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a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition experiences a mass movement around a figure
fear of immigrants and immigration
contempt for journalists and journalism
violence
but when the people said: this is fascism
there were always those who said, no it isn't!
if it were fascism, he would be glorifying war!
he's the anti-war candidate!
now
he's been elected to deploy the military domestically
and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military
this is fascism
... duh.
@FCfromSSC already warned you downthread, but you're still filling up the mod queue with reports on your posts, so consider this me underlining what FC said and highlighting a few more things.
Your username is suggestive and seems calculated to provoke, but that's fine - if someone was genuinely a member of the "antifa" movement or sympathetic to them, they would be as welcome to post here as anyone else (and it would be interesting to have their perspective). I don't know if you are sincere or trolling, but either way, you need to understand a couple of things: first, you're going to encounter a lot of hostility. We (mods) factor that in, so when you're being reported just for posting leftist opinions, we aren't generally swayed by that. However, you are following into an unfortunately familiar pattern that many hardcore lefties do when "arriving" here. (I put "arriving" in quotes because you created this account today, and you're clearly not new here, and I have a pretty good suspicion about who you are.) And that is being preemptively rude, condescending, and belligerent, with an attitude of "I am here to set you fascists straight."
Not only is that not going to be received well (or generate any decent discussion), it's against the rules requiring everyone to interact with charity and good faith. No matter how much you don't want to because you think of yourself as doing battle against the forces of
evilfascismwokeismJewsthe mods.This is all condescending, belligerent, and just reads as bad faith.
I see no reason to let you continue to participate with a newly rolled alt if you are going to do so in bad faith. So if you continue in this manner, I'm going to move to go straight to permaban rather than letting you progress through the usual tedious cycle of increasingly longer bans just so you can come back every few weeks to play again.
I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor. One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children, and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies. Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups? I think the answer is no. Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists” and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.
I don't know what to tell you - we mod people for "boo outgrouping" every day. Yes, this is generally not a friendly environment for those on the left (and don't I know it, as someone nominally on the left), but the exact degree to which we calibrate how much we let people badmouth their ideological opponents is never going to satisfy everyone. Too much moderation and we're suppressing basically any degree of heat or emotion; not enough and the people being talked about feel like it's open season on them. We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."
Also, bluntly, I think you are wrong about causes. Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.
I'm not sure exactly which post you are referring to, but I know another recent post that asserted that got modded.
That one was borderline, and got some pushback from a mod (albeit without modhat on). My own opinion is that the claim was not entirely offbase factually (my understanding is that the only reason prep is needed is because gay men don't wish to refrain from activities that spread AIDS), but reducing it down to "gay orgies" was rather inflammatory. Was it a particularly nice thing to say? No. Was it a defensible claim to make, even if it hurts feelings? With a bit more effort, yes.
It depends on what you said. If you just come in calling everyone who voted for Trump a fascist, no. If you made an argument that Trump is a fascist, you'd probably be downvoted a lot, unfortunately, but you would not be modded if you were civil about it. What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here? There is a difference between "The mods will let you say it" and "Many people will argue with you, perhaps not very nicely, and downvote you."
Then they are wrong and they don't actually look at our mod log.
This is incorrect. Every week I mod multiple people for "dunking on leftists" (and predictably get bitching and downvotes for it).
I am claiming if I make an argument that Trump is a fascist, I agree, I’ll be downvoted (but like idc), and yes, I won’t be modded if I keep it civil, but also virtually all of the replies will be so riddled with logical fallacies, not to mention subtle boo outgrouping, that not only do I have no desire to continue debating in good faith but I’m at risk of losing my cool in a sea of what seems to me to be absolutely laughable debating bizarrely not getting modded and then definitely getting myself modded. I’m also claiming that my reaction is likely a common reaction most other leftists are having and therefore is the explanation for why the leftist population is nonexistent here without the other explanation being “the mods are secretly fucking elephants and flipping off liberals while they do it.”
Edit: to address directly your question of “What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here?”, I believe it is, “I literally can’t argue with this trashy argument because it doesn’t even fit the definition of the argument. Do you even know how to have a conversation, random_Motte_user, much less want to? Like how am I expected to work with this? Mods where are you guys isn’t this supposed to be a debate club? Why are all the users absolutely shit at debating.” Or something less inflammatory.
You're right, a lot of people argue with fallacious logic and straw men. We have a few rules against things like weakmanning and boo-outgroup, but generally speaking we don't mod on the quality of someone's arguments, let alone whether we think they are factually correct (or even truthful). That's the whole point of this place; moderating on tone, not content. I realize a lot of people dislike "You can make ridiculous and absurd claims as long as you're polite about it," but yes, that's how it works. That's where the "test your shady thinking" part of the Motte comes from. People can make ridiculous and absurd claims, and hopefully someone else will call them out on it.
