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By vague request of interest in the topic, I am copying over a post I made elsewhere to this thread.
The Chagos Islands Deal, or, The Next Westminster Scandal Is Already Here, You Just Haven't Noticed It Yet
The British-owned Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean, host a major US military base, Diego Garcia. Our government is now planning to sell the islands to Mauritius, and to pay them for the privilege.
Brief on the background. The Chagos Islands were originally uninhabited until France brought slaves from Africa to work on plantations in the late 18th and early 19th century. The descendants of these workers became known as Chagossians. The islands, along with Mauritius, came under British control in 1814 through the Treaty of Paris, and were administered as a dependency of colonial Mauritius for administrative convenience rather than any historic connection. In 1965, three years before Mauritius gained independence from British colonial rule, the UK separated the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Then, the UK removed around 2,000 Chagossians from the islands to make way for the Diego Garcia base. Mauritius maintains that the separation of the islands was illegal under international law, and has waged a legal battle to get them. In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the UK's ownership of the Chagos Islands was unlawful. The UN General Assembly subsequently passed non-binding resolutions demanding the UK withdraw.
Alright, onto the actual scandal. Over the last few months, the British Government has been rushing to put together a deal that would hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This rush was likely prompted by fears that the next US administration would oppose the handover, and seemingly because of this rush, the British government has kept giving in to new concessions that Mauritus is demanding to seal the handover. So now the UK will also pay $9bn over 99 years to lease the base. Oh, and it'll be inflation-linked. Oh, and front-loaded. Oh, and maybe it'll actually be $18bn instead. A substantial amount of money for a government that is raising taxes, cutting spending, and claiming there's a £22bn 'black hole' in the finances. In addition to the loss of a strategic military base, There are further concerns that the islands would likely end up hosting the Chinese military at the end of all this, too.
And in return for all this, in return for the territory and all that money, the UK gets... Nothing.
So to justify the seemingly impossible, the government has offered an increasingly bizarre list of reasons to hand over the territory, none of which hold up to scrutiny.
No, it is not. The Chagossians hate Mauritius and reject this deal because it doesn't give them self-determination and ownership of the Chagos Islands. In 2021, Mauritius criminalized "Misrepresenting the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory" i.e criminalized Chagossians stating they should own the islands themselves.
Nothing that would be binding. And besides, international law and what army? This is a US military base. If we care to hold it, it will be held, and there's no force that can take it from us.
No. It will cause other countries with dubious territorial claims on the UK, like Spain and Argentina, to smell blood in the water. Not to mention generally making the government look like gullible idiots.
Unfortunately, it is untrue that Keir Starmer monomaniacally follows international law. For example, his support for arresting Britons over speech crimes violates international law. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." - UN General Assembly, Resolution 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217(III) (December 10, 1948)
In 2022, they agreed to enter negotiations. And then in 2023 they realised how stupid handing the base over would be and pulled out of negotiations. This is also, of course, not an argument in favour of the deal.
I wish I was joking, but this is actually the argument they're currently using.
Okay, I did make that one up.
So what's actually going on here? There's not much that can be said with absolute certainty, but there is certainly some plausible alternative reasons that the government aren't so willing to state. For example, Keir Starmer was well aware of this case before becoming Prime Minister. In fact, Mauritius's chief legal advisor, Philippe Sands KC, is one of Keir Starmer's friends. Sands has seemingly (and maybe illegally) entered the islands in the past. Oh, and that last thing about changing the laws of physics to switch off the electromagnetic spectrum. That's also Philippe Sands. In other words, what's been presented as a national security claim from our own government is, in fact, smuggling a claim made by an adversary instead. There's another figure involved, too. Lord Hermer, who is seemingly involved in negotiations on the UK's side in some capacity, while also harbouring life-long anti-British sympathies. But his involvement seems less obvious here.
Anyway, now we have multiple opposition figures accusing Keir of, effectively, treasonous corruption.
Conservative MP Robert Jenrick:
Reform MP Nigel Farage:
Dominic Cummings:
I am gleefully awaiting the next reason the government presents for why we need to hand the islands over in full expectation that it is even more hilarious than the last.
Perhaps there’s a simple reason for this anti-British deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Philippe Sands and Lord Hermer, are both Jews. You even mentioned that Lord Hermer harbors anti-British sentiment. Subversive Jews are trying to undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Starmer, though not a Jew, fits the role of the useful idiot here.
Since you’re looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.
You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed. You have not proactively (or on demand) produced any evidence to suggest a conspiracy of the Jews. Or that they have anything to gain from weakening the British state. Inflammatory, boo-outgroup, throw it all in, toppings are free with this sandwich.
