naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Biden wants a constitutional crisis, apparently.
Well, that's editorializing, but like, seriously--WTF?
Biden says Equal Rights Amendment is ratified, kicking off expected legal battle as he pushes through final executive actions
He's got chutzpah, I guess (or, realistically, one of his staffers does). Never have I seen such a nakedly partisan attempt to create mass confusion concerning American constitutional law, nor such an inducement for left wing justices to defect from the rule of law. It is perhaps the single least professional, most embarrassing thing a sitting President has done in, like, six or seven weeks.
Just to get this out up front: no. The Equal Rights Amendment has not been ratified, and is not the law of the land. When asked for comment by CNN, the U.S. archives referred the station to previous statements from the U.S. archivist that
the amendment “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions,” pointing to a pair of conclusions in 2020 and 2022 from the Office of Legal Counsel at the US Department of Justice that affirmed that ratification deadlines were enforceable.
The President has no particular role in the ratification process anyway, so his opinion is legally meaningless. Certainly his appeal to the "American Bar Association" (an especially left wing advocacy group) is meaningless. But it's a signal, and the message is clear: time to ignore the law, precedent, history, and any possible position of compromise and coexistence. Watching the outgoing administration slap the "defect" button as rapidly as possible does not bode well for the next four years. At best, it's an inducement for the Trump administration to play tit-for-tat. At worst, I don't know--civil war?
The fact that the CNN article is still pushing this wild "pre-emptive pardons" stuff is also concerning, but illegitimately announcing an Amendment to the Constitution has surely got to be the most brazen lame duck move in American history. This is banana republic levels of absurdity.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Several times per day, a new account gets created and posts a variation of this post. Sometimes in Russian. "Where are the admins? I want to talk about advertising. It's important!" And so on. We have mostly just removed them, as with all spam, but this one had been quite persistent, rolling IPs and browsers and so on, posting and posting. After a while we tried responding, but it became clear that there was not a human at the tiller--actually saying "yes this is the admin" did not generate any results.
Actually approving this post may have been the thing that broke the bot's loop, as after it was approved, an actual spam post got made (advertising a Russian sex chat site), which I removed, and so far we've not received further spam of this variety. Time will tell. We do deal with a fair bit of spam, but nothing quite so automated and persistent before this.
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.
I don't know that "marital rape" only happens when a soon-to-be-ex assaults his wife.
I mean, presumably there are other cases--that's just the one that I've actually seen in court, and the one I've heard used to justify the changes. I don't make a habit of following criminal prosecutions meticulously, but the rate of "marital rape" proceedings that are either preceded or followed by "divorce" proceedings surely approaches 100%, whatever the gory details.
But what about unhealthy ones, where the wife is never in the mood and the husband decides he's sick of taking no for an answer? If there is no such thing as marital rape, then all she can do is divorce him, I guess? (Which most tradcons who oppose marital rape laws also tend to think should not be an option.)
I don't feel like I know any tradcons who would reject "physical abuse" as possible grounds for separation, but I suppose they're probably out there. But really--someone who puts their spouse in prison for marital rape must surely understand that it is tantamount to a divorce anyway? This seems quite analogous to "battered woman syndrome" to me--the law has rarely faced any shortage of ways to answer domestic violence of various kinds; rather, a host of influences (love, material need, desperation, actual insanity, you name it) bring women back to their abusers under a wide variety of circumstances. Whether that's a "systemic" problem or a psychological problem or whatever, revamping central tenets of the ancient institution of marriage to better serve outrageous edge-cases does not seem to have especially helped matters improve.
This is a pattern I see repeated endlessly in conversations about "moral progress." I could hand you a dozen different papers purporting to explain how we can reduce violence against women through various social engineering programs, but none of them really explains the evidence for their own effectiveness. As far as I have been able to determine, the biggest progress in reducing violence against women has been made through IQ gains resulting from the near eradication of malnutrition, combined with an overall increase in the absolute wealth of the average American. Outside of America and Europe, "intimate partner violence" remains stubbornly unaffected by cultural interventions (though that hasn't stopped anyone from insisting their programs just need more money).
