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Long ago some troll would make new accounts "just asking questions" about the Holocaust. Not making positive claims but clearly fishing for wrongthink. For some inexplicable reason someone wants to snipe us.
I don't even get the point given SecureSignals is allowed to get on their soapbox.
SecureSignals got modded for making a post once a week on things that he found interesting that related to the holocaust and zionism.
What I don't get is, who is getting sniped and how? This isn't reddit. Do ISP's in the US, or wherever this site is hosted, ban Holocaust denial?
This is not true. You know this is not true.
As for trolls (@naraburns has already pretty effectively answered your blinking doe-eyed "confusion" as to why a troll-post from a burner account proposing we nuke Israel got banned), it's true we don't get "sniped" in the way we did on reddit from leftists trying to get us evicted. Now that we are on our own platform, it would be more effort to go after Zorba directly or our upstream hosts, and it doesn't seem likely anyone cares about us that much. Nonetheless, we do periodically get sniped and trolled by the JAQers and the accelerationists and giggly edgelords. Why? Why does anyone do these things? For the lols, or maybe to screenshot the Motte's greatest hits for sneerclub entertainment.
I am sure they appreciate your much more sincere efforts.
It is true, and you insinuating that I'm knowingly lying is the kind of stuff that makes you inconversable. Along with uncharitable characterizations and snark.
Naraburns didn't answer my comment per se, though he did reply to it. He just wrote the comment he wanted to write. I can instead of getting him to the point of contention just pretend along with him that the reason the 'Nuke Israel' comment got reported and modded was because of the 'consensus building' from a sock account, and not the 'Nuke Israel' part. Saltminer is certainly not the dream defendant.
Now, I'm not sure you maintain that pretense, so feel free to clarify. My point was that the standard I believed Naraburns was acting on when modding the comment was at best inconsistent. If this place consistently took issue with genocidal or otherwise grotesque rhetoric or sweeping unsupported statements, the examples I posted would be rule breaking. Naraburns tells me I'm completely off the mark, the modding in this instance only happened due to the nature of the account and how rhetorically out of tune it was. Making a comment about the validity of nuking Israel from a game theory perspective is not forbidden. In fact, if this poster had done a better job there would be no issue to contend with from a mod perspective. So why care about the nuking Israel part? It's just a burner account using out of tune rhetoric.
Now, I just don't believe that's true. But even then, if the same poster ever raised the issue again or built off of that point in future posts I believe the mods would find some excuse to get them to stop. Which is similar to what happened with SecureSignals.
SecureSignals's profile is public, as is the moderation log. Why don't you share some examples of him getting modded merely for the act of "making a post... on things that he found interesting that related to the holocaust and zionism"?
I'm referring to when SS was making new posts in the CW thread, relating various topics back to either holocaust mythology or jewish influence in media. He made one once a thread or so. He stopped writing those at a consistent pace due to badgering by mods. I don't know how to see modhat comments in the modlog, but I saved the one that was most exemplifying of what was going on.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1405/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/284375?context=8#context
He gets reported for 'making it about the jews again'. But SS had apparently made posts about other topics, due to previous mod intervention regarding single issue posting, so we see user report prejudice being acted on by mods against a user with unpopular opinions with no relevant basis in the rules.
It must be annoying, spending a lot of time writing things out in full compliance with the rules, then have your posts and replies to others used against you, being told that you are posting too much. But you're also badgered for not replying or posting enough. It's like...
This thread continues the saga. https://www.themotte.org/post/3421/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/394266?context=8#context
Well, that's an inference you're drawing. There could be any number of reasons he doesn't post as often as he once did.
Ctrl-F "distinguished". You can also filter using the dropdown in the top right of the modlog.
This thread does not contain any mod warnings, so far as I can see.
I mean, sure, I don't know the mans mind. But also, not really. I was there reading the posts. He stopped making top level posts at the same rate after he was told to stop single issue posting.
It's an example of how biased moddings operate. In one instance it's part of the mod post that SS is dipping out of arguments for some ulterior reason. When the mod is later challenged on this point in an unofficial capacity there's no reply. Same with the singular ChatGPT comment made by SS. Assertions or implications that a user is constantly doing bad things have a lot of rhetorical weight coming from a mod, hat on or not, but sometimes there's very little behind them. They're just building a case of justifications, which does put pressure on people.
I can see distinguished comments, but not who is being replied to.
Well, as obnoxious as the mods (and me, though it's not like my opinion carries any weight here) find his single-issue posting, he hasn't actually been banned for it, unlike the Hock guy. I really do think what the mods object to is repetitive one-note single-issue posting, as opposed to your apparent belief that they are censoring criticism of da Joos.
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Yet we are conversing, because you know you can say things like this and I may be annoyed, I may even be annoyed enough to respond to you, but you are allowed to carry on your own personal crusade complaining that we unfairly censor criticism of Israel (we don't) or that SS and other people riding a hobby horse are told to cool it because they just "posted about something they were interested in once a week" (please) and all you get is maybe a "snarky" comment or two.
Okay, I'll play. I think you're being disingenuous, but I'll pretend this question is asked in honest confusion and good faith. (This is always a mistake. Trying to explain moderation never, in my experience, results in the person we carefully and patiently indulge saying "Okay, that seems reasonable. Thank you for clarifying.")
First, your examples of "genocidal rhetoric" are basically people saying "Palestinians suck." You know, like you and SS regularly say about Jews. And yet you are not banned.
