have, the less likely you are to get the stick. As we often remind people: that does not mean carrots are a perfect defense against sticks! But for example a user with many carrots might get a warning where a user with no carrots would get a ban. People who contribute to the good of the community are deliberately favored. We have never made the slightest secret of this, but everyone has to learn it for the first time sometime, so maybe today is your day.
Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user.
I appreciate the candor, so in turn I will freely admit that your comparing moderation here to Putin's Russia gave me a good laugh. It also helped me to calibrate on your sense of proportionality, in a way that was probably not beneficial to your aims.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Are you kidding?
Posing rhetorical questions in the second person is not against the rules, but it is very often a sign that you are dropping into an antagonistic rather than productive conversational pose.
You can't remember basic political happenings from a year ago? Is the dissonance between what you're told to believe and what actually is just so great that your mind starts to paint over things?
These in particular are standard issue hollow accusations; they seem routinely applicable to basically everyone, and are equally routinely dismissed with "eh old news." So if you actually want to talk about relevant past events, you should put in the effort to specify which events you find most relevant, why you find them most relevant, and how you think that matters.
In short, none of the questions you asked appears to be a solicitation of actual information or in furtherance of discussion. You're just being performatively incredulous at your outgroup.
Don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
The patsy was dead, and what about the other shooters?
More effort than this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
the Utah Legislature tried one of the most blatant and anti-democratic power grabs in memory
...more anti-democratic and blatant than anointing Kamala the Democratic nominee without a primary process?
trying to give themselves power to effectively ignore or rewrite ballot measures even after they pass
Do they have any choice, really? Referendum voting is terrible, and often saddles legislatures with impossible choices. People are in general pretty happy to increase spending and cut taxes forever, and the process is inevitably infected by special interest groups looking for ways to manipulate a gullible electorate into false consensus building.
Admittedly, I have a much bigger problem with "power grabs" than with "anti-democratic." As someone once apocryphally said--the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
I value his presence here highly.
His own AAQC record suggests that you are not the only one! Which is why I would like him to not decide to get himself banned by pulling this shit.
Either way, being this explicit about protecting a user from criticism on the basis of a long record of AAQCs is a new extreme for this system
I feel like you are confusing several separate issues. Nothing I've done in this thread is aimed at "protecting a user from criticism." Coffee_enjoyer was breaking the rules and obnoxiously axe-grinding. His interpretation of Dean's post was bad on a rule-breaking level, and additionally I was annoyed that he had brought that obnoxiousness to the AAQC thread, specifically. If anything, it is coffee_enjoyer whose AAQCs were operating to protect him, here.
Separately, everything I said about Dean being a good poster was in direct response to coffee-enjoyer's obnoxious, overwrought, and rhetorical "is this the kind of posting you want!?" The answer was "yes, that's the point of the AAQCs, these are the kinds of posts we want." I was trying to find a way to help coffee_enjoyer understand why he was being moderated. Ultimately, I seem to have failed to find such a way; coffee_enjoyer seems to me far more interested in being angry about the disagreement between him and Dean (and, by extension, my moderating him over his approach), than in understanding that the problem is not the substance, but in the uncharitable and antagonistic nature of his engagement.
Your complaints are not at that level, but your candor over your distaste for Dean suggests to me that you are making a similar mistake: allowing animus toward a user to blind you to the fact that this is not ultimately about the user, but about the rules. In your little chart:
n% of the community like this user -> user gets upvotes and AAQCs -> user gets away with more extreme posts -> some people who dislike this leave -> m% (m>n) of the community like this user
You've left out my quite explicit point that AAQCs are not a bar to banning. Users cannot get away with "more extreme posts" indefinitely. Some of our best users, along with our worst, have, eventually, eaten bans--always, after deciding that they no longer wished to follow the rules, even perfunctorily. That's genuinely a problem for us! It's something the mod team talks about with alarming regularity. It's really, really frustrating to take someone with years of quality contributions, including former community moderators, and hand them a 366 or a perma or whatever. We don't want to do that! If this was about picking favorites or even picking preferred positions, Hlynka wouldn't be banned. Certain alts still kicking around here probably would be banned. But ultimately, no matter what percentage of the community is on "your side," if you're not going to follow the rules, you're going to get banned.
If you were serious about wanting a space in which people with different politics talk to each other, you should if anything have done the opposite, and treated any tendency in "community sentiment" as indicative of a growth that needs to be pruned.
I can see why you might think that; it's not entirely wrong. But we do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action." We cut people some slack when they get dogpiled and lash out. We try to give sufficient breathing room to heterodox views. Moderation is adaptive and qualitative. But like AAQCs, just having a minority view is not a perfect shield. The rules will still apply, if less quickly or harshly.
In the end, we can't maintain this space at all if we worry too much about what might or might not "drive users away." One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth. I've been moderating the Motte for more than five years, and I honestly never believed it would last as long as it already has. So I'm afraid I find myself entirely unmoved by your concerns. My goal is not to build this space into anything in particular. I have no KPIs. I just serve the foundation to the best of my ability, until the time comes when that's no longer needed, or wanted, or necessary.
