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On the sidebar it says "This website is 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." In this thread, it is claimed "the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here."
After my ban for this comment, it's hard to take that seriously. It did not include personal attacks, name-calling, strawmanning, or attempting to enforce ideological conformity. It "spoke plainly" and provided evidence. Yet the mods banned me for it, saying I was being an "immense pain in the ass."
I think the mods, and most people here, believe that they want this to be an open discussion forum with people of many different viewpoints, but when they're actually confronted with it, they feel it's an "immense pain in the ass." They called me an "obnoxious trolling shitstirrer." Yes, I am a shitstirrer in the sense that I say things that go against the dominant ideological viewpoint here, and I know in advance that hostility is likely to result. But isn't that what you want here, rather than another online echo chamber? I'm sure many of you have experience being "shitstirrers" in online spaces where you're in the ideological minority, now the shoe's on the other foot.
The mods accused me of "snarling" at my enemies, which gets to the meat of the issue: do you want an ideologically diverse forum or not? I freely admit I have a contempt for forms of conservatism and white nationalism I see as third-worldist. (Anti-vax, raw milk, conspiratorial, superstitious, fetishizing low-skilled manual labor, etc.) That's why I disagree with you guys and don't identify as part of your political tribe. If you think I'm a "leftist," try talking to a real one, the kind who uses terms like "patriarchy" or "heteronormativity" non-ironically. They do NOT like you. They see you as a malignant, cancerous influence on America. If you don't want to have a discussion forum with people who dislike you, change your rules to state that they aren't welcome. If, on the other hand, you want people from other tribes to be in this "jury," then you've got to accept them as they are rather than the imagined versions who disagree with you but like and respect you and never come around to actually posting here.
It seems to me that what some people here want is a forum with "left-wing" equivalents of David French. For the unfamiliar, David French is an allegedly "conservative" columnist for the NYT whose articles are just one after another telling liberals they're right and that conservatives are gross and mean and only ever making "we need 50 Stalins" criticisms of the Left. Thing is, French doesn't play this role for free. And you should be glad you don't have David French's, as I suspect that they have had a detrimental impact on the Left's electoral fortunes. If your only exposure to "conservatives" is people like David French, you're going to get a warped view of American politics that will lead to bad election strategy.
None of this is to say you should get rid of your rules against shaming, strawmanning, name-calling, etc. Maybe a new rule should be "be as polite as possible without being insincere." I admit that this is a tough balance to strike, I just think that right now the Motte is too far toward forced politeness leading to ideological conformity.
While I think a 1 week ban might be a bit excessive for that post alone, I can not say that this was a high quality post.
Your whole first meandering paragraph reads like a strawman to me. If you really described "new narrative on the Online Right", you could have linked and quoted them directly. Then I would know that I am looking at a weakman instead of a strawman at least.
Then you treat HBD (including scare quotes) as a synonym for white supremacy. Guatemalans are ethnically a mixture of Hispanic and Mayan ancestry. I do not know a lot about Latin America, but I think the Mayans had one of the well known pre-European empires, and probably had less of a link between violence and reproductive success than the Aztec. At least provide a link to some self-professed HBD proponent claiming that Guatemala is a ""third-world s***hole"" due to their genetic makeup.
Your post was bad for reasons which are totally orthogonal to you being anti-HBD. If you had started
and then proceeded to present a strawman of free trade proponents, that would likely have netted you less downvotes, but it would have been just as bad.
It is well known that this is a forum where the majority of people are witches, which means that they get away with being snarky sometimes when they really should not. Sure, being extra-snarky, getting -39 downvotes (but also 12 upvotes) and a ban is very theatrical, but not constructive. Instead, I would prefer if you reported comments stating pro-witch opinions which were inflammatory and poorly sourced.
Guatemalans are pretty heavily Mayan, to the point that describing them as ‘mixed’ is a bit of a stretch- most Latin American countries are indeed mostly mestizo, but Guatemala is mostly Indio- in the sense of still living in villages.
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I'm not anti-HBD. I'm anti third-worldism.
Youve never plainly stated what that means.
Principled opposition to neutrality in the socioecopolitical conflict between the United States and Russia?
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