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Notes -
You are not the only one.
If so many people are channeling @HlynkaCG, maybe we should let him back?
Maybe he already is back. OP is carrying the mantle of Hlynka with the kind of things he has been arguing. I actually believe that he is Hlynka but I am not 100% certain about it.
Random question. I just wrapped up the chapters in Gibbon about Belisarius, so I wanted to ask. Is he your namesake because you imagine yourself the greatest general of a degenerate and declining age, or because your wife is one of the top 10 most flagrant whores of history?
I kid, I kid. But man, what a way to go down in history. Greatest general of an era, and the biggest cuck.
Are you a Whining Coil?
That is pretty a stupid and insulting question but I will answer earnestly against my better judgement.
I picked the figure Belisarius because he was the greatest general in the fight for the restoration of the roman empire, but I certainly don't see myself as a general, or great general. And it was a bit random I chose that name over different ones. Just one of the figures of history I liked. It is good for us to be inspired by history and part of a degenerate and declining age is this hostility to a positive historical heritage. Why should I have to be attacked by you for picking the name of a great general?
Procopius was generally considered unreliable writer who promoted plenty of sleaze which is what is these claims are based on. Even if one was to accept that his wife really was a whore, he is still a positive figure in general.
It is your choice to take this kind of framing on a figure that is certainly much more known for being a great general than his wife's alleged exploits. We have enough problems dealing with much more common collective cuckholdery of our times to worry about the purity of Belisarius wife.
Be less antagonistic, and get a sense of humor.
I would expect this quality of moderation from 4chan, not TheMotte.
Of course you know I have had a beef with your partiality and believe that you treat users and tribes you are sympathetic to favourably, but this is an entirely new level of tendentiousness. User A makes an off-topic post trying to relate User B's username to a common slur/fixation, User B responds in a mildly standoffish manner but actually clarifies the origin of the username, and User B - only User B - gets a modhat reprimand? Of course, I fully expect that any objections will be met with the same old "I disagree, and no, I am not going to justify anything" sort of response from you. Is that what it is going to be, or do you have something better to offer?
(I don't even understand what you find so funny. Is it just "haha bro just called him a cuck"?)
The fact that you think I am being favorable to @WhiningCoil, of all people, or his "tribe," is much funnier than anything posted in this thread.
I have occasionally been accused of reading people wrong, and I'll cop to it when it happens. I read @WhiningCoil as injecting a bit of jocularity concerning a historical name he happened to have just been reading about. Not literally accusing @Belisarius of being a cuck with a famously whoreish wife, or being general of an empire in decline. I read it this way because I know @WhiningCoil's posting habits, and I also know @Belisarius's tendency to be aggressive and overly serious with anyone who argues with him about anything.
If the post was just an attack on a user for his username because WC didn't like him and saw an opportunity for a cheap shot, my response would have been different. Instead, I told @Belisarius to cool it because the exchange doesn't warrant this kind of heat and he is prone to escalation.
Is that a sufficient answer for you? Because that's as much as I feel like justifying myself to you, because yes, per that post you linked to, I think you're a bad faith objector whose objections are purely tribal, and I will continue to dismiss your demands that every time two people have an exchange, I carefully admonish everyone involved and make sure I am evenly distributing my admonishments along tribal lines.
Does the objection here break along tribal lines somehow? I couldn't tell who of the two is more "right-wing" for sure. At most, my sense is that WhiningCoil is more of a prolific and popular user that I figure you like, and my objections are "tribal" insofar as "users that Amadan likes" constitute a tribe. In that case, though, any objection against favouritism is definitionally tribal, and in your concept space, the only people who can have "good faith" objections to moderator bias are those who benefit from it. Maybe you think that is right and well, but then I can only say it is unfortunate if it turns out you only favour users who lack the principles to protest favouritism they benefit from.
(Though maybe you think that not finding a beloved right-wing slur intrinsically funny is already sufficient evidence of bias against the Right that rises to the level of bad faith...?)
To be fair, I should say I do appreciate that you explained your reasoning here. It does help me understand why you arrived at that decision, though I still think that the optics of it are terrible and it betrays an extreme double standard that you can muster the level of charity to interpret WhiningCoil's post, which really does not read as anything other than a wanton drive-by attack to me, as an innocuous "bit of jocularity" while also the level of anti-charity to interpret Belisarius's really rather level-headed response as "antagonistic".
Your sense is lacking in perspipacity.
That you believe this confirms my belief that you do not actually pay attention to moderation and are only complaining because you have an axe to grind.
I mod people I like all the time, often with great regret. Even more often, I decline to mod people who have been reported on what I considered insufficient grounds, even when I frankly dislike that person very much.
Wrong. While someone who gets modded a lot for their behavior and complains that our moderation is unfair does obviously present an obvious bias that we're going to factor in, we do hear everyone out. If I were only taking seriously people who benefit from moderation, I'd put more weight on your objections - to my knowledge, you have never been modded.
I know the history of "cuck" as a right-wing slur, and maybe you should consider that the word triggered a disproportionate response from you when @WhiningCoil was using it in a more literal sense (and talking about the historical figure Belisarius, not the poster @Belisarius).
Now if WC speaks up and says "No, actually, I did wonder if @Belisarius was into cuckolding" - well, I'll own to granting him too much charity (and give him a warning not to do that again).
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