You've been warned in the past, and I'm giving you a short ban so you know they have teeth. Even our most fervent anti-semites hustle to meet posting standards, and I'd advise you do so too.
'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.
Since you're looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.'
Surely the above would just be Tuesday at the Motte rather than a banworthy post, no? I'm fairly confident I can find a number of comments like the above with minimal effort. Posts without any evidence to suggest a conspiracy, things that are inflammatory and boo-outgroup, etc.
The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.
Tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Replace janitorial duty with an AI that flips the political valency of a given comment before someone is asked to judge it. Bonus points if you can train the AI to learn a given user's ideology. If we manage to abstract reality enough, it's the first step towards black mirror!
We definitely also mod stuff like that. The ceteris is never paribus, sure, but it’s still against the rules.
I recognize that we don’t see or choose to act on everything.
It would be helpful to understand sometimes why you don't mod particular posts, such as this one. Reporting, most of the time, just feels like a waste of clicks these days; raising a stink in a comment sometimes attracts a statement, but between poisoning the atmosphere (you can't really publicly call out a comment without it coming across as a personal attack) and most likely putting whatever moderator chooses to respond on the defensive from the outset, it's also not really a good way to go. Would it be possible for the mods to aim to make a public statement on every post that receives more than a certain number of reports, even if just to explain why they disagree with the reporters' view of it violating rules?
(I don't think "you are the only one who reported that particular post though" would be a slam-dunk retort; if you look further downthread, there were definitely more people who were unhappy with it, so if this didn't translate to reports that is just a sign that this part of the community has given up on the reporting mechanism)
I feel called out at the moment, so, first, my mea culpas.
@Amadan I am aware that being a rightist partisan is not very conducive to the kind of space that the moderates wish to nurture. I, myself, personally moderate spaces where I have to manage people being political. Knowing this makes my behaviour even more unacceptable, and for that I apologize. I don't really have an excuse for my rhetoric, for liking the heat instead of the light. But I am not a passing internet troll, or fishing for responses from outraged liberals. I have been here in one form or another, and I actually like being here.
Moving forward, I will try to not clog up your moderation queue with my hot takes. I'll try.
@4bpp I disagree with the notion of reports as an enforcement mechanism because it is trivially easy to game, if one is a motivated bad actor. If an individual post is bad, one can downvote it. If it annoys one sufficiently, one can rebut it (although I concede the effort may not be worth the squeeze in nearly all cases.) Reporting is the tool of last resort, when something is noisome and of no value whatsoever.
But you report so much that the lack of response feels like a waste of effort?
I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature. Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be. But the demos has an opinion, too. Expressed through upvotes. Metathoughts about the pernicious nature of such social media systems nonwithstanding, is that not the fairest way of determining the merit of what someone is saying?
(I admit that the proposition of 'being maximally evil in posture to EA people' is horrifying, but no more so than the people who constantly talk about 'race realism'.)
I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave. It's not like I'm running around conspiratorially reporting the TracingWoodgrains of the world. They left. Cannot I talk to those of a similar ideological bent? It's not like I'm pretending to be objective or anything. Am I being asked to keep it down to make sure the last leftists don't just pull up stakes and leave, leaving the Motte a witch-chamber?
I've been on a hot streak of hot takes recently, so I'll probably take a step back for a while. But if you have a problem with my posts or you believe that I don't belong here, you can say so. You don't have to write me up in a post complaining about moderation. That's all I have to say.
We aren't trying to nurture a "moderate" space. I personally am a moderate, but many of the mods are not and being "moderate" is not the Motte's ethos. We have lots of rightist partisans here (and a few leftist ones). The problem is not being partisan; the problem is being antagonistic and inflammatory just to dunk on your enemies.
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In what way are reports an "enforcement mechanism"? They do not enforce anything - unlike votes and comments, they don't even leave a public record. Reports are a mechanism for drawing the attention of moderators, and nothing else.
I do not come here for a discussion that is curated solely or primarily by the demos, as defined by everyone who has an account and bothers to click arrows getting a vote. There are plenty of spaces like that all across the internet, many with bigger crowds, and they generally don't work, or at least they don't work to produce a space in which political discussion that is worth reading can be had. An internet forum, in its natural form, is an island in Scott's meta-libertarian archipelago, not a community of people who are chained together by birth and geography and are thus compelled to organise in a way that to them feels fair - it is easy to join, and fairly easy to leave. The appeal of the archipelago is that any island can offer whatever it wants, be it democracy or compulsory-two-buckets-of-shit-a-day Soviet hell; and if you don't like it, you can just leave for a different island, or go and create your own and hope that the customers will come. The Motte's pitch was not a democracy, but a carefully tended autocratic garden with a particular prominently stated set of rules. If it devolves into a democracy, and if these rules are being enforced selectively or not at all, then in the best case it is simply because its operators are inattentive, in which case reporting helps draw their attention to the right place. In a worse but more realistic case, they are failing the criteria they promised to uphold due to bias or the human fear of social censure, as hinted at by @Amadan in his parallel response, in which case reporting serves to convey my disapproval, thus levelling the social censure incentive landscape a little. In the worst case, they are simply committing sticker fraud. I cling to the hope that that is not the case, because exit, while cheap, is not free, and the archipelago is actually finite and shrouded in a fog of imperfect information.