Cases like Gaiman's are special. He obviously isn't an impoverished blue collar laborer, lashing out at his long-suffering wife due to poor executive functioning. He's damaged in a different way: he's a wealthy, powerful man living in a world where sex and marriage have been decoupled, to the primary detriment of the very women the sexual revolution so often purported to advantage.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
"What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible.
Sure, we could redefine words so that you couldn't call women being physically forced to have sex with their husbands against their will victims of "rape", but I'm not sure what the value of that is.
No one is proposing to do that.
But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is,
Do you mean that the point of marriage is that the man can have sex with his wife whenever he wants?
No; kindly stow the strawmen, please. Sex is, however, central to the concept of marriage, historically.
I would imagine the most common application of marital rape laws is invisible, i.e. deterring husbands from forcing themselves on their wives against their will.
You don't have to answer this, of course, as it is a somewhat personal question, but... are you currently a member of a marriage in which the higher-libido spouse refrains from forcible intercourse partially or primarily because it is against the law? Because, like, if you are, my condolences? But if you aren't, then where in the world would you pick up such a bizarre model of marital relations?
In fact I already briefly mentioned the (true, historical) primary driver of "marital rape" laws, which basically never apply to functional marriages. There were actual cases of H and W getting divorced. Enraged, H stalks W, rapes her, and then law enforcement responds "nothing we can do, sorry, it's not illegal to have sex with your spouse." This seems like a genuine problem! But there are many possible solutions, some of which do not have the same cultural drawbacks as introducing the "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model of sexual intercourse into private marital relationships, which should be mature and caring enough to negotiate such things without the assistance of a government cudgel.
No, half-hearted maintenance sex isn't rape. There's a healthy compromise position between "Everything is rape" and "nothing in marriage is rape".
Yes, that's true. The "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model isn't it, though.
I don't hold traditional ways of doing things as sacrosanct. I think it's entirely worth knocking down the Chesterton's fence of forcing women (and probably some men) to stay in relationships they don't want to and to submit to sex against their will. This doesn't mean I want to end marriage as an institution, rather that I think there are things from the past worth keeping and things worth discarding.
Again--I am broadly in agreement. What you don't seem to want to discuss in a careful or nuanced way is the idea that maybe there are times when people should be socially pressured to stay in relationships they don't want to, and submit to sex they aren't enthusiastically interested in having. I can only imagine why this might be; I do think Western attitudes toward increasingly absolute "bodily autonomy" have generated some peculiar attitudes toward sex, for example. The treatment of marriage as purely a matter of romance, rather than a union that can sometimes be practical or beneficial in other ways, may also play a role. I'm not exactly opposed to everything the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has introduced into our culture.
I just think we're being deliberately obtuse if we try to pretend that Neil Gaiman, and others like him, are not also the fruit of that tree.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Vanishingly few cultures genuinely held that husbands had unlimited physical dominion over their spouse, with no concept of consent possible.
Yes--of course. There are many different legal traditions that parse things out differently. A common Western one is that because husband and wife are "one flesh," and one cannot commit an offense against oneself, many interpersonal crimes are impossible between man and wife. However, one could still do morally atrocious things which were against the law--so for example, adultery was illegal, even though under the doctrine of coverture adultery was not strictly an offense against one's spouse. Rather, it was an offense against God and the State (which approved the marriage).
Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.
Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.
@quiet_NaN also raised this point below, but I think it begs the question. "What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible. I think most Westerners today do not think of marriage that way! But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is, and what else can/should constitute "consent."
Somewhat recently, a pre-2020 essay on "maintenance sex" popped up in my social feeds, and I found it faintly amusing. The "expert" being interviewed clearly wanted to say "it's normal and healthy to have sex when you don't want to, simply because your partner wants to and you care about giving them what they want." But he kept having to dance around it, resulting in amusing elocution seeming to simultaneously suggest that the indulging partner was both willing and not-willing. It included bad advice like "make sure both partners climax," instead of acknowledging that--particularly as people age--orgasm can sometimes become exhausting to pursue, or even totally unreachable, and this doesn't necessarily make sexual activity undesirable.
