naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Trad macho posturing bullshit like this is always so laughable being posted on a community that is an even less productive use of time than some Minecraft open source project.
This antagonism gets you banned for a week. Please think of it as my personal contribution to the productive use of your time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
The patsy was dead, and what about the other shooters?
More effort than this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Sorry for the lateness of this reply, but you're banned for a week: egregiously obnoxious and single-issue posting (Jews).
Posting about the "mass graves" brouhaha (dare I say "hoax?") in Canada was fine; if someone else had posted about it and then you'd come in with this comment I would have hit you immediately for attempting to derail the conversation. My only hesitation, and why I discussed it with the other mods first, was that it's a bit weird to accuse you of derailing your own thread, I think? But it has this weird bait-and-switch feel to it; you were, refreshingly, not pounding your one-note piano for a change... just kidding, it was a post about Jews all along!
Don't do this.
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.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Unnecessarily antagonistic, write like you want to include others in the conversation, low effort, banned for this behavior before...
Let's call it seven days this time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
303 Creative is a freedom of speech chase, not a religious freedom case.
What kind of speech (or silence) are we talking about, here? Are you one of those people who pedantically interjects that the civil war was a state's rights issue, not a slavery issue?
For whatever it's worth, my choice of words there was deliberately poking at the number of people calling this an "LGBT rights case." Because of course the case is sufficiently about that, that it's not entirely inaccurate to characterize the case that way, and yet flip that rhetoric on its head and certain people are bound to get worked up...
You seem to think that 303 Creative was an enforcement action brought by the state of Colorado against the company.
Sorry to have given you that impression, but no--I've never thought that at all.
the whole issue of whether or not anyone asked for a wedding website is essentially a red herring
Yes, very good--this is why I found the CNN article, and its downstream effects on conversation in my vicinity, noteworthy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
All of his criticisms are on point, though.
Surely you don't actually mean that?
I was a bit hesitant on the mod button, for all the reasons I already mentioned. I recognize that there is some hyperbole there, and some humor, and some self-deprecation, and I always feel a bit schoolmarmish wagging a finger at that sort of thing. But like--
Literature references. Point score is directly correlated with obscurity; actually having read the the work in question is optional. Bonus points for linking SSC pieces, double bonus points if they're from 2016 or earlier.
What's the "on point" criticism, here--that we quote Scott too much? What's the "bad habit"--that we don't actually read the books we quote from and talk about? (This seems clearly false!)
The fact that we have our own status games is interesting, and worth talking about. And there are surely times and places to enjoy an amusing roast. But a lot of the stuff in this list is not actually bad, and most of the rest is unobjectionable if stripped of the pejoration and mockery. To treat e.g. complex vocabulary as a signal of low status is textbook anti-intellectualism. Yes, some people use big words strictly to appear smart, but treating people that way without further evidence requires an uncharitable take on their motives. Writing lengthy posts is frequently mocked in many places on the internet, but some problems are complex and demand extended reflection--assuming you want to do more than make a joke at someone else's expense. While many of the attitudes called out in this post are indeed counterproductive or otherwise objectionable, most of the behaviors are not in themselves problematic, particularly given a charitable interpretation of the writer's intent. If we're going to criticize such behaviors, we should do it in a thoughtful way--not by resorting to mockery that seems crafted to shame others away from effortful participation and thoughtful discussion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Which, in this case, is probably nothing.
Why? Do you know something nobody else knows? (I mean, you may be right, but it's not at all obvious to me how you got to this conclusion.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The OP's question wasn't about what should or shouldn't be kept away from children, but whether drag is inherently sexual. That's the only question I was answering, so following that up with a discussion of what is or isn't appropriate for children seems like an orthogonal and perhaps just uncharitable response. Nothing you've said here is responsive to any of the arguments I raised for the particular claim that drag seems to indeed be as inherently sexual as blackface is inherently racial.
Saying that Makeup is done by women to add to their sexual value, so therefore anyone wearing makeup is engaging in sexual activity, and we should keep that away from children, leads in pretty weird directions by analogy.
If I am in favor of keeping children in the shallow end of the swimming pool, I must by analogy oppose tall drinking glasses, I suppose. Some slopes are indeed slippery, but you seem to have engaged the genuinely fallacious version, here. "If we stop kids going to drag shows, what's next!? Banning dances and bringing back Victorian fashions?"
