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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.
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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