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It's less about general criticism, and more that this is ymeskhout's specific hobby horse that has been flayed for years at this point, and regularly comes with standards called for against Trump that were not followed or applied (in general or by ymeskhout personally) on the lawfare against Trump. As with other pet topics, it repeats old themes to the point of evaporative cooling, which then leverage's ymeskhout's bad habit of dismissing/forgetting/claiming prior engagements on points either didn't occur or have been dismissed, for lack of an engaged opposition to engage otherwise.
As far as Trump-related lawfare goes, ymeskhout's a partisan and an old one at this point. At this point I only pay attention when he starts being petty towards people calling him out, like how this time he edited-in a callout- against The_Nybbler and then edited it out after being called out for it.
You're not wrong, but if we modded everyone who flays dead horses, we'd have a lot fewer regulars.
(I like his posts because he explains law stuff in a lawyerly way, even if he is a bit cute sometimes when specifically criticizing Trump. But his theory that Trump is engaging in lawfare as a fundraising project does not seem unreasonable to me.)
The collapse button is helpful in this case.
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I'm not precisely sure what drives 'if we modded this' comes from, because to the best of my knowledge neither myself or the Nybbler have called for mod-hat moderation of it. I cannot speak for @The_Nybbler, but I know I did not report the post.
It's certainly an argument... but it also runs into the general point of 'and this is not new or unique to Trump,' which comes back, as many things do, to whether Trump is uniquely bad, or if Trump is getting unique censure for things that go on as a matter of course. Lawfare and fundraising is an incredibly well established practice in a diversity of forms, from non-governmental agencies like the ACLU running literal solicitation campaigns to continue legal activity broadly seen as ideologically partisan now adays to government-entangled ones such as the Obama-era practice of offering corporate settlement offers that resulted in corporations giving money to non-profits or interest groups aligned with the party of government that was taking the corporations to court. There is an entire spectrum, and entire genres of fundraising solicitation emails of '[important thing] is at court- we need YOUR money NOW!'
Which, of course, brings back to the point of distinction of when someone is accused of pretext. 'I know it when I see it' is not a credible standard when highly subjective, and 'this is a Serious Thing' is not a credible claim when contextual examples of lawfare are available that were not held to similar standards. Selective appeals or enforcement of standards are related to the concept of anarcho-tyrrany precisely because the choice to enforce them is generally pretextual. When a general category of action is widespread, the choice to enforce sanction can simultaneously be 'valid' (there is a broken rule) and pretextual (the broken rule is not the reason the sanction is being enforced).
Okay, cool, so is your complaint that he's attacking Trump in an unprincipled fashion, or that he took a poke at nybbler in the process? Because I have some sympathy for the latter complaint (and believe me, it's hard for me to muster any sympathy where nybbler is concerned), but for the former, I have none, because whether or not I agree with your criticisms, this is exactly the kind of argument that is the Motte's bread and butter.
Solely Nybbler and the edit-trolling, and I have made no request or advocacy for mod action against even that.
As mentioned in a different post, I try to no longer engage ymeshkout on top-level post topics due to my judgement of him as a bad-faith actor in iterative engagements. I don't use block lists as a general principle, so the primary instances I respond are when he [insert potentially imprecise but generally negative action] other posters.
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Really though the first three meaty paragraphs are wholly unnecessary to the post. I don’t think that should be subject to moderation but should be discouraged. Part of “speaking plainly” is getting to the point.
I do often wonder if I am overexplaining things. Because of my job, I don't think I am well calibrated on how much non-lawyers need/want something explained. I'm a nerd about minutiae like the history of civil procedure and personally find the subject interesting so when I started writing about a "bad" lawsuit, it seemed relevant to include some background on what makes a "good" lawsuit. The point, one which I probably should've been clearer about, is that we used to have this very formal and stodgy standards for how lawsuits are worded but that changed in favor of something less formal. The intent was to encourage people to speak more plainly, and I showcased the Dioguardi case to highlight how low the bar was. The risk with less formal standards is that people might ramble on, and so I thought it was relevant that courts want you to get to the point when you file a lawsuit.
All those things combined (less formality, preference for short and plain statements) showcase the challenge judges have with strictly policing the gratuitous parting shots lawyers/clients include in their lawsuits. So towards that end I highlighted Armstrong's example as a rare case of a lawsuit being dismissed for being too long, as a way to illustrate the limits of what judges are willing to put up with. The point was to set the stage for how Trump's 193-page lawsuit should be evaluated. I think if I just linked you a 200 page PDF and said "this is bad", few people would understand why.
With all that said, do you still think the intro was totally unnecessary?
