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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29205 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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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.

  • -76

@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 evil fascism wokeism Jews the mods.

this is fascism

... duh.

you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism

so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow

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 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.

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.

One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children

I'm not sure exactly which post you are referring to, but I know another recent post that asserted that got modded.

and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies

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.

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?

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."

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”

Then they are wrong and they don't actually look at our mod log.

and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.

This is incorrect. Every week I mod multiple people for "dunking on leftists" (and predictably get bitching and downvotes for it).

The really funny part is banning people for describing the exact perspective of this user in terms he would agree with himself, re.

It is the common good for everyone that social conservatism, much like institutional Civil War era slavery, is no longer tolerated by civilized societies, and is socially ostracized. Such as, for example, Turning Point. I do not believe that organization has anything useful to say, and so I find the motivations for why someone would want to listen to useless things dubious, unless they found it useful.
progressivism cannot exist alongside conservatism, because all of the progress done by the former will always be challenged by the latter.
the value of a forum like this is that it allows progressives, at least such as myself, to observe a rich diversity of right-winged thinking to identify the more insidious and subtle dogwhistles indicating the traits of a conservative, so one may steer clear of them in IRL interactions.

There needs to be some discussion about this. I'd be happy with a rule requiring all claims of "this is what leftists believe" to be backed up by quotes. But there needs to be some way to say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" without breaking the rules, especially when literally everyone involved on all sides agrees it's true.

If you want to have a good faith discussion of this, I will be happy to discuss it with you. I just have low expectations because all previous attempts have resulted in you accusing us of running cover for leftists, being hypocrites, etc.

The key point you are missing is that what one person says is not representative of an entire group, and that's why we have an entire paragraph in the rules about being specific about who you're talking about:

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

So when you say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" - who is they? Because it's certainly not "leftists." It is definitely some leftists. Every bad thing you have ever said about leftists - everything you've ever been modded for for saying about leftists - if you said "There exist leftists who say and think this," I would agree with you. And if you said "That person who's posting is openly saying he has no intention of communicating with us," you would not be modded for that.

But when you take that person as an example and say "He's a leftist, therefore he proves that leftists are blahblahblah..." I mean, do you even see the distinction I am making here, or am I talking to air? You think we're ignoring the behavior of individual bad actors, when those bad actors usually get modded. But because those bad actors exist, you want us to treat every leftist as being the same, and then get mad that we don't ban leftists on sight.

And if someone comes rolling in with "Right-wingers are a bunch of racist, sexist, anti-semitic homophobes" - well, some people in this forum wear all those labels proudly! And yet it is clearly not true of all rightists, such generalizations are clearly intended to be derogatory, and we would mod someone who said that. And you'd be angry at us if we didn't mod someone for saying that.

I don't know why it is so hard for you to distinguish between "What this jerk says" and "This jerk is speaking for everyone who votes like him and thus they can all be treated as interchangeable."

accusing us of running cover for leftists,

https://www.themotte.org/post/1229/quality-contributions-report-for-october-2024/267191?context=8#context

Literally a quote from naraburns two months ago saying you guys do affirmative action moderation for leftists already. If you know me as well as you claim, you know nothing offends me more than "it's not happening and it's a good thing it is, you're crazy for noticing" tactics.
That's the level of good faith I expect from discussions about moderation here, which I suppose means I'm breaking my rule of not engaging with manipulation attempts

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.

I mean, your answer was "it depends on what you mean," and you confirmed that you do go out of your way to give extra leeway to "heterodox" posters who get "hot under the collar," which obviously seems to include posters like "antifa" and the kind of rude behavior that results from hot-under-the-collarness.

I don't think you're manipulative, and don't have a problem extending mod charity to real minority posters rather than ones that show up to troll and bait; notice it wasn't me complaining about your moderation in that thread--it was 4bpp, and I only jumped in to ask that question because other mods had denied it before.

Most of that is that you moderate without the snarky comments amadan uses to bait out behavior he can ban people for

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