I sympathize-I really do-that being in a distinct minority means you will get a lot of shit flung at you, and if you respond in a heated fashion you risk getting modded yourself. All I can say is that I think that lefties have gotten entirely too comfortable with everywhere else on the Internet being for them, and what you want is pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions.
You could say that (maybe not calling everyone shit at debating). You can certainly tell someone you think their argument is bad. Like, you have gone off on how you think "Prep is to enable gay orgies" is a bad argument (and you even had mods agreeing with you!). You wrote a thoughtful post about why you think that argument is wrong.
If you interpret what I’m suggesting as “pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions”, then I don’t know what to tell you. I feel I have said repeatedly the problem is not that right-wingers are saying mean things about left-wingers, it’s that bad debate etiquette is so pervasive here that it’s impossible to have a discussion.
Like kinda right now. I am scratching my brain on how, despite what I interpret as carefully wording my response to be as clear as possible about my opinions, you walked away with “justawoman doesn’t like reading mean things about her political beliefs like all the other leftists online”. I literally do not care if I get downvoted a lot, I don’t care if I get vitriol thrown at me, and can you show me which part of my responses implied I don’t want to read mean opinions?
To reiterate my position once more; I do not care if I read bad opinions here. But if I can’t debate the bad opinions because my opponent won’t respond to what I am saying, then yeah, something needs to change because none of us can test our shady thinking on here if we aren’t actually doing debate.
Yeah, but you still haven't told me what concretely you think we should do, other than be stricter. Maybe "@justawoman doesn't want to read mean things about her political beliefs" is not fair, but all your examples are basically people making bad arguments - and many of them are bad arguments! - which you want us to mod. We don't mod people for making bad arguments here! We mod people for making rude/uncharitable arguments or being insulting.
If your opponent won't respond to what you're saying, what do you want us to do about it? And again, I disagree with you, because from what I have seen, some of your opponents might go off on tangents about how much leftists suck, but most of your opponents are responding to what you're saying. Here, @07mk responded to your complaint about posts claiming leftists don't care about child rape. Here and downthread people steelman the "Prep is for gay orgies" argument. Are they good arguments, or arguments you agree with? Maybe not. And your response to @7mk was basically "I think your argument is bad, ergo the Motte sucks." What do you want us, as mods, to do about this?
You are not the first person to write about how you think the Motte has gone downhill (or was always bad) and that the problem is the users and we don't enforce quality standards enough. Some people have a long list of rules they think should be enforced that would prevent people from bad-posting. They all tend to be some combination of (a) a lot more work for the mods, who would basically be delegated as editors and proofreaders for all posts, and (b) banning more posters who fail to meet the complainant's quality standards. Which effectively does boil down to "bad people who make arguments I don't like."
I can certainly envision ways we could implement this. Back on reddit, when the discourse had been turning particularly sour and low-quality for a while, we would institute periodic "reigns of terror" wherein we would become far more trigger-happy about banning people for low-effort and disparaging comments. It's not clear to me if these were particularly effective long-term; short-term, people mostly buttoned up a bit and toned down their vitriol, but of course we got all the usual whining about how we banned Suzy but we didn't ban Jane. We probably could decide we're going to start getting much harsher about modding dunks and cheap shots and low effort comments, and the result would be to force people to write longer posts with more effort, but it would also suppress a lot of discourse. Would it be for the better, or would it drive more people off-site? We already get a lot of complaining that moderation is driven by word-count, or that too much moderation makes everyone afraid to post and thus kills conversations.
So what concretely do you want us to do that isn't demanding a shitload more work from us and also isn't heavily biased towards making the Motte exactly the place you would like it to be, but not necessarily what everyone else wants it to be?
I replied downthread the proposed solution and went into detail. I genuinely am asking if you have read it? The one about statistics and me collecting a data pool? I feel like it has answers already to these questions on it, and no! It's not going ban crazy, and it's not using up all your energy to proof-read.
Otherwise, concretely, I want you guys to be able to identify the debate fallacies going on and tell the users who are utilizing them to knock it off so that legitimate debate can be had and you're not driving off the leftists that you want. In your first example with 07mk, is a great one; no, I think he did not respond to what I said. I first posited a) their claim about leftists' attitude on child rape couldn't be substantiated with just anecdotal evidence and b) did they have any evidence other than anecdotal. Neither of those points were addressed in their response. To me, appropriate mod action would be something along the lines of "07mk, you cannot expect justawoman to continue the conversation if you don't continue it appropriately. Please respond to her two claims a) Do you think such a claim can be substantive on anecdotal evidence and b) do you have evidence other than anecdotal, then move on to the next claim." I said in my response earlier I would be happy to document these things privately so that I had data to back my claims and also to point out these general trends and condense them into a sentence or two so that the small mod team here has concrete examples to look out for.
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