naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Indeed she has been slightly less liberal than Sotomayor or Kagan
I'm pretty skeptical of the use of the word "liberal" in such contexts, and cases where justices don't line up with what the news media "expects" of them often come out that way precisely because the case does not neatly align with orthodoxies like "Woke." I suspect SCOTUS analysis carried out along "blue tribe/red tribe" metrics could be more helpful than "Republican/Democrat" or "conservative/liberal" metrics--but I haven't actually done the work, so that is only a suspicion.
(With specific respect to the 2020 protest, I did see some discussion of Jackson and Barrett "swapping places" but in the end I think far less attention was paid to that peculiarity than was maybe warranted.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
But you can't let the place stray too far from leftist Orthodoxy, can you?
I appreciate you.
It honestly warms my heart to know that I can still generate responses like this in the same thread where I'm getting responses like this:
Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction? Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
This response is not sufficiently charitable. You may note that I have banned the user to whom you were responding; one big problem with rule-breaking comments is that they tend to proliferate by encouraging further rule-breaking responses. But responding to a rule-breaking comment in a rule-breaking way does not excuse you!
...actually, looking through your rather fresh comment history, you seem to have a remarkable knack for sussing out problematic posts and making the discussion even worse by responding, not to the substance of the post, but to its rhetoric. Somehow that is, actually, most of your posts! The odds of this are so low as to not be worth contemplating.
Still, in the interest of charity, I will hold off perma-banning you as a suspected alt until the next time I notice this peculiar pattern. Once, after all, may be happenstance.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Can you say more about how Livelsberger was a leftist suicide bomber?
It seems like he changed his mind about those things, and indeed that the change was a sufficiently traumatic experience that he became radicalized against things he once believed. But I acknowledge that is not the only possible explanation for his actions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Thanks for adding context. It would probably be better without the somewhat blatant culture war bits.
I'm a little ambivalent as to the extent to which this arguably constitutes "recruiting for a cause," but I will, tentatively, allow it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line.
Yes, exactly. People who take their cues from the Cathedral cannot do that, because "the ordinary sort of citizen" has their views grounded in a mix of practical reality and community ingroup signalling, rather than taking their cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites.
Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch.
For starters, "never" can't possibly be right. The first particularly stand-out thing French ever accomplished was to attend Harvard Law School, and even after that he did a lot more public interest work than most Harvard grads deign to undertake. I never got the impression, in 2015, that French was taking his cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites. Today, he is clearly taking his cues from the Cathedral, as McLaughlin articulates.
Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.
That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
You can say conservatives are too stupid to be held accountable, but you can't note that people do this?
While I would not exactly endorse Goodguy's post, (1) other people's behavior is irrelevant to your own and (2) here is what he actually said:
to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid
First off, "to me" and "seem" do some work here: reporting on your own perception in a very clear way does not excuse flagrantly bad behavior, but in the interest of encouraging honesty of self-report, it does provide some cover. Second, "supporters of those theories" is a reasonably specific group in this context, in a way that "conservatives" simply is not.
Now to what you said:
They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them. We practically talk about Trump supporters in anthropological terms with all these fucking Ohio diner ethnographies. It's on the rest of us to manage them.
Any time you find yourself slipping into "us" versus "them" language, odds are pretty good you're running afoul of the rules somewhere. At minimum, it tends toward consensus-building or antagonism. You didn't even don the fig leaf of "it seems to me that they are ignorant." Maybe this is because what you wrote there was taking a certain outside perspective--"they" switches from "conservatives" to liberals" in your second paragraph, so you are raising the defense that "this is what some people think, not me but some people." But the level of heat you put into what "some people" think still falls on the wrong side of the rules, I think.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I've complained before that @naraburns is also pretty bad at rounding off recklessly in this way.
You were wrong then, you're still wrong, and now you've brought a third moderator into this conversation.