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
1yr ago
The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.
This is too much heat, not enough light. Please don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The current release (as far as I know) of the agenda specifies that any child that expresses any interest or ideation about himself being transgender, should be immediately medically, socially and surgically transitioned, parents have no legitimate way to react to it except fully supporting and enabling it, and in case they do anything else, they should be immediately and irreversibly striped of all parental rights.
I'm not sure this even rises to the level of a weak man, though maybe you could point me to someone actually espousing precisely this position. My suspicion, though, is that this is a full fledged strawman. Please work harder to portray your outgroup's views in a way they would be likely to recognize and agree to, or barring that, at least in a way that brings strong argument/evidence that this is what they actually believe in spite of their protestations to the contrary.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless
Please post about specific rather than general groups to the extent possible. Please provide effortful argument and evidence in proportion with how partisan or inflammatory your claims might be.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Many people here get really fucking cringe ... Just a palpable sense of barely disguised seething towards women from some commenters.
Unnecessarily antagonistic. If you have something constructive to add to the conversation, do! Calling other users "cringe" does not contribute, and violates our rules of engagement. In my experience, rarely does the word "cringe" even get deployed outside of naked signaling. Aim for substance instead.
The whole discussion in the OP is about whether Drag is sexual, and whether that sexuality makes it inappropriate for children.
This is not how I understood the question, or how I approached it. I took the question on its face:
Is dressing in drag (that is, a man dressing like a woman potentially with makeup and so on) an inherently sexual act?
OP goes on to suggest that this is at the real center of debates about "Drag Queen Story Hour" and so forth, so presumably if we can reach agreement on this question, then we could reach agreement on the latter question. This may or may not be so, but my impression of this framing is that it is a way of trying to get clear about a less-obviously-charged question before worrying about the details of a more obviously charged question. Maybe I'm the one who misunderstood the OP, but I read your leaping straight to "and is this appropriate for children" as missing the point of the discussion.
Your little syllogism of "JP/Feminists say Makeup is sexual >> Drag Queens wear makeup >> Drag queens are sexual >> sexual things are inappropriate for children >> Drag queens are inappropriate for children"
I have never said "therefore drag queens are inappropriate for children" in this thread. I have explained why it seems clear to me that "drag" is inherently sexual, and you have said nothing to demonstrate otherwise, so if you want to have an argument with someone who is saying the things you're saying I'm saying, you're going to need to find someone else to argue with.
you shift that definition to "too prurient for children"
Again--which of my responses to Gillitrut or Gemma are you getting this from?
I feel like you're just spoiling for a fight. I was responding to Gillitrut in an analytic way, describing what comes to my mind when I hear "drag," and also pointing out that I am hesitant to do even this since of course there are many kinds of drag, and edge cases, and etc. I think my analysis is good in part because it also captures the discomfort people often feel in other situations unrelated to drag queens. Others have been quite civil in pointing to counterexamples, and I think in general the question "is drag inherently sexual" is an interesting one for reasons that have nothing at all to do with children. It's not that far from other arguments people have about e.g. whether breasts are "inherently sexual." Personally, I think lots of stuff is inherently sexual, to greater and lesser degrees, and I think that if we were Puritanical or Victorian about those things, I wouldn't personally like it but I would understand the argument.
Sexualized drag shows are inappropriate for children due to content, not because you can point to some banal element of drag as inherently sexual.
Sure, fine, whatever, you don't think drag is inherently sexual, I get it. I disagree, for all the reasons I've cited, none of which you've provided any plausible pushback against, because you're too busy focusing on shit I didn't say.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
You've brought too much heat and too little light, here. You're also not writing to include everyone in the conversation. To refer to an entire group, the majority of whom are not criminals, as a "criminal underclass" is clearly inflammatory. The rules do not forbid inflammatory claims; what they forbid is claims that are not also proportionally effortful, bringing argument and evidence (and kindness and charity!) to bear.