I think your post is very good. It flowed well and the order of presentation made sense to me (setting the legal context up first--it could have been shorter but I greatly appreciated the history lesson; it's funny how much understanding you can get from finding out that things used to be done very differently, or are done differently in other places).
FWIW I'm not sure that asking everyone for more explicit feedback is worthwhile. I think there are multiple comments in this thread that are really desperately scrounging for a criticism and aren't engaging in good faith. Asking them what they want is pointless, because what they really want is for their opponents to go away, but they can't really say that.
Thanks, I still think asking for feedback is worthwhile because it gives people the opportunity to rebut the conclusion that they're only upset because I criticized something they like. If they refuse to do so, that's on them. If they provide helpful feedback, then it's a win for both of us.
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Yes. Because it wasn’t really about pleading. The issue at hand is lawfare. That is, the rules relating to pleading don’t really implicate why Trump lost and lost “bigly.” The second part is interesting on its own which is you (and seemingly the court) think Trump is using the court for extralegal reasons. But hey, thanks for the free content (I don’t mean that sarcastically — my comments are just my two cents).
On the other hand, I haven’t done Civ Pro since my 1L year (in a transactional practice) so perhaps not the target audience.
We might ultimately disagree on this point but I still would be interested in any thoughts you might have. How the pleading was structured seems core to my argument that it was a pretextual lawsuit from the start. I can't read Trump or Habba's mind, but I can look at the pleading and immediately notice some red flags which are inconsistent with "good faith lawsuit".
From your post:
For a full accounting as to why you can read the 65-page opinion but the short summary is the lawsuit was a confusing constellation of disconnected political grievances Trump had smooshed together into a laundry list of allegations that could not conceivably be supported by any existing law. For example, Trump's lawyer Alina Habba alleged malicious prosecution without a prosecution, alleged RICO violations without predicate offenses, alleged obstruction of justice without a judicial proceeding, cited directly to reports that contradicted their claims, and on and on.
That is all about the merits of Trump’s case. You also point out bullshit responses to bullshit claims. That is, the case was frivolous not because of the length of the pleadings but because of the shitty content of what was plead.
The history of pleadings is entirely separate from the point you are getting at.
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Usually discouragement comes in the form of downvotes and feedback, which he's getting plenty of. Generally I don't think it's the mods' role to discourage prolixity.
Agreed — shouldn’t be a moderation point.
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Is there any theme discussed at this point on the Motte for which one could not make the exact same argument as the one you make against @ymeshkout?
People tend to have their opinions, which they change rarely through discussion. And culture war issues are only so many.
If your contention were made into a rule, this site would need to shut down.
This mistakes my contention. The contention is not that a position doesn't change and this should be banned- the contention is that the position is re-raised regularly without regard or even accurate reflection of previous engagements, and with poor conduct towards other in the process.
Ways to avoid this include not misrepresenting people's current positions, not mis-representing previous engagements, and not making one's hobby-horse a top level post with regular slights towards other posters.
This also describes many other regular posters on the Motte (and @ymeskhout much less so than many others I could name), and yet strangely receive far less pushback, and even provoke resentful carping when they push it too far and get modded.
Most reports we see are 100% partisan and can be summarized as "A person I don't like said something I don't like."
Both sides(tm) do this, but because of the increasingly skewed nature of the Motte, the majority is directed at people like ymeskhout expressing left-wing viewpoints.
What's strange about it?
The well established climate currated by the mods here is that not pushing back against many sorts of posters is a survival strategy, as the sorts of posters who would push back strenuously against the Darwins or Julius's of the motte were also the ones more likely to be banned than the Darwins or Julius's of the Motte. When moderates have open commentary on calibrating mod action based on political composition of forum, or accuse censored posters of ban-worthy tresspasses while simultaneously not doing so, it creates a pretty clear climate of what is more or less acceptable, and 'more pushback' is often the less acceptable path for long-term motte posters if they want to remain long-term motte posters. This is an old and well established failure state of the Motte, where bad posters both poison the culture and get the mods to ban better posters reacting against them, but this has been defended in the past an acceptable cost for the target goal of the Motte to not punish what people say, but how they say it.
But it is still a basic punitive incentive structure as enforced by the mod team, and as a consequence pushback that does occur will exist within other contextual boundaries- such as the acceptable areas of criticism such as treatment of other posters, or when it exists within the space allowed by the social dynamics of when a mod is involved. These social dynamics involved when mods don't want to be involved in moderating either other mods (internal group dynamics of people who do/have worked together for common causes, a desire to privately raise concerns out of public view) or when mods don't want to get involved in the personal non-mod disputes of a mod and other conflicts (public optic dynamics of not wanting to present mod solidarity). This creates greater conflict space- an overton window if you prefer- for more pushback to people who act within the ven diagram overlap of 'takes condemnable swipes at other posters' and 'is a mod.'