As I read, I reflected somewhat on the model sometimes taught to college students today, that "consent is voluntary, informed, and enthusiastic," and should be re-affirmed periodically throughout every sexual encounter. I perceive a very strong likelihood that this can, will, and probably already has led to some serious sexual dysfunction in Western relationships. Many people find themselves psychologically unable to express sexual desire in an overt and expressive manner; this is one reason why people sometimes consume alcohol with the intention of getting laid. People enjoy being swept away in emotion and sensation, becoming inarticulate with desire, etc.
Put all this into the context of a marriage, and the idea of "marital rape" becomes incredibly fraught. Realistically, the most common application of "marital rape" laws is to prosecute men who, prior to the finalization of a divorce, force themselves on their soon-to-be-exes. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the law should be able to react to such a development--and besides, I find it difficult to imagine anyone in a healthy and functioning marriage prosecuting their spouse for anything. That seems like a clear commitment to the immediate or eventual termination of the relationship. But since the advent of "marital rape" laws, I have seen a gradually increasing number of people (usually, women) wield the concept of consent as a form of control: by default, sexual activity becomes locked to the mood of the lower-libido spouse, with no compromise (or "maintenance sex") possible. After all--wouldn't that be rape? But it seems clearly absurd that the definition of "rape" should become "any sex you don't enthusiastically desire," much less "sex you later decide you wish you hadn't had."
So when you say "consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages," my inclination is to respond, sure, not necessarily--but they can, and ideally probably should, and the evolution of "sexual consent" as a concept in premarital and extramarital contexts is in this way directly corrosive to marriage as traditionally practiced. This is what people actually mean, I think, when they say that no fault divorce erodes the concept of traditional marriage. After all, someone else's divorce isn't going to change my marriage, right? Shouldn't I just let others do what they want, while I do what I want? But here we are talking about importing "consent" into marriage, as if it is a separate thing--when traditionally, marriage was how you consented.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Have I just blocked out or forgotten the deviancy?
Bilquis?
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I agree with your final conclusion but that's why I don't see how small-l liberalism necessitates - even reading on the surface - the elimination of social opprobrium? In fact, that is clearly not what's happened and it's not what anyone actually wants to happen.
So first let me say that I do not believe that small-l liberalism necessarily aims toward the elimination of social opprobium; most people do not chase the idea of liberty all the way to Ancapistan. But "not what anyone actually wants to happen" is probably asserting too much. I don't think it's a coincidence that the essay where the term "anarchocapitalism" was coined was first printed in Playboy in 1969; perhaps most notoriously, it was Playboy Press that published nude glamour photos of a certain 10-year-old celebrity in 1975. This was one year after the initial publication of Richard Farson's Birthrights, which contains the following passage (page 147-148 in the hardback I just pulled from my shelf)--
The most ruinous situations are usually not the sexual activities involved in the act of molestation, but the community's response to the act when it has been discovered. The guilt and fear that are induced can be worse than the experience of the act itself.
This is typical of bleeding-edge conversations surrounding sex and gender in the 1960s and 1970s. Nudity and sexual activity, being "natural," could not be bad; any shame or embarrassment or reticence felt in connection with one's body and its functions was a social construction in need of deconstruction. Meaningful harms were not the result of human activity, but of systemic oppression. Practical considerations like "bear[ing] the costs of enforcing violations of a notoriously hard to prove nature" scarcely entered into the conversation, except perhaps with hidebound conservatives whose opprobrium could be safely dismissed as mere patriarchy.
In hopes of maybe steelmanning American counterculture circa 1960, it's probably worth observing that there were (and arguably are) indeed many oppressive aspects to American culture! But people fighting for "freedom" do not typically concern themselves with the nuances of application, as we see even today with the "burn it to the ground" mentality of various anti-capitalist, "woke," or otherwise revolutionary types. These often find themselves hoist from their own petard, as it is not the elimination of social opprobrium they crave, but rather it is control of social opprobrium they crave, and when this becomes evident, many of their "anti-authoritarian" views turn out to just be different authoritarian views, and they lose their punk cred.