And I'd leave it at that, but in the short time we've been on this site, you've managed to accumulate a ban from Zorba, a ban from Amadanb, and five other warnings besides! Take two weeks off this time. You do not seem interested, at present, in the project of making this place a fruitful discussion ground. If you continue to show that unwillingness, your bans will only continue to grow.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
No, the steelman is, they were there first
They weren't there first. Why isn't your reaction to the (re)creation of Israel, "what fucking savages" but "they kinda have a point" as well? Because 2000 years is longer than 400? Or 50? My whole point is that it doesn't matter if the Palestinians "kinda have a point" about being told by their government, "sorry guys, time to move." What matters is what they do about that; what they have repeatedly chosen to do about it is not to pursue peaceful solutions, but to pursue the solution "murder as many Jews as we can, say we're sorry so the international community suppresses Israel's response, then prepare for the next opportunity to murder as many Jews as we can."
You have assiduously avoided addressing this angle, at all, in your responses. This is, at best, a botched "steelman" grounded in simply omitting relevant facts. What it feels like is just completely dishonest engagement.
Just because they didn't have a flag doesn't mean it didn't exist.
Ah. Well, if stand up comedy is the level at which you engage with history, that would explain a lot of what you've written here.
The Palestinian Declaration of Independence was written in 1988. Prior to that, both Arab and Jewish nationalists in the 20th century helped to overthrow the Ottoman Turks in hopes of creating their own nation, but Britain and France did not follow through on those expectations. The region has been ruled from afar for just about all of recorded history, albeit mostly by Jews, then Muslims, and occasionally Christians. Although many Jews were driven from the region by Hadrian (and others), there were always some who remained. By the early 19th century, many had begun to return.
But once more (since you're apparently ignoring it every time I write it anyway): it doesn't ultimately matter who has or had a flag, or whose ancestors were from where (though don't think I don't notice the rhetorical trick of making conveniently inconsistent claims about what counts as being somewhere "first"). What matters is that there is a group of terrorists pretending to be a "nation" for the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible, and that this is (contra to your bizarre claims) in no way "symmetrical" to a democratically elected government doing what it can to respond to the mass murder and rape of its people by Muslim Arab terrorists pretending to be a "nation."
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Long form and relitigating every frame hinders the ability to develop models to apply to new situations.
Inflammatory comments and shorthand integration-by-reference hinder the ability to create 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.
That's the goal--it's right there at the top of the page! Of course, the community is what it is; personalities and culture and such are bound to develop and play a part. The goal of moderation is to do what we can to preserve the foundation in the face of that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Way too antagonistic, dude. You've been warned about this before. Banned for a week.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
While @yofuckreddit would probably have been better off making their post a bit less rant-y, sneering at them does not help matters. Please avoid this level of antagonism in the future.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I have asked what is so special about a particular minority -- rural voters -- that they have a right to be given extra votes and a veto, as was the case in the past.
Calling them "extra votes and a veto, as was the case in the past" continues to beg the question, as you have done from the moment you joined this conversation. They weren't "extra" votes, it was the way the system was set up to protect certain minority interests from mob rule. If you prefer mob rule, like--I doubt I'm in any position to talk you out of that.
Most of what you're writing now suggests that you are either unwilling or unable to understand the answers I've already given you, so I should probably just leave it at that.
The mod team has discussed this comment in response to a couple of user reports. The result is mixed. I am explicitly not giving you a warning at this time--but I need to say a little more about that, because we are probably going to be dialing up the sensitivity on posts like this in the near future.
This is connected with @Amadan's moderation of @firmamenti and @cjet79's partial modhat comment about it. Since moving over from reddit, moderation has gotten both easier and more difficult in interesting ways. We have far fewer bad drive-by comments and much less brigading from trolls (although, importantly--not zero troll brigading!). We seem to have more users paying attention to AAQCs, both in terms of crafting them and in terms of nominating them, such that many excellent posts don't make the roundup simply because there are so many plausible nominations. These are positive developments!
On the downside, though, low effort comments from more regular users also seem to be turning up more frequently. There is a tendency to rely on shorthand arguments that are both low effort and obfuscatory for new users. This is understandable--as the community coheres it can often feel like certain individuals are just re-treading old ground. But that is something we want to try to mitigate. In this particular comment, your substantive position (that the primary impetus for targeting Trump is purely political, as evidenced by the ceaseless barrage of unusual, contorted, or even spurious charges raised against him) seems defensible, but the way you raise it as though it were obviously true (implicitly building consensus), without furnishing either evidence or argument, brooks no discussion on the matter. That is antithetical to the foundation of the Motte.
I will be writing a longer top post about low-effort posts in the near-ish future, but it seemed worth mentioning here to get people thinking a bit about the problem, hopefully.
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