In so much as this is a problem for the broader motte space, the solution is to reduce the ven diagram overlap.
I imagine most non-quality post reports would be summarizable as 'A person I don't like said something I don't like' whether it was partisan or not. Most internet fights seeking higher sanction against another are not between people who like eachother fighting over how much they like eacother.
Is ymsekhout being criticized for expressing left-wing viewpoints, or is ymeskhout being criticized for his character in how he responded to a very minor barb about how his own post could be viewed from a non left-wing viewpoint?
"Pushing back" against the Darwins and the Juliuses never got anyone banned. Losing one's emotional equilibrium and going off on them did. I won't deny there is a failure mode here where someone very good at writing provocative posts that fall within the rules can result in some decent posters losing their shit when they can't take it any longer and getting themselves banned. On the other hand, someone who only does that once or twice doesn't get banned for very long, and Darwin and Julius both eventually got booted long-term. We have never had a great solution for getting rid of bad but effortful posters who poison the discourse without breaking the rules, and I have yet to hear proposals that don't amount to "Ban this hobby horse" or "Just admit that this person is terrible and ban them." (The latter we very occasionally do under the egregiously obnoxious wildcard rule, but every time we do it burns some of the membership's goodwill... remember, there are people who got on our case every time we modded Julius, and some of those people were not Julius's alts.)
I also do not think ymeshkout can fairly be compared to Darwin or Julius.
I am saying a large percentage of reports are "non-quality" as you put it - not people genuinely concerned about the tone and quality of arguments here, but simply seeking to punish their enemies.
Both, IMO. He writes long, effortful posts that are hard to take apart on the facts, as you'd expect when debating a lawyer, but he also criticizes Trump a lot, so a lot of people see "Long-winded criticism of Trump" which makes them angry, but they can't really muster a cogent response to explain why the criticism is wrong, but they also notice him taking a few pokes at his interlocutors, which triggers even more rage. No, I seriously do not think he would get this kind of pushback if he were writing similar posts about how corrupt Joe Biden is. (He'd get some, but not like this where you're trying to make him the new Darwin.)
Off topic, but I want to say that this post, unlike your direct comments on the issue, made me feel sorta bad about getting a rise out of people who in my opinion have made themselves fair game with bad faith rhetoric.
You're fully correct on the object level here. There's no case against @ymeskhout that wouldn't apply equally well or much better to an unreasonable proportion of discourse in the community. If people don't want to read detailed legal commentary of Trump being {bad, again}, they can just collapse the thread (highly recommended). If they take it upon themselves to correct people being wrong/mean about their favorite politician, but find the process too onerous, they may be advised to reconsider their priorities. Elevating this to mods via reporting is just lame.
@Dean's responses, for all their characteristic argumentative quality, don't amount in substance to anything more than "I don't like it when people make a hobby of criticizing Trump here, so I'll try to shoehorn my opposition to this practice into the well-recognized failure mode of moderation tolerating incorrigible high-effort provocateurs". His own litigative tactic here is more Julius-like, if anything. Actual failings of ymeskhout that are brought forth as evidence of the Julius pattern range from trivial (editing in and out some catty remarks), to highly contestable, to apparently disingenuous (everything about failures to engage with criticism in previous rounds).
The meta level of all this, i.e. the evaporative cooling thesis and long-term consequences of flogging some dead horse, is more interesting but vague and rather hopeless for obvious reasons, and not rigorously argued, not yet at least.
To clarify the last for you, I made a judgement call around 2020 that direct topic exchanges with ymeskhout were unwarranted due to his habit of misrepresenting other people's positions and ignoring previously provided arguments. The topics at the time were cases involving the 2020 election, but the behavioral trend was more general. In a thread where multiple examples were pointed to of past examples of this (including by other posters), I wrote a long-form post explaining why I found further engagement with him (providing more engaged arguments and sources) pointless due to the faith demonstrated, and would no longer provide that level of engagement going forward. This followed up with another effort post elaborating the point on the more abstract level, and have referred to it since as to why I don't engage with ymeskhout on his post subjects anymore, but limit myself to discussion of his conduct.
The disingenuous charge against me comes from ymeskhout accuses me of not explaining my refusal to engage with him. The disingenuous charge by me is that I refer ymeskhout back to the effort post thread where I explained what I found lacking and why I found him to be acting in bad faith... which then comes to the next cycle, when ymekshout will claim for the audience that I've never provided him the reasons why.
