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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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At the same time, it's apparently totally acceptable to run around this forum screeching DEMOCRATS ARE GROOMERS

You... do know this is primarily a reactionary forum and is consequentially going to have a right-wing skew (thus be a bit more concerned about traditional purity, per Haidt's Moral Foundations) to it no matter the actual leaning of the participants, right?

The problem is that "anyone interested in teaching sex stuff to the under[age] demographic implies they're [at least not dis-interested in or concerned with] potentially increasing the number of under-[age]s having sex in the world" is... well, it's more trivial than it really should be to find edge cases where this is actually true.

But it's trivial to argue the opposite from a purity standpoint- average age of virginity loss is at all-time highs and Gen Z/A are on average more sexually conservative than their Gen X/Y teachers. So the progressive argument that more sex ed is having a cooling effect on under[age] sex is actually valid, but you actually have to make that argument in the first place, and it's confounded by the rise in transgenderism (though you could just point out the increased emphasis on it in schools lags its rise).

Of course, that's still not going to be enough to justify the abuse of State power to abduct children from families, but in fairness nobody tried to justify that one.

  • -23

You... do know this is primarily a reactionary forum and is consequentially going to have a right-wing skew (thus be a bit more concerned about traditional purity, per Haidt's Moral Foundations) to it no matter the actual leaning of the participants, right?

I don't know who you are or how long you've been around, but it's pretty frustrating to hear you say that. Mere months ago we were being told (by - wonder of wonders! - Naraburns) that actually, the forum is politically balanced, and liberals were too thin-skinned and used to dominating online spaces:

I have audited moderation, AAQCs, and (using your data!) the demographics of the sub itself. I have never found any evidence of an anti-left bias. I have found copious evidence of the absence of a left-wing bias, which many left-wingers appear to interpret as an anti-left bias. Part of the problem, I assume, is that it is much easier to write polemics than it is to write constructively; even when writing constructively, we tend to respond to criticism, which is itself a sort of polemic. And part of the problem is that, as one of the few rational platforms that permit right-wing viewpoints at all, we do seem to have something like an "overrepresentation" of the right here, though it is perhaps inescapably difficult to say for certain...After all, I'd conducted multiple audits in response to users whining about anti-left biases, and simply never found any evidence.

But I happened to have a moment to check your work, and all I can say is--what? Unless the vote tallies have shifted quite a lot since you did this work, I find your tally for November 15 to be nigh incomprehensible, to the point where I am inclined to simply disregard the others without further audit.

But based on the criteria you provided, I once again find no particular anti-left bias in this space--though I do worry that claiming there is a bias, in a comment that (due to the high effort nature of gathering the data) few users are likely to challenge on the particulars, is one way to encourage anti-left bias, and discourage leftists from posting here. At minimum, you seem to think that many comments I coded as "other" are in fact comments that would discourage leftists from posting here. That seems like you indirectly claiming that leftists are simply too thin-skinned to abide even the slightest disagreement. I do not think that is true, but if or when it is true, then I think it is the foundation of the sub, rather than the users or their posts, to which such people actually object.

You're the second person I've seen this week saying something to this effect. But we've gone from a mod calling us 'users whining about anti-left biases' to 'of course this place leans right you fucking idiots' so fast I'm getting whiplash.

For the record, I think Naraburns is a good mod.

I think you're missing a distinction.

The mods are generally balanced. I could even be convinced they're slightly biased in favor of people on the left.

The commenters here definitely skew anti-mainstream and anti-woke, which is very close to being synonymous with skewing rightwards in the post-2016 era. This has gotten more and more blatant over the last several years, imo.

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