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Sir_Pings_a_Lot  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   3253 thread views

Am I an acceptable poster for theMotte.org?

Hi, I'm a long time reader of Slate Star Codex and I used to post on the Reddit forum until I got banned. There are a few reasons that I believe I got banned.

  1. Uncharitably claiming that Leftist censorship was a threat to the rationalist community

  2. Advocating for violence

  3. Not being kind

I understand why all of these things could have been a problem on the Reddit community, but I would like to know if they're still going to be a problem here, since I don't want to invest a lot of time creating a profile and having good-faith discussions with people if I'm only going to be banned again. Here are the reasons that I think these three issues shouldn't be a problem anymore.

  1. I was right, and everybody who disagreed with me was wrong. The fact that the community had to move here proves it. I'm not expecting an apology but I think that time has proven me correct on that score.

  2. Violence is a completely justifiable response to tyranny. While calls to violence may be against Reddit rules (and the community was right to ban me from Reddit because my rhetoric could have caused problems for the mods) there are no such rules here. In fact, rdrama (which helped set up this offsite community, and whom you should all be grateful to) actively encourages calls to violence. If a rational and logical case can be made for violence then I think there is no good reason not to hear that case out. If you're forced to censor people you disagree with because you're unable to make a stronger case for pacifism over violence in the open marketplace of ideas, then you should question whether your pacifism is actually a worthwhile philosophy.

  3. Kindness and truth are different terminal values. If you optimize for kindness then it is self-evident that you will have to sacrifice truth at some point. Obviously the Reddit community has chosen kindness as its terminal value, but I'm hoping that this offsite community is enlightened enough to choose truth.

I'm linking to a few articles from my Substack here so you have a few examples of my style of writing and can make a better judgement about whether I would be a good fit for the offsite community. I'm also on rdrama where my username is sirpingsalot. If you think I'm not a good fit for the offsite either, then no hard feelings - I'm happy to take my ideas to more sympathetic communities instead. I just don't want to put in the effort of investing time and energy here if I'm only going to get banned again for the same reasons.

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  • For example, you calling me a "moron" seems very unkind, but I notice no mods are stepping in to punish you for that

Technically, she called you an idiot, and no one said anything until we (I) noticed it. Now I have - are you satisfied?

I have to say, now that I know you who are (I had my suspicions before), that if you follow your previous patterns, yes, you will probably wind up banned. Of course, you do have the option of changing your behavior so that doesn't happen. Hope springs eternal.

But this rather self-centered thread you started just to try to secure some sort of assurance from us that you can say whatever you want however you want without being banned does not bode well for your willingness to conform to community norms. The rules are, for the most part, pretty much the same as they were in the old sub, we just don't have to worry about AEO slapping us down because we let people be a little too forthright in their opinions on CW topics.

Thank you for appreciating the shades of distinction between "moron", "cretin" and "idiot". He's not a moron, he's smart. In a dumb way. Where he thinks showing off how he is sociopathic is somehow clever and impressive. Or perhaps that we will be intimidated by the veiled threat of drawing his ire upon us unless we fawn and slobber over him.

(I don't know why I'm writing in sentence fragments recently, I must have read something that affected my prose style).

OK, thanks for the candid assessment. I'll go elsewhere, no hard feelings.

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