Given that the 2020 posting was a (multi-post) effort explanation why, with both concerete and abstract reasons, and ymeskhout has repeatedly linked back to the post since (but in a way that hides the object-level objection trend from the later follow-on), I find the the accusation of not providing prior explanations why disengenuous, and demonstrative of the dishonesty (of both mis-representing positions and and the existence/nature of prior engagements) I maintain my stance of. At this point I know he knows where to find the previous position, he knows I know he knows where the previous position... and every iteration of this, he will complain that I still have not provided him my position, and I will counter that he is demonstrating the reason why I will not engage.
Me being the disingenuous one is certainly a credible enough charge to those unaware, and why I consider his objections performative at this point as part of the charge of misrepresenting other people's previous positions for current arguments, but this is also why I openly accuse him of lying, and have not recanted it despite mod warnings to not do so lightly.
Take viewpoint bias for what it is, of course, but from my position I've always been frank to the point of risking mod censure on why I will not engage ynekshout in a counter-argument form anymore- because I find him habitually dishonest when representing other people's arguments, present and past, ranging from their stance to their existence (and effort-spent) in previous engagements.
The last time you accused me of lying about other people's positions, lying about other people not giving me arguments, lying about not being provided insight into specific concerns, I responded to you in detail. None of your claims about me lying held up. Anyone is welcome to follow the link and check themselves.
So, cards on the table. You claim that your persistent refusal to engage with the actual substance of my arguments is borne out of a commitment to principle. It's what you say but how would you convince someone that you're telling the truth? Because the only other times I've ever encountered anything close to the position you're claiming to adhere to is from online activists (typically leftwing) who respond with some variant of "It's not my job to educate you" when their positions are scrutinized. It's reasonable to surmise that anyone offering that response is using it as a deflection tactic to avoid having to defend their beliefs, most likely because they know their beliefs are too weak to stand up to adversarial scrutiny.
I can't prove this conclusively because I can't read your mind, but I strongly suspect that your refusal to provide arguments because I'm purportedly acting in bad faith is just a pretextual excuse (a lie) used by you as a dodge to avoid defending your beliefs or having them scrutinized. I suspect that anti-Trump arguments in particular make you upset, but because you are unable to construct a legitimate counter-argument, you resort to a dogged and persistent response campaign which compensates for the lack of substance with a heavy dose of vitriol.
One reason I believe this is because I can't think of any good explanation for you to be so persistently tight-lipped across several years all within a forum specifically dedicated to debate and discussion. If you have an argument, just please for the love of god say it. Your excuses make no sense in this context.
Another reason I believe this is because despite the wide-array of topics I write about, what consistently acts as a trigger for your grudge with me is almost exclusively when I write about either Trump or the 2020 stolen election theories. I suspect, given your scope of attention, that you have an emotional attachment to this topic which is why it reliably elicits a hostile and angry response from you. Those posts of mine are probably the ones most exhaustively sourced, which is inconsistent with why they would be the most likely to anger you.
Another reason I believe this is because while your refusal to engage would make sense in isolation, you replace this with significant efforts towards vague denunciation riddles with lengthy wordcounts. If your goal was to save yourself from wasting time, this is incongruent conduct. It's not clear what, if anything, you gain from this behavior.
Another reason I believe this is while I can understand why someone might want to avoid typing out a long response, you flatly and explicitly have refused to even link me to sources. Some of your responses to those requests include:
"I'm not particularly interested in trying to feed you sources to be judged by you on your standards on credibility to consistency standards you impose that helpfully weed out things other people might care about and could even be true."
"I am uninterested in providing you sources on other people's positions given your conduct on this topic."
"Can I? Sure. Will I? A waste of time when you are involved, given your pattern of conduct which has been noted repeatedly over the years even if you have also repeatedly denied the feedback."
This is a patently bewildering position to hold and I can't think of any scenario where it makes any sense, except one where you are concerned that I would eviscerate your sources (flattering, admitedly). Given the circumstances, I cannot fathom an explanation more charitable than this, you are literally the only person I've encountered in this forum with a self-imposed policy against linking sources. It's wild.
I've outlined the reasons for why I hold my suspicion, and it's a suspicion I believe is especially well-founded given the scope of time involved. Suspicions can be rebutted with evidence, and I will remain open to any arguments and heavily encourage anyone and everyone to point any faults with what I've outlined above. If I am wrong and my suspicion turns out to be misplaced, I will emphatically apologize. Unless there is some new developments, my hope is that this will by my last word on this (very tiresome) saga.
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I disagree with sentence one, and from that much of the rest. The nature of pushback vis-a-vis disagreement in a metaphor of equilibirum is that pushback is inherently destabilizing, and generally driven by emotional impetus to respond. Just as walking forward is a controlled fall due to off-balancing your center of balance, pushing back is inherently moving one's self due to motivation, and that is what got people increasingly banned as early phases of intellectual-only pushback died with evaporative cooling and bad faith, which led only the emotionally-driven pushback to remain... which, of course, is what is selected against with mod censure.