That's correct. If someone wrote a serious post arguing for nuking Israel from a game theory perspective, they would not be banned (at least by me). You and SS regularly talk about how we should consider Jews an existential threat to Western civilization. People here have proposed stripping civil rights from women, reenacting Jim Crow, and making it legal to fuck children, and they weren't banned for arguing those things. We have demonstrated for years that merely making abhorrent (to some of us) arguments does not get you banned. Every last Joo-poster complains that we forbid Joo-posting after years and years of Joo-posting which we didn't stop. But when you actually push it over the line and get modded, you say "Hah, I knew you were covering for the Jews!"
But yes, a burner account showing up to argue that we should nuke Israel, or proposing that the age of consent is stupid and it's only natural for men to want to fuck 13-year-olds will probably be banned. Not because the argument in itself cannot be made, but when we see a fresh troll arrive to spout trollish opinions and without having established any credibility whatsoever, we know it's a troll. Not here for conversation, not here to genuinely test their "nuke Israel" or "fuck 13-year-olds" idea against people who will thoughtfully engage with them, but to giggle at the turd they dropped on the floor. What you don't see is all the posts that never appear. As @naraburns said, usually we just wouldn't have let a post like that out of the filter. I assure you, almost daily there are posts like that that we just delete and don't let out of the filter. Now and then, by accident or to make a point, one of them gets through, and then we make a public mod post, and people like you get all het up taking umbrage because how dare we mod in such an inconsistent manner, obviously we are just trying to prevent criticism of Israel.
Depends on how he presents the argument. You keep mentioning SecureSignals as if we banned him. You will notice (you are well aware) that he is not banned. He was told, once, to occasionally post something that isn't about Jews. He kinda sorta complied, briefly, and now he's back to posting about Jews 95% of the time. And yet we haven't banned him. If we were being so vindictive, biased, and particular in our moderation, why haven't we? I can think of several posters who, almost always, are going to post about how one or more of: (a) women; (b) black people; (d) foreigners; (d) liberals, should be killed/deported/disenfranchised. Sometimes they get modded. Mostly we let them ****-post. It's adjudicated based on the individual post, trying to be as consistent as we can be.
You know all this. You've known it for years. You're just angry that you have to follow some rules when expressing how much you hate your enemies.
It's an odd thing, being called a liar and then when you tell that person that it's hard to talk to someone who calls them a liar, get told you're annoying them.
I get modded for making sweeping statements about jews controlling media and influencing society in a certain kind of way and so on. I.e. a guy with a red username says 'don't do that' along with argumentative snark. Those comments that did something similar to that, just not about jews, did not get any. Now, there might be reasons for that, like Naraburns pointed out. Not every comment that should get modded does get modded and so on, and that would apply to many of my comments as well, but I can only interact with what I see. And I saved a few comments, though not all, as I found the current trend odd. Now here we are, and there are the comments that are equivocal to writing that would get me modded.
Well, I don't really agree with that completely. I've never argued for nor do I want every Israeli to die. And if I would ever write that holocaust propaganda was so annoying that I wished every jewish person on earth got holocausted, then I would get banned, or at the very least received an inquisitive modding. Nor have I ever had any thoughts or made any comments relating to the effectiveness of starving Israeli children as a legitimate military strategy or provided tacit rhetorical support for such a venture.
These characterizations of yours that are the equivalent of a 4chan greentext strawman are not worth engaging with. To put it a different way, if people like you had a higher emotional sensitivity to certain topics, then yeah, we would see an overarching bias in a direction. Couple that with some degree of a combative ego, and we get whatever this is supposed to be. Like Joo posting. Why do you talk like this? Why does this even register in your brain as a thing, but the emotionally detached 'maybe we should just like, kill all the Palestinians, man' somehow doesn't have a name.
You're separating the 'normal' from the 'abnormal' and you are doing that based on something and it's not in equal application. Is posting a lot about a single topic bannable? Not really. But if the topic hits on a softer nerve. Then it slowly becomes abnormal. Those posters get noticed, get molded into some caricature and when they inevitably color in any way outside the lines, the mods feel they have the reasonable weight to do something. Does that mean every single person gets banned? No, and since I did not say that was the case, maybe you can get with the program.
You have these snarky memetic analogs to every negative kind of poster, why not add a new one? The genocidal zionist shower thinker. 'Since most Palestinians believe Israel shouldn't exist, is the only rational solution to not just murder every Palestinian?'
I mean, no. I do not mention SS as if you banned him. He was modded unfairly since the topic being discussed ruffled a few too many feathers. That was what the initial interaction was about.
The 'single issue posting' saga goes on a bit further than that.
If you were being the strawman you assert that I believe you are, why aren't you? Because I don't believe you are.
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I am inclined to believe that there are like 1-or-2 actual Joo-poasters, and 10,000 socks puppeted by that one guy who's been around for years prosecuting his unnatural (for someone who doesn't live there or in a neighboring country) obsession with Israel.
I don't know. The population of rabid antisemites who are still cogent enough to hold their own in a Motte discussion is probably quite small - but we probably ended up with ALL of them. It's the classic witch effect.
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I can understand the mod twitchiness here, if nothing else because we live in a Lovecraftian universe and the bulging-eyed stranger suddenly bursting into your town square and screaming "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!" is a different trope from the loony old Miskatonic professor who compulsively injects non-Euclidean geometries into every discussion. We don't know what exactly the boundary is after which all webhosts and banks mysteriously start refusing to do business with you giving a variety of vague excuses, but it's too late after we find out; and this particular stranger behaved as if he was aiming for that boundary and knew more than we do, or at least was quite determined to learn.
That being said, I do find these sorts of edgy hypotheticals much more fun to discuss than the nth iteration of "I am tired of having to pretend that our Lord Jesus Christ is okay with trannies", and wish we could have more of them instead.
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