But there are purists out there, whether by naiveté or aspiration, who either believe or at least aspire to believe that what would really be best, is total independence from the all the pressures imposed by society. I think it is an unrealistic attitude. But I can grasp the appeal, the dream, of simply doing as I please, all the time. For the wealthy and powerful, it is more often a live option, and their revealed preferences routinely paint a startling portrait.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
No, that was me failing to open the italics properly, sorry.
Infidelity is wrong, but discreetly (discretely?) having a mistress is not the same as carelessly sleeping around, which itself is not the same as whatever degenerate stuff this guy was doing...
I agree with you to this point.
If "consent" and "fidelity" are your only measures of correctness, and only on a "yes/no" basis, you're bound to end up with a Puritan <-> Borderline Sex Criminal barbell.
This doesn't seem quite right, however. While I'm not sure where it takes the argument, exactly, I feel it necessary to point out that both adultery and fornication have been, and in many places still are, sex crimes. They are not prosecuted in the same way as groping, which is not prosecuted in the same way as rape, so it does seem like societies are capable of recognizing gradations while still maintaining a clear line (essentially: formal social approval in the form of a marriage certificate) between "yes" and "no."
In the 1960s/1970s, feminism and the hippie movement decoupled sex from marriage on the view that this was liberating individuals from the shackles of social opprobrium. That doesn't seem to be wrong, prima facie; the idea that my community should have any say in my sex life seems like a pretty obvious violation of liberal (and libertarian) thinking. "Behind closed doors" wasn't even part of the equation--the sex and nudity of that era was often quite public!
But to whatever extent society is going to punish sexual deviance--every consequence from ostracism through to actual legal penalties--should be attached to reasonably clear expectations. A marriage certificate says, presumably among other things, that "society approves of sex between these people." This was the substance of the Obergefell case--that society should formally approve homosexual relations as socially legitimate. One of the most interesting arguments I ever heard against gay marriage was from a young gay man whose reaction to this was that this was a total abandonment of the "queer" ethos; that the point was not to become accepted by society, but to break down its oppressive norms.
I do not know, but strongly suspect, that this is the mindset of people like Gaiman. "Look, I'm a brilliant, caring, utterly free individual who has transcended the boring, tradition-bound nonsense against which you youngsters rail. Behold my boundless freedom! Partake in it yourself by gnawing upon my engorged genitals, you free, sexy rebel, you." And of course, his critics can be easily dismissed as uptight religious whackjobs, or uptight feminists.
I also don't know what the answer is. My own inclination is toward freedom! I have always enjoyed Gaiman's writing, for whatever that's worth. I am inclined toward smaller government, however, which Gaiman generally was not. I don't want to make marriage a legal requirement for sex; I don't want us to prosecute fornication and adultery as a matter of law. But I'm increasingly concerned that we haven't really come up with a good alternative. The "consent model" seems like a failure and a burden. My instinct is that it would be best to have strong cultural norms in favor of traditional monogamous marriage, without legal requirements. But in the absence of those cultural norms, it seems like we as a culture are asking for the return of legal norms along those lines. This puts me in mind of Ben Franklin's (somewhat ironic) proclamation:
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I've never read Sandman, could you expand on this please?
It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality, homosexuality, BDSM, child abuse, and rape, just off the top of my head.
There was also a lot of nudity, which was arguably "artistic" but was not usual for mainstream comics at the time. My personal experience of the 1990s was that I often encountered neo-hippie arguments about nudity being "not inherently sexual," which in retrospect seems like a pretty obvious motte-and-bailey approach to the matter.
(The ninth episode of the second season of The Simpsons, "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge," which first aired in 1990, ends with Marge conceding that it is hypocritical to censor a children's cartoon but not a field trip in which children see Michaelangelo's David. The episodes remains culturally relevant to this day.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I'm not sure being married to palmer would have helped
...well, yes, but they are married, have been married for 14 years, and are going through a divorce.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I mean, maybe Gaiman is a creepy sexpest, assuming the truth of the allegations. Certainly the evidence seems to be that he is quite promiscuous, like so many other men of similar repute.
