naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Let's take a 30 day break from your trolling this time. Come back better, please, or just don't come back.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Should I assume that I would be in worse shape if not for the vaccine
If you're over 40, then yeah, probably. If you're under 40, it's a coin toss at best.
And once I recover, should I get a fourth shot?
I was happy to get the original Moderna shots. I initially planned on getting a booster when they updated it for Omicron. By the time the Omicron-specific booster was out, there no longer seemed to be any point. It seems like some people are saying once you get a bivalent booster you're done, others are saying you should get boosted every year, or six months. Does an infection count as a dose? Who even knows? If so, I'm already quadruple-dosed.
So I haven't even gotten my third shot, much less a fourth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I know we aren't always very good at enforcing this rule, but CW posts are still in fact quarantined to the CW thread(s). Please feel free to post there.
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
2yr ago
The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths.
Huh. For some reason I thought Cummings was the architect of the original approach, and that the draconian lockdowns marked the beginning of the end for Cummings. But maybe that was based on my impression of his comments to media when he broke lockdown to be near relatives when his wife got sick.
I'm not "remembering" anything, much less misremembering--I literally just went and checked, because your claim seemed plausible to me, but proved on examination to be wrong. You said:
Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.
My first thought was to check the subreddit creation dates. But as you suggest, it occurred to me that a subreddit may be created but not "opened." So I went looking for the original roundup dates, and CWR "opened" and was running CW threads basically immediately when SSC started having conversations about the split. It opened first, several months before TheMotte. When the roundup was "booted," CWR was already open and running, for the express purpose of being the new location. Everyone could have gone there.
Everyone didn't. The vast majority followed Zorba's team.
And it doesn't really matter very much to me who was first, or why people ultimately moved, beyond the claims I've already made and against which you have presented no counterevidence (only speculation). But it does seriously damage your credibility, in my view, to maintain your position here, in the face of strictly factual evidence against your claim. It's okay to be wrong, everyone's wrong sometimes. But not everyone is rational enough to update their beliefs in the light of contradictory evidence.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Here:
On September 7, 2020, this post was made on /r/themotte and got +20 upvotes:
As the poem goes, sooner or later the Saxon begins to hate. And I have more than just begun.
[...]
The truth is that I fucking hate them. [...] I don't want a compromise anymore. I don't want to go our separate ways in peace. I want to hurt them and I want to win.
[...]
I would rather die and fail and men say 'at least he tried' than to throw my own flesh and blood to the wolves that swim in Cthulhu's wake.
[...]
I doubt we are in for a short victorious war but I think the right will come out well in any civil conflict.
I reported this to the mods, who did nothing. After waiting some time, I reported it to the reddit admins, and the AEO promptly deleted it. To my knowledge, this was the first AEO action against /r/themotte. The mods discussed it via modmail but issued no warnings or ban to the user in question.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Not very helpful, I know.
It's more than I was able to glean on my own! Thanks for the insight.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Christians too dream of utopia, but of course since we know that the Kingdom of God is fiction, the Christian position is tantamount to the claim that utopia is impossible and not worth striving for in actuality.
This technically violates the rule against consensus-building--"we know" is too strong. More subtly, I know "Christians" (in the sense that they identify with Christianity while doubting the metaphysics of it) who see the Kingdom of God as unattainable but worth striving for as an ideal, so you need to be careful about making assertions regarding what "we" know, as well as what the "Christian position" is.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Any advice on getting one?
There are many ways, but in my experience the most decisive step toward getting paid large sums of money to tell other people to do things they would do better without your interference is to get an MBA.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
That's not the work I intended that phrase to do. It was more of a factual observation about the extent to which outcomes are actually (not) within OP's control, which was the overall point of my post.
Specifically, "ought" implies "can." Ensuring that some people are employed might be the right thing to do; say for the purposes of argument that it is in this case. If in such a case it's not really up to you that those people will stay employed, it can't really be a moral requirement that you keep them employed. The claim "if you don't do it, eventually someone else will" is not a justification for any particular course of action, but an empirical claim about the extent to which a certain outcome is likely (not) within OP's control.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
It gave me Thomas Sowell, and when I asked for others it suggested Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Apparently I missed my calling as an economist.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Where should I post this?
Reddit? You seem keen to make a reddit alternative, there is a whole subreddit for those.
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.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
It's not just you.
I heard a right-coded radio host mention the New Orleans attack somewhat recently, but it was only a passing reference in connection with a Biden gaffe.
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
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
8mo 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
9mo 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.
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
11mo ago
This is not my intent, and by suggesting that it is my intent, you are actually breaking the same rule I just warned you against breaking. This is the absolutely predictable refrain of people who do not want to accept that they have broken the rules: "Oh, the mod is just biased against my views." Don't do this; it's not just uncharitable, it's almost comically boring.
Then take it up with them. I don't know how to be clearer about this. You explicitly tagged the fact that you were making assumptions about what anti_dan meant by "the meme" and you also tagged your own assumptions as tracking "very outlandish." The way you responded tells me that you were being uncharitable, and further suggest that at some level you even knew that you were being uncharitable.
And the thing is--for all I know, anti_dan believes exactly what you said. The problem here is not about substance. It's about approach. Generally speaking, just don't put words in people's mouths. No, not even if you think it's necessary; better to shut your own mouth than put words into someone else's. But in those cases where it really does just seem unavoidable, well, then--you need to do a better job attributing beliefs to people in ways that do not strike you as outlandish. You need to steelman their position. If you're not going to do that, then you just don't get to put words in people's mouths.
As for any other people who might actually be taking outlandish positions explicitly, like--okay! They've painted the target on their own backs. So take it up with them.
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