Your complaint, every time we have these conversations, boils down to "other people did bad stuff and got away with it." That is certainly true! We do not moderate every bad post. We do not moderate all of your bad posts. Why? Well, as I've explained to you before, we have to weigh the costs and benefits of every second we spend moderating. The rules ultimately function only in service of the foundation. Sometimes a not-great post just isn't worth the hassle, and isn't doing sufficient harm. Sometimes a not-that-bad post is worth the hassle, or is doing sufficient harm. Sometimes we just miss it because no one reports it. Sometimes we're busy with other things. "Consistency" is not the goal; the goal is to serve the foundation to the best of our abilities.
But since you seem to at least want more consistency, here you go: I've consistently told you that the bad behavior of others is irrelevant to your own. Arguing with us about what other people have or have not "gotten away with" is meaningless. We've banned leftists, we've banned rightists, we've banned more flavors of political perspective than most people know even exist. But always in service of the foundation. We've never yet banned someone "based on rounding discussions off to preconceived notions from your previous experience on the internet." As long as you believe otherwise, you will continue to believe something that is false.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13d ago
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
This is absolutely my impression also.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
So, this is borderline, but on balance I am not approving this post.
It's not quite recruiting for a cause, but the reference to "infested with commies/radical leftists" kinda puts it in that territory. You're also a "new user" which kind of pings "spam" to me. Or maybe I just don't see the value in using a top post in this space to recruit for... an alternative to this space.
Wasn't this strenuously denied for years and claims of it were met with accusations of being paranoid conspiracy theorists?
My inclination is to say "no" but on reflection I have vague memories of this being something the mod team was maybe disunified about for a while (maybe still is). It's also possible I'm giving the wrong impression with the phrase "affirmative action." It's possible different moderators have had, and expressed, different ideas of what amounts to "affirmative action" in various cases. Zorba has always made it our top priority to make this 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
which necessarily involves having people who don't all share the same biases. So we've always tried to moderate in ways that would encourage the development of such a community.
On the other hand, the mod team is accused somewhat regularly of going too easy/too hard on red tribe/blue tribe posts, and we have often cited this fact as evidence that moderation is not actually especially biased in one direction or the other; everyone always feels like their ox is the one being gored. Thumbing the scales a bit in favor of including heterodox views does not rise to the level of nuking the rules, any more than QCs do. And I don't think we've ever thumbed the scales for tribal reasons (either pro or con)--just for specific users in specific cases, where it was, say, understandable that someone might get a little hot under the collar.
So I would suggest that the way to parse all of this is that moderation is a qualitative and adaptive process in a reputation economy. We do go easier on new users, generally. We go easier on people who make QCs or otherwise contribute to the health of the community (e.g. by expressing heterodox views), for the most part. We go harder on people who habitually make bad posts, or express unwillingness to abide by the rules. We moderate tone rather than content. What that amounts to, in the end, is... what we have here. If you're getting moderated occasionally, it's probably nothing to worry much about. If you're getting moderated a lot, it's definitely because you're breaking the rules and showing no inclination to even try doing better.
In the process, do we have our biases or pet issues or whatever? Sure, we're just people. Do I think we do a pretty good job at impartiality and fairness anyway? Yeah, I do. Are we perfect? No, I can't imagine. Are we better than basically every other message board moderation team on the Internet? Yeah, I think we actually are. Are we going to change? Sure, over time that's bound to happen.
Has anything in this thread come anywhere near identifying a real identifiable problem with moderation in our community, and suggesting novel but plausible ways to address said problem? Well... not yet! Which makes the amount of effort I've put into it so far pretty wasted, and probably reduces the likelihood of my bothering to respond effortfully to similar complaints in the future. The people most inclined to complain about the rules are basically never the ones who are consciously and positively contributing to the effectuation of the foundation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
The change I would prefer would be to make shutting down consensus a goal that is at least equal in weight to enforcing post quality.
