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The immediate admission that you don't know BC's posting history, demonstrates that you're offbase with that categorization.
BC, and Alexander Turok, have both in recent days been defended against bans as 'left wing' being punished. But neither is remotely a leftwing poster.
Please, stick around. Every forum needs new blood.
If you're interested, the origins of the forum are that there is a blogger called Scott Alexander. His subreddit had a politics discussion thread. This thread moved to its own subreddit (r/themotte) and later to this site.
The aspiration is for civil, charitable political discussion and a place where tone is moderated rather than content.
Meh. If someone's so thin-skinned that their response to "you don't know the context" is a passive aggressive "sorry to disturb you I'm leaving and never coming back" instead of lurking more and/or digging through to find context, or at bare minimum shrugging off the critique and ignoring it, then they're probably not a good fit anyway.
I don't think threats to leave, from new people, or old people, or in real life, should be met with begging "no please stay." That sets a bad precedent. As a matter of principle I think you call the bluff and either they stay or they leave and it's a win-win either way.
If someone’s leaving because “I didn’t know people would get so angry when I asked them questions” then it’s possible that they could acclimate after getting used to the general tone of discussion here.
If someone’s leaving because “I didn’t know racism was allowed here” I would tell them to not let the door hit them on the way out.
It's not the initial cause that rubs me the wrong way, it's the response. If someone's response to any scenario is to passive aggressively threaten to leave then I would tell them to not let the door hit them on the way out.
If, after having read a decent sampling of the overall posts here, you feel that this is a good place but one guy is kind of a jerk to you once, then argue back or just ignore him. There's no need to try to guilt trip the rest of us into apologizing on his behalf or berating him or begging you to stay. If it's actually something outrageous and bannable, report it and wait for the mods. If not, ignore it and engage with the rest of the community. Don't let yourself get One-Guyed.
If, after having read a decent sampling of the overall posts here, you feel that the overall culture is not to your taste then just leave. You don't need to threaten it, and if you're brand new then you don't need to announce it. Nobody will notice or care. Don't try to guilt people into feeling bad that they could have had one more person if we were a completely different kind of place that catered to that one person's tastes.
If, after reading one message by one person, you assume that the overall culture is not to your taste based on that one experience then either lurk more or leave if you can't be bothered to do that.
I'm all for making this an open and welcoming place that lets people come here and engage with ideas and discussions. But (and I've made similar arguments about this in regard to dating profiles) negative filters aren't automatically a bad thing. Our goal is not to maximize the total number of people, but to optimize some balance between quantity and quality. Which means when someone sees this place and decides "this isn't for me" and leaves that's actually a good thing for us because we don't want people here who don't like what we are. Within reason, of course, we're not tautologically perfect and having more people would probably be better. But I'm not going to complain if some people self-select themselves out for petty reasons, that just means they were petty people and we don't need to stoop down to cater to that in order to retain them even if it succeeded at retaining them.
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No, you stumbled into a weird little internet site that cleaves more closely with old-style forums, with old-style rules that aren't explicitly defined, and the expectation that you at least lurk quietly to adapt to the overall local culture before making yourself known.
If you've been exposed to nothing but reddit and/or twitter for most of your online life, of course this place is going to look weird. You came in expecting an industrial rave and instead got an English Gentlemen's Club.
Stay around a bit. You'll be fine.
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This was an unusually drama heavy week. I’m going to encourage you to stick around to read the first quality contributions report after your arrival and see what we’re aiming for here.
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That's not what I meant, Im not even that frequent a commenter here these days.
Just defending that the moderation policy isn't really along a left/right divide.
I'd say rather, it's biased against arguments that amount to 'You are moral monster and cannot be tolerated'. This was, at least online, pretty strongly associated with the progressive advance over the last decade, so I thikn reaction against this gets pattern matched to reaction against leftism.
But 3 recent moderation debates have been around:
Alexader Turok: sneering contempt for populist conservatives, from a viewpoint within the general 'right', but a libertarian/EHC perspective.
Burdensome Count: moral outrage against American nationalism from a globalist, EHC perspective, though socially somewhat conservative
Contra Whinning Coil: somebody flaming out because Whinning Coil was allowed to express racist views.
The third was kind of liberal adjacent? But more like centrist disgust at racialist remarks. All three kerfuffles though, were not about left/right, but about reacting to an argument that amounts to 'how dare they!'
To be super clear, I also flamed out of here several years ago, because I too hold some how dare they views. I don't agree with the general philosophical aims of theMotte, and think it is founded in self-destructive tolerance-maxxing. I do not agree with the axiomatic viewpoints that found the philosophy of the motte and it;s moderation.
But I simply defend that it's not left-vs-right.
On this, it's not always just the racism element, more that what the mods appear to be selecting for is having a line of how much contempt you are allowed to give off when expressing a view. This seems mostly with the goal of preventing the forum from becoming trading insults back and forth.
Some positions inherently come with animus. There's a reason I scroll past the HBD discussions. But there are times I feel that users get away with a little more spice against groups that aren't typically here than if those groups were here, such as when feminism comes up.