The crux of Darwin and Julius is that while both 'eventually' got booted long-term, it was only well after bad faith was widely recognized, and also well after repeated toleration by mods explitictly recognizing -bad thing- but also tolerating it. Darwin in particular received multiple warnings that were framed in terms of 'we're going easy on you because of past quality contributions' (selecting for past rather than current conduct) despite blatant trolling, and Julius had a number of sockpuppets for whom the mod response was 'we believe you as a sockpuppet, here's your warning but you can stay.' The actions that were bad were recognized as bad, and ban-worthy, but not banned until they were... and until they were, the punishment for months to years was that it wasn't ban-worthy to conduct the offenses one would be eventually banned for.
I cannot emphasize how much this discredits standards of moderation. You speak of burning membership good will for moderating, but you also burn good will when visibly not moderating by professed standards. This is why legitimacy, not popularity, is the crux of acceptable conduct codes, and why legitimacy depends on consistency, because people can accept unhappy things if viewed as legitimate and not arbitrary.
However, legitimacy derives from culture, and culture is set by the climate that enables it, and the moderator climate has regularly and consistently been that while consistent bad actors may eventually get the boot, the people they provoke into continuing engagement will get the boot much sooner for being the sort of people who would continue engaging well after the evaporative cooling process sets in.
The way to resolve this is not by banning pet topics, but by consistently enforcing the rules... but consistently enforcing the rules is secondary to the mod team's goals of trying to retain / grow membership, which is viewed as being compromised when enforcing rules.
That depends on what flaw you think links them, otherwise one might as well say that Darwin and Julius cannot be fairly be compared. The point of two extremely dissimilar people is to weaken comparison to either one of them.
The flaw I refer to is the mix of unchanging hobby horse and bad faith engagement with others that leads to evaporative cooling and the gradual forum disinterest of engaging in any intellectual push-and-pull because there is none to be had except from the more emotionally-driven.
And I am noting this is entirely expected and typical, without warranting a caveat or special notice. It's exactly what one would expect for any appeals process in a political dispute.
...which goes right back down the Nybbler's critique of the original post argument- that the criticism of pretext in the case of Trump is not people genuinely concerned about the quality of the legal case, but simply seeking to punish their political enemy in some way, which goes to the broader principle of lawfare, which is what the post covered in a condemnatory fashion. As a metaphor, pretty spot on, but probably not your intent.
What you call 'can't really muster a cogent response' is what I call 'evaporative cooling,' and is the point of recognizing the Motte's selection bias for people who disagree to disengage from addressing the arguments.
'They can't really muster a cogent response... triggers even more rage' places the onus for lack of good engagement on those still engaging, without noting that they are the primary source still willing to engage. Note that even most of the 'Well, I liked it well enough' posts were in response to people expressing dislike. The current exchange is entirely consistent with controvery attracting more engagement than the underlying thing itself.
The arguments that the lawfare against Trump are primarily pretextual by parties just as guilty or worse of the same sorts of sins is long, extensive, and literally years old at this point. ymeshkout was also a regular part of them, so regular that the old sparring partners have lost interest.
Alternatively, if he were a non-mod writing the same posts about how corrupt Joe Biden is and the same shots at left-leaning posters, he would get a different and stricter response from the mod group, who has discussed how political balance and forum management considerations shape their response.
This is the crux of the issue when in the past conduct concessions are made to people on the basis of overall political composition of the forum- everything starts to be seen as pretextual, by all parties.
I can tell you that the mod team, and I personally, have not intentionally chosen to prioritize retaining/growing membership over consistent rules enforcement. Believe me or do not, but I strive to be consistent and even-handed, and I believe the other mods do too. Maybe you think we're all terrible at it, but you are definitely mischaracterizing our motives.
I am kind of curious in what way you think we do not enforce the rules consistently, but I fear it will boil down to "Ban the people I think should be banned, and don't ban the people I don't think should be banned," because it always does.
There are people I think are bad faith actors and poisonous to the environment whom I would boot in a heartbeat if we took the more expeditious route you are suggesting. But I am fairly certain you'd find at least some of my choices objectionable.
Just to pick at this a bit, if I understand your argument here, it's basically that we let terrible people like Darwin and Julius (and ymeskhout, apparently) run amok until they drive good posters away. There may be some truth to this (in that I'm sure that all those individuals have driven some people away, some of whom might have been good posters). On the other hand, the people often mentioned as "good posters who were driven away" are people like trannyporn (on one end of the spectrum) or Impassionata (on the other). Do you think any of the people complaining about all the people driven away by so many threads about HBD and Jews and progressives-are-cancer might have a point as well?
