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Hot off the Platner scandal, here comes Max Miller one upping him. Max Miller, a Republican who previously served in Trump's first admin and running for reelection as state representative has been accused by his ex-wife of throwing hot water on her, putting a gun to her head, and (potentially) even choking their 2 year old daughter.
She doesn't know for sure as it would have happened behind closed doors, and Miller obviously denies this but CPS investigations did suggest strangulation as possible.
And the daughter for some reason seems to be scared of her father, so even if he didn't cause this particular injury it's not a great sign.
There's also apparently been other accusations against him when he was younger.
Especially when I made an interesting discovery, him being an abuser seems to have been already known or at least suspected in politics. George Santos had previously called him a woman beater during a spat with Miller, because Miller was accused of assaulting his previous girlfriend before that.
and
And Miller is (or was) a drug user, showing a history of irresponsible behavior.
And there is hard proof that he poured hot water on Moreno, per a recording.
Again there's no hard proof of most of these (yet at least) but a history of physical abuse allegations throughout his life + drug usage (and lying about it) + the abuse suggesting bruising patterns on his own child + at least one proven allegation, it certainly seems to be leaning towards his guilt.
These allegations haven't reached the general public much yet, but they do seem to having a small effect on his reelection chances already. Not as much as Platner did but the news is still pretty young. Some comments I've been seeing however suggest that Republican candidates are simply held to lower moral standards nowadays by their respective sides and it won't impact him too much despite the severity. I guess time will tell.
This is just boo outgroup stuff. We just banned someone in the last thread for doing this.
Three day ban for you as well.
Now that my ban has expired, I would like to figure out what you are and are not looking for from top-level posts about current events involving culture war issues.
I don't really see much of a fundamental difference between this post that OP was banned for, the one that I was banned for, and for example this post that I made two weeks ago.
I don't think that your intention is to prohibit posts about current events, and I don't think that your intention is to prohibit people from expressing their opinions in posts about current events. But it feels like the line is a bit fuzzy here between posts with these qualities that are bannable or not.
I understood the warning I received 4 months ago as wanting posts about current events to have better sourcing and a bit less sensationalist language, which I've endeavored to do, but obviously I either didn't do this well enough or I took away the wrong lesson.
Some more clarity would be appreciated here.
Probably ask yourself why you want to share or discuss a particular story.
There was a legitimate question in the mamdani story "can he even do this" and a discussion of why it's a horrible idea for him to do this.
If your purpose in sharing something is more like "look at this horrible thing my out group did" and "does everyone else think this is as horrible as I do". Then you should stop and reconsider.
Is the answer here really that your powers of divinition allow you to know posts about Max Miller, a sitting representative, are talked about because of "boo outgroup", but all the posts about say Platner who was just a candidate have no such intention or motivation? Especially when I've said some pretty mean stuff about the latter.
People have literally pointed this out to you too https://www.themotte.org/post/3863/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/466408?context=8#context
The people here barely even hide how much they hate me, if they think your ban was questionable then maybe it was.
You were upset cause in addition to my theory things didn't change yet just because the news was young (which I have been proven right about https://polymarket.com/event/oh-07-house-election-winner), I added an alternate possible explanation I saw on social media. Something that people like Hanania or Demsas were proposing, it's not like these were just random shitposters. This was a serious alternative claim being proposed by established pundits.
We generally moderate what is reported. If you want me to go back litigate your posts that were not reported then simply report your posts and add them to queue. They will likely be ignored, but if you really want me to look at them and let you know if they are rule breaking I suppose I can do that. The outcome will be that either I ignore it like most reported things or I hand out warnings/bans.
The object level issues are not in contention from me.
The level of candidate doesn't matter. A post just about Trump being a cheater, or Kamala sleeping her way to the top could also be dinged under these rules. I'd maybe be more lenient if the candidate was more well known, usually there are side issues for higher level candidates that the poster might care about and call out.
I'm aware they will be, the standard you applied is hilariously low that again, even many of the users here who hate me found it questionable. When people who have every motive to say otherwise were telling you that it was weak, it was probably very very very weak in actuality.
It would probably help your argument you apply the rules fairly if you didn't contradict yourself in the same paragraph.
And the ban length was commensurately low. You were part of a crackdown to stop a trend that I was noticing. I don't dislike you in any way, if I did I'd hand off moderation of you to someone else. I pointed out to another user that suggested you should be given some leeway because you might not have noticed the other ban, that the ban I handed you was to give notice to other users. If you and others are more careful about posting heavily "boo outgroup" top level posts then I am happy and mission accomplished.
I'm sorry that you were the particular example, but also not sorry, because the punishment was minor, the correction seemed necessary, and you did violate the rules as I interpret them.
Admitted lack of clarity on my part. Bigger candidates tend to have more other stuff swirling around them. Its the other stuff that is fully open to discussion. Like the mamdani post where he wanted to arrest the israeli guy. If the post is just "mamdani is an idiot" that is bad and boo outgroup, but myself and other read the post as "can mamdani even do this, what would even happen" and that led to interesting other discussion. It also implied that the motivation for the orginal post wasn't entirely just "mamdani said this stupid thing". However, if a no-power position candidate says something stupid or does something horrid there often isn't much else to discuss.
It is coincidentally easier to not fall afoul of the boo outgroup posting for higher level candidates, because you can easily make it not just about the fact that they did something terrible. BUT no level of high level candidacy is an excuse for a pure or heavily boo outgroup top level post.
And your post did fall afoul of that. And your post seemed to be a specific one-upping of the platner stuff, which you alluded to in your first sentence. That is specifically what we are trying to avoid, a sort of one-upping back and forth of culture warring where this thread is just turned into another battle ground.
I think many people interpreted the ban wrong. We don't have many tools here. One tool is warning. Another tool is temp banning. And the final tool is perma-ban. In my experience plenty of people tend to ignore warnings. There will be accounts with dozens of warnings that they never act upon. And then the first time we actually ban them, suddenly they make an attempt to modify their behavior. Some of the other mods are more willing to play the "warn repeatedly" game. I'm not. In most cases I'm doing a temp ban. If it is worth it for me to defend and promote a rule, its worth it to impose some consequences on the user that broke the rule. I consider 1-3 day bans basically a slap on the wrist. 4-15 day bans a serious infraction. And anything above a 15 day ban our alternative to a perma ban.
I'm happy to engage in discussion on the ban mainly because it serves the same purpose as the ban, highlighting what behavior is not ok and what might get a future ban. This is probably getting too low in the discussion to even be viewed by most people. If you are still pissed at me and think I have wronged you, and you want another mod to review it all, then just report this comment or the comment where I moderated you. We do not approve our own comments. So someone else will come along and look at it.
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