Will he be cancelled entirely? Is this evidence against the plausibility of "open marriage?" Should we accept the article's allegations at face value, or question the veracity of the claims, victim-blaming style? What is "consent," really?
There seemed to me to be a plethora of culture war angles--that's all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Guy really went down the deviancy rabbit hole.
Yes! But I feel like, having read American Gods and Sandman, this is totally unsurprising.
My memory is that Neil Gaiman's name occasionally pops up around here (edit: here). New York Magazine pulled no punches today. Headline?
There Is No Safe Word How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.
The headline is false, though maybe not for the reasons you would immediately guess. As far as I can tell the story itself is not a scoop so much as a rigorous summary of things already known. It's difficult to know where to begin, commentary-wise; probably this belongs in the long tail of 2017's "#metoo" movement? But maybe we should begin with Sandman.
If you don't know who Neil Gaiman is, he's... a writer! A talented writer--not so talented a comic writer as Alan Moore, not so talented a novelist as Neal Stephenson, not so talented a screenwriter as Joss Whedon, but what makes him remarkable is that he is almost as good as every one of those writers within their respective mediums of mastery. He became Alan Moore's protégé; he collaborated with Terry Pratchett (Discworld) on Good Omens (1990). But it was his new take on an old DC character, Sandman, that became his own personal magnum opus. Running from 1989 to 1996, the book briefly outsold even Superman and Batman as DC's top title.
If you read it today, you'll see a lot of English punk, a gothic flair, deep cut literary references, edgy takes on stuff that 21st century Westerners now take culturally for granted... and a whole, whole lot of not-even-repressed sexual deviance, both of varieties that have since become more culturally acceptable, and varieties that have not. Hence my suggestion that the headline is false; as near as I can tell, Neil Gaiman never hid the darkest parts of himself from anyone, ever.
In fact, owing to decades of involvement in fringe geek fandoms, I have had a handful of glancing personal encounters with Neil Gaiman. The first thing to know is that he basically sweats charisma. Where Alan Moore is a spectacle, where Joss Whedon is a douche, Neil Gaiman is patently avuncular. He is warm and articulate, a storyteller every second, and when you meet him you know immediately within you, down to the marrow of your very bones: this man fucks.
And as far as I could tell, he made absolutely no secret of it. By no later than 2010 I had heard multiple totally separate stories from women claiming to have accompanied Gaiman to his home for playtime, hippie-style (or rationalist style, if some of the things I hear about San Francisco group homes are true). It is entirely possible that some or all of them were lying! Certainly they were all boasting. One was very clearly imagining that this would be her big break into the literary world, which seems like a strange hope to express if you are lying about the sex.
This is not the sort of behavior I want to encourage from anyone, for a variety of reasons, but it's probably worth noting, very clearly, that this did not seem at all surprising to me. I remember Bill Clinton, I remember Bill Gates, I know what a groupie is. Famous, powerful, wealthy, men have for all of history been inclined toward promiscuity, and women have been inclined to indulge them that.
The article seems to confirm my own, limited historical experiences:
It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual.
Inevitably, it seems, in such contexts there is never any shortage of... misunderstanding. The article gets into pretty explicit detail concerning accusations of outright rape--often, however, with women who had been involved with Gaiman for some time, and continued to be involved with him for some time afterward. His second marriage (to a C-list celebrity in her own right) was "open"--
During the early years of their marriage, they lived apart for months at a time and encouraged each other to have affairs. According to conversations with five of Palmer’s closest friends, the most important rule governing their open relationship was honesty. They found that sharing the details of their extramarital dalliances — and sometimes sharing the same partners — brought them closer together.
Indeed!
