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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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It was obvious to anyone paying attention, but now it's pretty much confirmed.

From the rules:

Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.

"As everyone knows . . ."

"I'm sure you all agree that . . ."

We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.

Avoid this kind of thing in the future, please.

I was not trying to build consensus: "anyone paying attention" is not "everyone", it could very well be less than 1% of the people, that's not consensus in the least. And very well could accommodate 99% of the people that as you say "doesn't know it yet".

Yeah but the issue is how it is read - you might not have meant for it to, but it strongly suggests to the reader that they should agree with you if they consider themself someone who pays attention, which most people generally do.

If you are going to moderate on the basis of how some people might interpret something, then nobody is going be able to say anything controversial. Policing language stifles freedom of expression.

A basic principle of fruitful conversations is to be charitable with what the writer might have meant.

We moderate heavily on interpretation and tone, and this is very unlikely to change.

This is much worse than consensus building, because instead of moderately annoying some people who disagree with you, you are physically keeping out a lot people don't speak like you.

Ironically what you are doing is negating the effects of that rule. If 80% of the people that disagree with you speak differently than you, then you are using the consensus building rule to defend the remaining 20% of people who do speak like you like, but keeping out 80% of the people who don't.

In other words: you are keeping out most of the disagreeable people.

If your objective is to keep controversial topics out of the discussion, that's precisely the way to do it.

I disagree, sorry. The point of the community is to "be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs", not to accept the largest possible percentage of people, and in my experience, people being rude about their beliefs tends to drive out people who oppose those beliefs. I haven't seen a counterexample to this.