Is this the "You give leftists extra slack to try to cultivate ideological diversity" argument again? Because I recall one time when Zorba said something like "Yes, we have a problem keeping leftists around and so we might sometimes go easier on a lefty who's taking a lot of flack," and for years since y'all have beaten that particular horse to death. I can tell you that at present, there is definitely no intentional extra slack given to left-leaning posters.
I do believe you try to. I also believe you are fallible, and susceptible to the same sort of biases that people like to think themselves above. I also know that mods have regularly appealed to personal subjectivity towards those they moderate as they do.
I do believe you try to be even-handed, I challenge that even-handed is subordinated to other concerns, and I base this off of mod comments in ban-posts or kicks which elaborating why certain degrees are inflicted. The words to use them may change- 'not becoming an echo chamber' or 'don't want to drive away key counter-balances' or 'you were a good poster and we'd like to be again"- but past compromises compromise future credibility.
Of course it does, you made a truism of a generality. Nobody goes 'ban the people I don't think should be banned,' because it creates a paradox. This is what I mean by mods not being above logical failures when under their subjective presence.
But, if that feels too confrontational, let me ask a question in turn-
Amadan, how many times in all my years at the Motte have I ever reported someone asking for them to be banned?
Certainly. But the point of a legitimate justice system isn't being non-objectionable, it's being consistent/credible and legitimate. The conflation is why I believe there is a breakdown, and interjects the biases I was mentioning before.
Or me. I am well aware that geopolitics is a hobby horse.
Not drive them away- drive them into not responding to them.
When you have a mix of 'good' posters (those who will only respond in accordance to the rules) and 'bad' posters (those who will respond emotionally, and at risk of the rules) facing a 'nasty' poster (who is not going to change or engage in good faith), the 'good' posters will avoid risk by disengaging. By ratios alone, that makes bad posters a larger share of the remainder, which in turn changes the dynamics of reporting and perception of bad posters, because rather than one bad poster against many good and a few bad, it becomes one bad against many bad and now even-handedness rears it's ugly head because what does 'even handed' mean in practice when dealing with one-vs-many? It certainly doesn't often mean joining in with the unsightly crowd.
This is the environment which drives people away- where dogpiling is very obviously occuring on unpopular positions by obstinant people, where the optics are of mods taking greater actions against those objecting to those in bad faith than against the actors they will eventually ban anyway, where good-faith engagement is hard to find because the good-faith opponents left and the remainder are the sort motivated by emotion, and where even-handedness struggles to handle two different sorts of 'bad'.
This is not the worst environment, or even a worse environment than alternatives, but is the climate of the motte when unmoving bad-faith arguments are raised time and time again.
I absolutely think they have a point, and encourage them to make it- because I believe the mods have a point to, in that a key purpose of this forum is how to argue, not what to argue. This is not a curated garden of harmony, this is a moderated battleground. Siege warfare is our literal visual metaphor, and the motte is for defending points under challenge.
Points are not to be dismissed from consideration, they are to be defeated. Even if people are being driven away by HBD and Jews and progressives-are-cancer... so what? What would you do differently if that were true, that you would not do despite it being true?
Whether there is an intention is irrelevant to whether there is, because, again, biases and other concerns and how subjective things get framed in the context of incentives other contextual priorities. And, of course, prior interest such an intention, even if it's not formal (or even informal) policy at the present.
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This is as good of a place as any to say. While I had nothing at all to do with past mod actions giving you and other users warnings for calling me a liar, I've strenuously disagreed with that and have asked the mod team to stop enforcing that rule with me. You are welcome to accuse me of being a liar, although ideally you showcase evidence to prove your point. You can even call me a liar without evidence if you so desire, no matter how silly that might look.
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Do you have any examples of other posters who regularly post top level threads about a singular topic without regard or even accurate reflection of previous engagements, and with poor conduct towards other in the process? Particularly examples of posters who do it more than @ymeskhout, but I'll settle for anything really.
I know you think I am an insipid partisan dick, but I would have readily pushed back against anyone repeatedly calling out other users and picking fights in top level posts, regardless of their ideology - but I haven't seen any other top level posts doing that. Did I just not want to see them?
Is this what you believe I do? I'm honestly surprised to hear this accusation coming from you. I specifically praised you in this post as a good example of someone who asked me pointed questions here which prompted productive introspection on my part. Having my beliefs scrutinized is something I genuinely wish happened to me more often. You never responded to that post (and I didn't necessarily expect you to) but I thought my responses to your questions were thorough, and I would be curious to know what your opinion on that effort is. You are also more than welcome to call me out on any other specific examples you have about me either disregarding or inaccurately reflecting on any engagements.