In 2012, Palmer met a 20-year-old fan, who has asked to be referred to as Rachel, at a Dresden Dolls concert. After one of Palmer’s next shows, the women had sex. The morning after, Palmer snapped a few semi-naked pictures of Rachel and asked if she could send one to Gaiman. She and Palmer slept together a few more times, but then Palmer seemed to lose interest in sex with her. Some six months after they met, Palmer introduced Rachel to Gaiman online, telling Rachel, “He’ll love you.” The two struck up a correspondence that quickly turned sexual, and Gaiman invited her to his house in Wisconsin. As she packed for the trip, she asked Palmer over email if she had any advice for pleasing Gaiman in bed. Palmer joked in response, “i think the fun is finding out on your own.” With Gaiman, Rachel says there was never a “blatant rupture of consent” but that he was always pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her. Looking back, she feels Palmer gave her to him “like a toy.”
That sort of thing only lasted a few years. Eventually, Palmer was pregnant and decided to try to close the marriage. This seems to have been the beginning of the end of that, and the New York Magazine story could be viewed through the lens of "hit piece intended to influence the drawn-out divorce proceedings." I do not (and cannot) know the truth of these events for myself, but it probably doesn't matter; his career has been drying up for a while now, and once studios milk the requisite profits from their current investments in his IP, those contracts seem likely to be among his last. Well, he's in his 60s and he has plenty of money (even if Palmer absconds with half of it), I don't feel too badly for him.
But the whole charade does remind me once more of the peculiar way in which Western culture has come to insist that there is nothing problematic about sexual promiscuity. Marriage is just one choice among many! Homosexuality, polyamory, open marriages, monogamish couples, as long as it is consensual then it's fine, right? Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries. Gaiman's putative victims do not say that they unequivocally rejected his advances; some, indeed, texted him after the fact with reassurances that their encounters were in fact consensual.
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him. “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she wrote.
That's the kind of evidence that keeps Gaiman out of jail, regardless of what social media mob justice decides on the matter. Even assuming she was being completely honest when she later said, in effect, "I texted him lies because I was scared," there's no evidence of what she was thinking at the time, except what she actually wrote. A world with clear relationship-grounded boundaries around sexual activity alleviates such ambiguities!
I am sort of peripherally aware of some of the "sex pest" stories that occasionally circulate in rationalist circles, and certainly I am aware of the polyamory (and e.g. Scott's occasional defense of it). Apparently it can work, for some people, at least for a time. But more often it seems to end up like this: if you want an open marriage, probably you don't really want a marriage in any robust sense of the term. And wealthy, powerful men who do not commit themselves to monogamy wholly and from the outset, Pence style, will be promiscuous, and it will eventually create headaches for them, of one kind or another.
Hm. Maybe someone should write a comic book about that.
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
6mo ago
Just to add to @Amadan's take on this, it's hard for me to take you very seriously in a discussion about "good faith" when you link to that comment I made, without also referencing my direct reply to you in that thread where I elaborated:
...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.
(Emphasis added.) Your refusal to engage in open, honest, charitable discussion of these nuances is a far, far cry from us engaging in "manipulation attempts." When you ask a question and get an answer, then pop up months later writing as though you never read or understood that answer, like... I don't know what more I can possibly say to you about it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
...what?
I was nodding along as I read, until I got to this bit:
but by showing me that they don’t fear him and can offer pointed, vocal criticism of his conduct and strong condemnation of these potential pardons
To the extent that there was rioting on January 6th, that was bad. At least as bad, however, was the way that rioting was prosecuted. I'm 100% on board with criticizing Trump when it is warranted, but that doesn't actually appear to be Yglesias' argument; his real argument appears to be "do not allow Trump to pardon anyone convicted of offenses committed during this very specific event." And while I am not an expert on these cases, I've seen a lot of concerning videos that suggest to me that this is probably a good use of the presidential pardon power: putting January 6th to bed.
Yglesias seems to be reasonably consistent on the question of pardons being bad, so I can appreciate the article to that extent. But he's ultimately just... wrong. As long as so-called "prosecutorial discretion" exists, the pardon power is pretty important, and should if anything probably be used more liberally.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo 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.
No, this is disinformation coming from the President and Vice President. At least stupid executive orders are president-things that presidents do.
Officially declaring the existence of a fake Constitutional Amendment based on the dubious theorizing of an advocacy group is exactly the kind of oligarchy-style nonsense the President of the United States just warned us about.
More options
Context Copy link