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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I don’t really disagree. 2rafa may have phrased it better below.

it’s because if you’re in a right-ish forum with libertarian moderation any thread, even one about video games or the latest fantasy show or whatever is liable to turn into a sea of unnecessary racial slurs, homophobic baiting or just petty interpersonal attacks in which people are called slurs for Jews or gays or whatever for not agreeing with their respondent.

In other words, it’s not that leftists have any particular claim to niceness, it’s that they’re more likely to avoid copping a ban for this specific low-hanging fruit. Repeat that for a few months and the only people left are the ones who wouldn’t use slurs to start.

Repeat that for a few months and the only people left are the ones who wouldn’t use slurs to start.

But they consistently will go much further than that. TheMotte may or may not ban slurs, but even if it did it would not drift drastically leftward. To make the Motte into /r/politics you start banning ideas, facts, and questions.

I actually think it would cause a drift!

A strict policy on certain words would hit right-wingers harder, both because of the direction of any euphemism treadmills and because, as @gattsuru put it, there's more plausible deniability on the left's equivalents.

It would also push out any principled free-speech absolutists, who are overwhelmingly right-wing. This group matters a lot more for the Motte than most communities.

The end result would be evaporative cooling, even if no specific idea was ever banned. I think that's more likely to happen in hobby spaces than hostile takeovers and explicit ideological censorship. The latter makes for a better narrative, which is why we can think of so many examples.

there's more plausible deniability on the left's equivalents.

Meh, there's just more special pleading accepted by NYT.

Something like that.

I’d say the kind of censorship which is useful for functioning online communities is more compatible with the left wing than the right. Ideologically, maybe, but mostly because citing free speech is almost exclusively right-coded.

TheMotte may or may not ban slurs explicitly, but the sort of person who would use a slur to insult another poster tends to catch a ban for other reasons pretty quickly. There is a minimum IQ threshold to understand why writing this sentence (complete with r-word) is less bad than calling out the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces. The nice thing about this place is that 100% of the regulars meet it.

Disclaimer: I don't insist on tabs, but my employer does, and I am smart enough not to argue.

the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces.

Hey, we're reading too, you know! I should totally report this. /s

Disclaimer: I prefer a usage-determined mix (basically the clang-format UseTab: ForIndentation behavior), but until everybody's auto-formatting is smart enough to understand "tabs are for program flow indentation, spaces after the same number of tabs are for alignment of statements wrapped onto subsequent lines", using spaces alone seems to be the safest way for a big project to not require constant formatting fixes or look scrambled when moved between different authors' editors with different tab sizes. Plus, even when everybody's on board with a mix, you can still end up with different line wrap locations from different tab size preferences.

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