On top of this, on the object level, the main signal that our demos sends by up- and downvoting is "we want more content that helps the right wing". I can see that from my own posting history easily enough - I generally make posts in a fairly narrow range of length, type and sophistication, and the only ones that reliably get over +20 upvotes are those that contain strong unhedged defenses and concurrences with right-wing talking points. Conversely, any attempt to directly argue against right-wing positions is capped at +10, and without careful hedging and gratuitous but-of-course-leftists-also-bad disclaimers it's easy to land in the negatives.
That's perfectly consistent with a scenario in which the community heavily leans towards your preferences, and you trust that the mods will take care of it when it doesn't even without your prodding.
At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.
Of course it is also your fault. When you make posts that are actively unpleasant to a class of readers, such as ones that are pitched to rally your tribe to bring about their defeat or ones that say it's "always acceptable to [engage in the act of harassing, intimidating, or abusing them, especially habitually or from a perceived position of relative power]" (circumscription courtesy of dictionary.com) (here), you encourage them to leave. The obvious mirrored example is unfortunately not so effective because American online right-wingers have all grown a thick skin out of necessity, so maybe try to imagine how inclined you would feel to stay in a forum where a bunch of Mexicans are circlejerking each other about plans on how to illegally immigrate into the US and defraud dumb gringos out of their money, or Russian soldiers planning torture of American volunteers they caught in Ukraine if you want an even more colourful example.
Why do you think the current staff loathes you? I have no negative feelings about you. Your record is 2 AAQCs and no warnings! You're a good poster. You're just on the left which means you get downvoted a lot. Sorry about that, but that is how the community is, as you've observed.
Whether or not Zorba uses his "doge" mechanism next time he needs new mods, the way to become a mod is not by kissing our asses.
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It doesn't disqualify you, and none of that would have helped you. If you want the job, I'll be more than happy to vote for you if I'm nominated for nominator the next time around.
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Fuck no.
Well, maybe if someone else wants to do it. But no, we get enough flack when we do mod posts and people are unhappy about it; now you want an open forum for people to bitch every time we don't mod a post? Fuck if I'm going to explain myself for every post I mod or don't mod. (As for "a certain number of reports," it's pretty rare for a post to receive a large number of reports and not get modded. Usually those are unambiguously pretty bad.)
Look, I think we are pretty damn transparent. We usually explain ourselves, we let people argue with us, we engage civilly on threads where people are calling us shitty mods. Sometimes we are too transparent, because it just invites ankle-biting and rules-lawyering. I go through phases where I will patiently explain to someone why I modded them and let them argue with me for an entire thread, and phases where I just say "Banned, bye" because I feel like it's a waste of time explaining things to bad-faith grudge-holders who don't really care about our reasoning, only that we didn't mod the way they think we should.
We do read every single report. Including yours. I would guess we actually act on about 5% of all reports.
Why does any particular mod not mod a particular post? It might be because the mod thinks it's okay, it might be because it's borderline and the mod isn't sure whether they think it merits action. It might be because the mod thinks it merits action but doesn't want to be the one to make the call, for various reasons. I will frequently look at a mod queue full of "borderline" posts and think "I don't want to deal with these right now." Maybe I don't have time to think about them, or maybe I'm in a bad mood and am afraid I might be too trigger-happy, so I will hope some other mod makes the decision. Then maybe I see three days later no one has made the call and it's still in the queue, and I sigh and approve it because clearly no one felt strongly about it and I'm not going to come and ban them three days later.
As it happens, that particular post by @crushedoranges was discussed in the mod channel. It was definitely borderline. We were split about 50/50 between "It's a bad post but not a rules violation" and "This deserves a warning." In the end we defaulted to no action. On a different day, a different mod might have warned or banned him. @crushedoranges posts a lot of crappy comments like that so he's on thin ice, but this time he skated. Does that mean we are not always 100% consistent and that sometimes a much worse comment will pass while a less bad comment earns the poster a ban? Yes, yes it does mean that! Yes, that definitely happens!
So it goes.
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