No dude, you know I love you (except for your top level call outs) - I do think you can be a bit myopic at times, but so can we all, and I would have been banned a long time ago if I hadn't learned how to motte better from your posts. It was the phrasing previously used and I wanted to see examples of others doing it. I was focused on that so it didn't occur to me how it would read from your perspective, sorry man.
I didn't expect such a gracious response, my apologies for misreading you.
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Yes, but I am not going to call them out by name. Also, there are several people who rarely or never post top-level threads but will regularly go off in a subthread about their hobby horse.
Other than being slightly patronizing and snarky at times, I do not think @ymeskhout shows poor conduct. And while we discourage snarkiness and sarcasm, even from mods, it's a flaw most of us fall prey to occasionally, and piling on him for "poor conduct" because he was a little snide in responding to someone who constantly engages in bad faith partisan sniping does not move me to demand an apology.
People always think they know what I think based on my modding, and they're usually wrong.
FWIW (and @ymeskhout can confirm this) I have privately voiced my objection to this kind of "calling out" of people just because you've had an argument with them in the past. But a lot of people seem to interpret "criticizing Trump"/otherwise expressing a partisan viewpoint as "picking fights."
As a top-level post, it's not that common. As petty sniping in the threads, or in reports - it's constant.
It's not the hobby horses that bother me, and I think sniping inside threads is de rigueur. Ymes has gone to this well many times, and the only times I have objected are when he has also called someone out. Because calling people out in top level posts is bad for the motte. Top level posts set the tone, and call outs in top level posts generate more call outs and increase the baseline antagonism of the forum.
It looks to me like you determined this was about Trump, but to me it looks like what ticked everyone off was the edit snarking at nybbler. If it had just been ymeskhout and nybbler slapping each other in the comments, everyone would have, well maybe not been fine with it, but limited their grumbling significantly. Even if there are a lot of users just upset that he criticised Trump - which seems likely - there is a core of valid criticism there and it's centred around the call out. Is there a silent majority who loves the call outs or something? Because distilling it to 'criticising Trump' seems like an easy way to dismiss the grumbling, but not a way that will reduce future grumbling.
Usually?
Calling someone out wasn't exactly a great starting point, as I said, but I've seen ymeskhout get jumped on for "writing verbose Trump-bashing lawyer-speak" even when he isn't calling someone out by name.
What do you want me to say, dude? You honestly haven't made that much of an impression on me, but no, I do not think you're an "insipid partisan dick." Try harder and maybe you'll get there.
Lol Jesus Christ, generally speaking that's how that phrase works - you say "a lot of people think thing, they're usually mistaken" to imply that this instance is the rare occasion where someone thought thing but wasn't mistaken. I thought that was the joke you were making, so I played along.
It doesn't bother me that you don't think much of me, I just didn't want you thinking my post was motivated by partisanship, because that seemed to be your impression of all the criticism, and I am partisan sometimes. But I have been consistent on this issue, because I get a klaxon in my head when I see a top level call out, and it's ringing "this way be troll forums". Also you have accused me of picking fights with you in the past, which is what I based my assumption on.
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This is true. I've maintained my disagreement with the idea that it's bad form mainly because I would welcome anyone doing the same to me. I make it a practice to proactively acknowledge my own errors and edit corrections when appropriate (just go through my comment history), and don't understand why people here of all places react so negatively to being caught credulously repeating false claims. I would emphatically and earnestly praise anyone who owns up to mistakes and being stubborn about it is just childish and dishonorable behavior that I don't think it belongs in this forum.
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If Janny Duty is any indication, I'd say this is false. Most "reporting for disagreement" posts I've seen where targeted against people expressing right-wing viewpoints. Maybe if we divided each by the number of right/left leaning posters the results would come out different, but I have a hard time estimating the denominator here.
Are you talking about somewhere else where you are a mod? On a typical reddit sub, I can easily believe that's the case, but I'm talking about here.
I'm talking about here. Is Janny Duty, a.k.a "Quincy Needs You!", based on reports?
Mostly, but you only see the cases where we actually respond. The vast majority of reports get ignored, for the reasons I stated.
...I swear I could see comments there before any mod had a chance to respond.
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I asked before but I'll try again and hopefully get a more helpful answer: what information, context, link, source, claim, assertion, citation, whatever, etc. do you believe is missing from my post above?
This would be an example of you not accurately reflecting previous engagements, as the previous engagements precede your post above, and so obviously and temporally did not address it, and insinuating they did is the sort of mis-representation you stand accused of conducting on a regular basis.
I'm trying to read and understand what you're writing to the best of my abilities. I'm just asking "what am I missing?" and it's not helpful for you to play a game of riddles. It doesn't make sense why you'd waste so much time and energy evading questions with purportedly trivially obvious answers.