And this is examining your anecdote in the most charitable way possible.
No, I'm afraid this is not sufficiently charitable. It's okay to express your doubt regarding the veracity of a story, but even then you would need to do so in a less antagonistic way. For example:
To be honest I find it difficult to believe anecdotes like this one. It seems like everywhere I look, people are doing their damnedest to pretend that a historically unpopular and utterly unaccomplished politician suddenly has incredible merit. I'm not saying you're lying, but maybe this is the real essence of a "vibe shift": people consenting to an artificial narrative (or propaganda) shift rather than (or even in opposition) to any relevant facts on the ground.
When you make the conversation about a person instead of about the ideas under discussion, you lower the quality of discourse. We're not here to hold referendums on one another's character, but rather to have civil discussions with people who don't always agree with us. Please keep that more closely in mind.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness.
Are you not reading carefully, or are you just reading selectively? Look at my mod comment again. I first said
grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best
That's the wildcard rule, applied not for what he said, but for grumping about what someone else said--so you mischaracterized my criticism in exactly the same way that coffee_enjoyer mischaracterized it, by suggesting it is about my "taste" rather than about coffee_enjoyer's insistence on his own taste being the proper determinant of quality. So right from the starting gate, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.
Then you said
someone who only ran afoul of that rule
but this is clearly an unforced error. In my very first mod comment I also wrote:
your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly
"Be charitable" is a very clear rule. Coffee-enjoyer broke it, as I demonstrated by mentioning how he broke it, and I said all of that quite clearly. So the rest of your comment fails to land entirely; I'm sure you can think of some other reason to criticize my moderation, and yet at this point it seems that your real goal is just that--to criticize my moderation, regardless of anything I have actually said or done. By your own logic, at this point it seems like you should probably just recuse yourself from criticizing my moderation approach.
I will address your parting question anyway:
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
I imagine there are many such arguments and evidence; I hardly imagine myself to be a paragon of human judgment. But as you have not presented any such arguments or evidence--as you indeed failed to even notice the rather explicit rule breaking I spelled out in my initial post--what is it you expect me to change?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? You mention recusal but actually the whole mod team does recusals pretty often, calling for others to come in and handle stuff they don't think they can be impartial about. However it's basically never about topics, because the whole mod team has opinions on just about everything. If we recused ourselves from topics we happen to know and care about, none of us could moderate anything! Rather, usually mods will recuse themselves from dealing users who get under our skin (or are just particularly under our skin on a given day). You mentioned darwin; back in the day, I recused myself from moderating him a lot.
So beyond that, what "argument or evidence" do you think you have in mind, that you think should change moderation policies here? Sometimes you write as if you think people should be moderated more ("Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago...") but your argument in this case is that coffee_enjoyer, at least, should be moderated less. As far as I can tell, you are engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: "why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?"
And once it is recognized that that is the substance of the question being asked, well, it kind of answers itself, doesn't it?
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Well,
Moderation is adaptive and qualitative.
Rules-lawyering and grudge-litigating are rarely beneficial to anyone on any side of the issue. I notice, however, that you have posted multiple AAQCs, and received no warnings at all, over the past nine months. I would like to say this with all sincerity--not as a taunt, or an inducement for you to now behave as a frustrator--but that's exactly the outcome we wanted to see. You're still here, you're not perma-banned, you make quality posts. Thank you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral.
That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.
Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.
I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This is low effort and unnecessarily antagonistic, please don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Are you saying that to live a valuable life you need to only do what is "reasonable" as in the bare minimum of not harming others? Or "reasonable" as in "make the world a better place but you can spend moderate/reasonable costs and don't have to spend severe/unreasonable costs"?
More like the latter. Contractualism is the view that we should never violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. In practice, we want to be able to justify our actions to others within our moral community. A principle like "always act to make the world a better place" seems reasonably rejectable; not only will I rarely have any idea which of my actions will "make the world a better place," even if I have a very good idea that it would actually make the world a better place to torture a certain innocent child, I have compelling reasons to not do that. In particular, innocent children have a weighty interest--a right--to not be tortured, and making the world a little or even a lot better for millions of people is not sufficient to overcome such interests.
Of course most choices are not so stark. There is often value in doing more than is strictly required of you, but even so it's very important to notice the difference between what is optimal and what is obligatory. If morality required us to always do the optimal thing, it would be impossibly demanding. Very likely no one would ever actually do the "right" thing, on such a view--there are simply too many unknowns. It is much more reasonable to expect people to act in ways they can justify to others. Deliberately making the world a worse place is not generally something we can justify to others. But it's not hard to justify to others, say, spending some time chatting about politics on the Internet, provided your other immediate obligations have been met and you find this sort of activity interesting or relaxing or fun. Is it the optimal way to spend your time? Perhaps not! But you are not actually under a moral obligation to spend your time optimally. So long as posting on Internet forums does not violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject, it's permissible.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Yes, but humans are also biologically selected for certain patterns of collective action - thats part of normal evolution for a social species.