Well, as I noted somewhere upthread, we already do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action" moderating. Which is maybe not quite what you're asking for but sounds pretty close to me. We tend to go easier on people who are bringing underrepresented or heterodox viewpoints into play.
(In this particular case, uh... I have to say that coffee_enjoyer's position on Israel is not one that strikes me as underrepresented or heterodox, here. I understand that probably everyone feels dogpiled at some point or other, but no, I'm much more likely to cut slack to a rule-breaking Wokist than I am to cut slack to a rule-breaking Israel critic, simply because we could probably use more of the former, but I can't imagine us ever running short of the latter.)
I might find it hard to dispel the accusation that this amounts to "moderate my enemies more", since I am on the balance unhappy with the Overton window here and therefore naturally am an "enemy" of the majority of highly-upvoted positions; but this does not mean that I am "friends" with most of the downvoted ones, unhappy families all being different and what-not.
Well, "friends" in the loose sense that you have identified a common "enemy" (me!). My impression of your follow-up is that, yes: you want more moderation for your enemies, and less for your friends. But now you've made two suggestions that, actually, the mod team already follows, more or less--if not, perhaps, to the degree you would prefer. So you're not wrong, exactly, you just seem to think that your prescriptions will yield results that, actually, we can say from experience they do not especially yield. None of this is terribly surprising, the mod team really does think about and discuss this stuff amongst ourselves a fair bit, so it would be pretty surprising if you were to say something original about the project we've got going here. But you're always welcome to try, provided you do so within the bounds of the rules we've established over the life of the community.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Yeah, weird is nowhere near as bad a slur as w*man
It's not entirely clear to me what you mean by this; in the future, please put more effort toward speaking plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I looked over the rules just now. Was it my use of the word "tranny?" If so, I'll avoid using it. Not sure what else it could have been.
We don't really ban specific words per se, but we do ban things like weakmanning in order to show how bad a group is. In this particular case, you might respond "oh but I was just explaining a way to play the game under discussion" but... I guess what I want to say is that I might accept that excuse from a good poster with a long history in the sub, but I certainly wouldn't accept that excuse from a user with your posting history.
Frankly, if I were you and I wanted to continue posting on the Motte in good faith, the first thing I'd do is roll a new account without an openly antagonistic username. We are, I think, mostly tolerant of quirky usernames but, yours is a pretty bold declaration against, uh, the whole ethos of this site.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
This post is fine, but given its relation with CW issues, should be posted in the CW thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Some of this is CW material (birthright citizenship, e.g.) so you should post this in the weekly Culture War thread. Though as a new user you are likely to get a fair bit of pushback given how much this post flags as AI influenced.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I did not understand your question at all!
I think the answer will depend on where one draws a number of lines within important continua. Not everyone agrees (as far as I know) on the extent to which human civilization (and related egregore(s)) has or has not guided human biological evolution, so I didn't want to hinge my argument on prior agreement on that particular point. But I'm sure there is more than one way to usefully conceptualize the problem; if you prefer, for example, it wouldn't be incompatible with the substance of my post to suggest instead that competing egregores are at issue.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
We already told you to use the contact form. Or you could respond to this comment! Spamming the site does not endear you to us.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
This is sufficiently "culture war" that you should post it in the Culture War thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
What is up with the top-level post here (I am unable to get a direct link)? It says "Removed" but no modhat comment.
It looks like that user went through and deleted all their own comments.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I do not even know whether it is possible, but I can't think of any reason why we would do that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I don't know! That's definitely a question for @ZorbaTHut.
If Harris had simply said she would decriminalize marijuana, I might agree with you. But what she appears to actually say is that she wants to both legalize (a step that implies greater government endorsement than mere decriminalization) and also see to it that young black men are maximally empowered to profit from slinging dope.
For the gun analogy to hold, you would need a candidate promising not only to make gun ownership easier, but also to ensure profitability and a free flow of inventory for aspiring arms dealers seeking to do deals that are currently illegal.
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