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No one is rehabilitating South Africa. But the people there don't deserve what is happening to them.
I suppose you probably think that Red Army soldiers gang raping German woman was a good thing too.
Supposing this is an example of being uncharitable.
If any poster here believes that Red Army soldiers gang raping German women was a good thing, they are more than capable of expressing that thought plainly themselves; your assistance is not required.
You've been getting better at acquiring AAQCs rather than warnings lately, but this sort of post is flatly and egregiously against the rules. I'm giving you a one-day ban. Please do not post this way in the future; ban length will escalate if you do.
Gonna do anything about the goading, post-deleting obvious troll he's replying to? Or does the affirmative action policy cover that behavior
He's been warned to stop deleting posts or he'll be banned.
And you've been warned to stop goading mods and making things up. The last few times we've let pass, but the ankle-biting will stop. Now.
Clamping down on blunt feedback to the mods is a pretty serious change in norms around here, and a very negative development -- you should stop.
There's a difference between blunt feedback and ankle biting. If you want to question or criticize a mod decision that is of course allowed, but posting things like "What" or whining that we don't ban leftists and claiming we practice "affirmative action" is something Steve does constantly and has been told to stop. Just as we almost never mod people for reports, even people who constantly write spurious reports, but we had to tell him to stop writing reports calling people subhuman and talking about how leftists deserve to die. If you make it your goal to abuse the system and annoy us, yes, we're going to tell you to stop.
I guess I'll try to provide blunt feedback then. I apologize in advance for bringing in unrelated posts.
My entirely subjective opinion: In the span of a week, this thread is the second instance of very obvious bait going completely unnoticed without so much as a warning, even as a powermod explicitly shows up and participates in the discussion (without the modhat, given, but as the ban policy of the Motte is still the main topic in both cases I believe it counts as "speaking officially").
The first instance I believe has been given, frankly, a lot of leeway for a top level post that came out swinging with a thinly-veiled implicit accusation and hasn't (again, in my opinion) significantly improved the mode of communication or strength of argument in the following replies.
More bluntly, I find the (rather visible) pity/condescension towards
leftistunpopular points of view distasteful for a powermod, especially given the place's supposed focus on robust argumentation - at risk of being antagonistic, I would definitely not call that poster's median post "doing a good job of representing a point of view that is rare here" unless that was a polite euphemism. As I understand you're trying to keep it balanced as all things should be or something, but this is exactly how you get the affirmative action accusations.The second instance here is, well... I won't deny that @jeroboam's post is against the rules, but considering that he was rather obviously baited in a much less subtle way (really, argumentum ad Hitlerum in current_year?), I think a "proper" modhat warning would've more than sufficed, especially seeing as the bait itself remains unnoticed.
Notably, both posts were downvoted to hell - I hesitate to point this out, seeing as nobody likes getting dogpiled and updoot total isn't a very reliable metric (certainly a very gameable one), plus as you note downthread we're not a democracy so by itself this means jack shit. Still, it might serve as a very rough approximation of community reception when/if you ponder if it really is the children who are wrong.
FWIW I'm on record as a simp or the moderation here and haven't really felt any disconnect until now, but this is probably the first time I distinctly nootice a real lapse in vigilance, and especially disagree with your convenient blunt-feedback/ankle-biting distinction. The two are one and the same, cavalier dismissal of [thing you don't like] is not the way, and I sympathize with having to expend effort to separate wheat from the chaff every time you get more [things you don't like], but such is the way of the janitor.
I chose not to moderate that thread because flouncing isn't against the rules. It's not uncharitable, it's not partisan, it's not even particularly antagonistic. At worst it's a lie about whether one intends to come back.
If someone were to make a habit of it, I'd probably mod her under "egregiously obnoxious." That's the category which suits people who keep deleting their posts or performatively flouncing. Emphasis on "keep."
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