...did you even look at the link, maybe? Or read what I wrote about reductionism not being useful in the context of this conversation? You're not saying anything I don't know, but perhaps more importantly, you're not saying anything you shouldn't anticipate me knowing. In the end, we're presumably all just subatomic particles doing what subatomic particles do! Your question was "why is it egregorian and not just normal evolution" and my answer was "because evolution describes biological patterns and arrangements, while egregores describe social patterns and arrangments." Your response appears to be "nah those aren't different things" but they are at least as different as diamond and graphite, for which we have different words despite their consisting of the same atomic substrate.
Maybe it would just be simpler to point out that British-descended humans in Britain, America, and Australia clearly share "normal evolution" in common--but not egregorian memespace?
Or maybe I just don't understand your question at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
It's highly relevant, because I am trying to figure out what the actual infraction is, and one of the ways I'm going to do that is by comparing what I did to seemingly similar behavior from others.
No, don't compare yourself to unmoderated comments; we don't (can't) moderate every rules violation, because we don't even see most of them. Most of the time, a comment has to get reported first.
So you're saying that if I'd sprinkled in a few hedging words, there wouldn't be a problem? Or if I'd specified "Republicans" and "Democrats"?
"Republicans" and "Democrats" is probably still too general, because those are not meaningfully homogeneous groups beyond the fact of their group membership. You need to specify to a meaningful degree. "People who believe in God" is a very general group, but you can say some things about them in a permissible way. And I definitely didn't say "sprinkle in a few hedging words and there won't be a problem," I said something more like "hedging and honest self report can be mitigating factors, provided the rest of your comment isn't too blatantly terrible in other ways."
That is me characterizing the pattern of thinking I am talking about, as exemplified in the excerpt I quoted.
But first, you never say "suppose someone thinks that..." and second, your characterization slips into weak man territory. Remember, you opened with:
This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves)
So this sets the expectation that you think that conservatives (as well as liberals) think, concerning conservatives:
FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them.
It's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you include yourself in "conservatives" or "liberals" so it's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you are hiding your own views behind a neutral "some people think" point of view, or what. If you're going to run with a "some people think" argument, then you need to be either steel manning it, or proactively providing evidence of what those "some people" actually think.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
It wasn't me, but several of my posts on reddit were included in the maintenance of a cultural Marxism "thread" (maybe on CWR?) for a time, that included numerous materials. But at some point the creator deleted it, presumably either by quitting reddit or by being banned from it. This was not my first post on the topic, but Google is not helping me find older ones and I haven't got the bandwidth just this moment to dig up the others.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I'm sorry you had to deal with this, and you are of course permitted to share your experiences and your frustration. But referring to people as "biowaste" is over the line. Even "smug pricks" is sufficiently inflammatory that you should bring some evidence of smugness and maybe drop the "pricks" altogether.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
What do we do
"We," who? This is consensus building language.
Indeed, your post is arguably both weakmanning and "boo outgroup." If you want to talk about a particular strain of thought, be more proactive about providing evidence for that strain (where did you find this "quote?") so people can readily judge the extent to which you are or are not nutpicking. Then, actually talk about it, rather than dropping a contextless quote and a handful of quips.
Please don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
is this really the standard you want on themotte
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I think you're just using that as a gaslighting tactic because you enjoy being manipulative.
Do you understand how this kind of direct personal attack fails to advance the foundation? This is unkind, uncharitable, needlessly antagonistic, contributes nothing of substance to the conversation, and just in general does not contribute to an atmosphere of open discussion.
You are not required to agree with others. To the contrary! Disagreement is an important part of what we do here. You are not even required to be pleasant or agreeable. If you demolish someone's argument, they might very naturally be upset by that, and sometimes they will even complain about it to us. But that sort of thing is not only permitted, it is probably essential to the advancement of the foundation.
By contrast, your disdain is unwelcome, unwarranted, and frankly unwise. Sneering and name-calling and making personal attacks simply antagonizes others. It's all heat and no light.
This particular comment is not the most antagonistic comment I've ever seen, but it is antagonistic enough--and engaging in this sort of behavior immediately after I've warned you against it is straightforwardly unrepentant. You didn't just lose your temper and have a bad day; you plainly decided to disregard my warning and double down on your rule breaking.
Your last ban was for a week. This one is for two. I don't know how to make this any clearer: moderate your tone or your bans will quickly escalate toward infinity.
You are welcome to respond to AAQCs, here or elsewhere, but grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best.
This is a mod-hatted warning, and we generally don't dip into substance on that, but Google gave me this (PDF warning) pretty readily, and it was far from the only thing Google gave me on Hamas child soldiers. I have no particular opinion on the reliability of the sources etc. and I'm not going to get into it with you, but your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly.
More options
Context Copy link