This is a good point and, I think, a big reason why the mods are now levying permanent ban warnings against WhiningCoil. Every time he goes as far as he did last time, he causes a wave of discontent and many people have a hard time reacting to him civilly. The more inflammatory he gets, the more it's unreasonable to turn a blind eye to him but not to the people responding to him. I do not envy the moderators on decisions like this, because he's posted many a good post.
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this is all fair, I think. But it's aside my point that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism. They both come from a particular EHC right pov.
I agree that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism.
I was more saying that the forum can be perceived as a "right wing secret club" because, for example, a feminist might consider some of the writings about feminism to be boo outgroup, only there are no feminists here. Whereas a comment that is around the line of boo outgroup towards the right will be read by many people who are right leaning, so there are many more chances for an individual reading it to decide that it is over the line and create a hostile discussion.
This isn't necessarily an insult against the mods, because it is admittedly hard to decide when things are right on the line.
FWIW I've been warned by the mods here a couple times for not being sufficiently charitable towards feminists, and I didn't think what I had written was particularly unkind.
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To some extent this is grounded in the objective facts of the matter. We were chased off of two different subreddits because we allowed discussion of controversial views. The controversial views that the authorities took issue with were, invariably, right wing.
The mods try their best to be neutral but they’re only human. There is a set of consensus views here, that does affect the moderation and it affects how users perceive different types of posts, and that’s simply going to be an unavoidable fact of any discussion space you ever enter ever.
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Oh, come now. I could just as easily frame it as Turok and Count were banned because someone was allowed to criticize MAGAs and their feelings were getting hurt. Or are you going to argue that Whiningcoil (and many others!) is habitually more charitable and 'arguing to understand, rather than wage the culture war' than either of those two? I can provide receipts if you like but I assume we can both find better things to do with our time.
People got mad at WC for 1 sentence. His sin was failing to flatter our sacred sensibilities about race. That sentence was NOT saying "outsiders [to White society] are bad" it was saying "outsiders [to the family] are bad." The traditional deference to race is to triple-proofread your post to ensure it can't be misinterpreted in a bad way.
AT and (to a lesser extent) BC write paragraphs of emotion-slop that shouts the vibe on a neon sign. As far as I know, nobody is misinterpreting what they say though. Indeed, with AT and BC often time the vibe is the point.
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I think you misunderstand me. I was somewhat flippant because I didn't follow that one super closely, and don't remember the upset user in question. My point is more generally that the Motte's moderation philosophy is against 'moral monsters, end of story' framing. this framing was associated more with the left for the past decade, thus why places like the motte exist, and don't exist on Reddit, pre-Musk twitter etc.
But when Turok and Count jumped in, they didn't do it from the left, and the pattern matching of 'the Motte bans leftists' is incorrect.
Fuck bigots, fuck white people, and fuck low human capital, all get banned for a reason other than political association.
I will concede that 'fuck HBD deniers' seems to get a special pass on this space as some kind of legacy protection
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Charitability isn't the only thing that is being measured in any ban. I was just re-reading this post and its replies, in rehashing some old drama to satisfy myself, and there is a reply from Zorba below, to something else that I'm not sure what it was:
Rightly or wrongly, WhiningCoil has a bunch of AAQCs and is generally upvoted and considered a quality, if provocative, user. I can't really think of anyone who thinks the same of AlexanderTurok or BurdensomeCount, even on the left. Do they provide good steelmans of their own side? Seems like they don't, or you'd get more left-leaning posters defending their posts, or you'd get the more even-handed moderators giving more nuanced opinions of how they view the posts. If you've read a lot of moderator warnings, you see that they show their homework when giving any warning or ban.
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Just lurk for a while, or participate without criticizing the mods imo. The context is that people bitch about the mods' decisions (whether that is to ban or not) on a weekly basis, and I'm sure they're sick of it. People have been here for nearly a decade.
There's plenty of dysfunction in the community, but it's not driven by incompetence or ideological bias on the part of the mods. Even if, I have to say, I share your frustration for the Turok ban.
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I'd say it's more coming into a bar, and wondering why some of the regulars are discussing with the bartender whether another of the regulars (who, over the course of many nights before you got here, established a rep as a bit belligerent once they've had too many) should be cut off. Doesn’t mean it's not a drinking establishment, or that you're not welcome to belly up and order, but that there's backstory and conflict (like with any established group!) that you weren't around for. Don't let that worry you.
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I'm sad that this has been your first week here. It's not every week that two prolific posters are banned. This is actually one of the only places left on the Internet where you can say any idea, as long as it's said civilly. Unfortunately, it can be hard for some people to keep it civil, to the point where I think many posters have forgotten what civility even looks like.
I could make an effort post on why gay sex is morally terrible and it wouldn't be moderated - as long as I wrote it as if I was trying to convince a close gay friend, using the friendly language one would use with someone you will inevitably see every day. It would be downvoted terribly, because that kind of sentiment is wildly unpopular here. But it wouldn't be moderated. If I made the same post, with the same argument structure, but with some homophobic slurs added in and in the tone of a drill sergeant, it would be moderated in much the same way you see here.
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We’d really prefer it if you didn’t leave… we need new people to prevent this place from slowly withering away.
In any smaller and more tight-knit space it takes some time to get acclimated to the local customs, but that’s just like… normal.
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I for one do not believe you barged into our secret club.
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