What you are missing is the character qualities to acknowledge previous arguments provided to you without misrepresenting them or outright pretending they do not exist at a later argument.
This is not a riddle- this is a description of why I deem you to operate in bad faith.
Because I deem you to operates in bad faith and as the sort of person who pretends previous engagements did not happen. You used to link to the long-form, which itself followed a thread in which characteristic examples were identified.
Did you sign an NDA or something? Would you answer my questions if I gave you a dollar? Is there a hint system phone line I can call? You're not making this puzzle game fun at all.
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I honestly don't see where ymeshkout would be representing falsely or correctly any previous discussion in this forum in his top-level post, which appears to me to simply report on recent law- and culture war related news, concerning a person of obvious political and cultural interest.
I believe furthermore that the trigger warning does accomplish the contrary of what ymeshkout states it is aiming at, and that it should go.
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Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. What do you think the post above is missing?
It's absence. Not liking Trump is fine. Regularly and consistently making top-level comments about it with poor conduct towards the posters you are a moderator for is not. The dead horse doesn't become less dead if there's more of it to beat, especially when the complaint is about the stench.
He doesn’t “regularly” make these posts. Going off memory it’s once every 2-4 weeks. The post is high quality in every way I can think of. It’s informative, relevant to the news du jour, written well and gratuitously sourced. I’m saying that as someone who would vote for Trump again (if I thought he had a chance of winning).
The nitpicking that some replies do is so annoying. I don’t see why someone would presume the right to call a consistently good contributor “beating a dead horse”. Trump is a relevant and divisive figure and so criticism of him is expected for purposes of culture war discussion. This particular avenue of criticism is novel and interesting.
It's context for the complaints that I see sometimes about egregiously bad solicitations from Trump organizations.
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Do you like my writing when I don't criticize Trump?
Not particularly, but it's considerably less one-note and lacking. Your posting is unexceptional, but you intend to insult fewer people and ignore fewer prior discussions than when you fixate on Trump unprompted.
If you meant your writing on a technical level, I find it generally poorly structured and lacking in content, conflating a lot of words with good word choice and links for sufficient sourcing. The arguments are often too reliant on insinuation by word connotation in lieu of supporting arguments, and generally lacking in the ability to anticipate or address counter arguments completely or factor in contextually relevant history while relying on narrative momentum for an emotional climax. It's passable verboseness, and I am certainly a sucker for long-winded arguments, but also leads to basic failures like overly long intros that fail the principles of effective written communication, or speaking around past and still standing counter-arguments.
And I say this as someone who is naturally prone to comma splicing and writing essays on my hobbies, and who writes more the groggier she is.
I didn't notice your edit until now, and so I'll repeat this request:
I have trouble parsing your feedback because it reads as conclusory and is lacking in specifics. If you say poor structure, poor structure how? If you say links to court documents are not sufficient sourcing, then what is? If you say arguments are too often reliant on insinuation by word connotation, what's an example of where I did that? If you say I'm lacking the ability to address or anticipate counter arguments, where did I do that? If I'm speaking around past and still standing counter-arguments, which ones? And so on. I concede that I can be verbose, but that should only make it that much easier to point out the many many flaws you claim to have identified.
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Thank you for the thoughtful and actionable feedback, you've given me a lot of useful pointers to think about and implement.
Recently my girlfriend and I took an online BDSM test and it told me that I was only 32% on the sadistic scale while my girlfriend was 76% on the masochism scale. There's a disconnect in that I'm very uncomfortable with inflicting pain on others, even though my girlfriend is actively inviting me to hurt her. I would feel a similar discomfort about someone who does not like my writing yet actively continues to subject themselves to it. I don't want to want to continue hurting you Dean. If Trump criticism upsets you and you dislike my writing so much, you might experience an increase in your quality of life with some blocking tools or word filters. All the best my friend. I love you.
No, you don't, but the pettiness is not beneath you. Hence why you being called out.
Hopefully this can help both of us: can you point me to any Trump criticism that you respect and explain what about it I should emulate? This sounds like a win/win for both of us because the worst case scenario is the status quo. Best case scenario is that I adopt the worthy parts and my writing becomes less painful for you to encounter. Of course, if you can't point to any Trump criticism that you respect, that would be an interesting answer on its own...
Can I? Sure. Will I? A waste of time when you are involved, given your pattern of conduct which has been noted repeatedly over the years even if you have also repeatedly denied the feedback. Improving your character to have fewer petty swipes at your other posters would be a start.
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I bet that they post something of 50 Stalin variety complaining about Trump not being Trumpish enough.
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I only like it when you flatter us endlessly, like in your article about TheMotte.
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