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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Are you going to link the article this is from? It appears to be a comment on this article.

Edit: clarity

If he linked the original post his game would be a little too obvious even for the quokkas on the mod team.

Without this guy, even though (as many, not just you, have noted) he’s a troll, we’d be back to the usual conversations about trans bathrooms, abortion, guns and childhood transition making up 70% of regular threads, and those were in many ways played out discussion topics by the end of the last Bush administration.

It's not like we can't talk about other things, we just don't as much.

This is why I'd like a BLR back, maybe just with those topics outright banned, as more seeds for discussion on a variety of topics.

There's also the perennial Motte favorite of a person coming in to whine and consensus build about how things are going to shit and we have to do <blah blah blah> or else the evil political opponents will destroy us all, worded in such a way as to just barely slip past the site's moderation standards.

I know that there is a tendency for some topics, in some weeks, to dominate, but I fail to understand this critique.

I'm frequently impressed with the depth, breadth and back and forth of some of the discussion I've seen here. Even on familiar topics, some of the ideas are frame breaking enough they lead me to question some unexamined prior.

Even the HBD and white nationalism stuff has merit in uncovering widely held views and pointing to the critique of liberalism moment we are in.

Also, as a majority single issue focus poster, it's called culture war and I resent people telling me to move on just because they have reached their peace. I'm sure you have issues that stir you and there's a gate-keepy flavour with pointing out topics that are 'overdone' that triggers me back to days of college, where no-one at parties wanted to talk philosophy with me...

I recognise some stuff gets repeated and may feel overdone, but it's easy to minimise main threads. I think even in frequently posted issues, there can be new levels of analysis/synthesis that evolve over time.

The variety of posts both down thread and last week would suggest otherwise.

Hard nope.

SecureSignals is getting modded for one issue posting, this guy is doing the exact same thing, except dishonestly. Ban for life.

Concretely, I thought the Aporia article he posted was a perfectly reasonable thing to post.

The mods take an extreme light touch with SS, he’s still here years later and still largely single-issue posting, just not exclusively in top-level threads. And the main reason he gets modded is that he makes the same arguments in every Holocaust denial thread but when actually interrogated always disappears when Stefferi or whoever effortposts a quality rebuttal to his arguments and allusions.

This guy, by contrast, is more ‘just asking questions’ rather than making an argument. Obviously it’s still trolling in a particular direction, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s a less objectionable grift than posting propaganda and running away when a decent counterargument presents itself.

I'm not criticizing the mods, I think SS should bite the bullet and post about literally anything else, every once in a while, and if there's no other subject in the world that makes him tick as a human, he should probably take that as a cue to think about his life long and hard.

I'm criticizing you for encouraging JD, when all he's doing is being a dishonest version of SS.

I'm not criticizing the mods,

I will.

Situations like this are what ultimately lead to my falling out with Zorba and Trace and they don't seem to have learned anything in the interim. We kept getting into arguments in modmail where they'd be like; You can't just assume that "u/ArgleBargle456 is ban evading because he showed up the morning after /u/ArgleBargle123 got banned." and "Yes /u/soandso is very obviously pushing an agenda and consistently bringing the quality of the conversation down but that's not a reason to take action against them" and I finally ran out of patience. If blatant ban evasion and clearly violating the foundations of the sub are not reasons to mod someone, what is even the point of moderating anyone?

Like you say, this guy's just a less honest version of SS. and as @fuckduck9000 points out, keeping him around is effectively the worst of both worlds.

There's something to be said for "beyond reasonable doubt" when it comes to banning, but posters should err on the side of not feeding trolls, even if that results in some false positives.

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I suppose part of me is curious whether all our replies to JD/motteposter/other alts are going to end up on SneerClub one day, or whether it’s some other kind of troll.

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Yeah, if you want diverse content, just allow low-effort tops. If you want honesty, let SS and co be. Tolerating this guy is the worst of all worlds. Litters the sub with low-quality fake dogpiling arguments about a subject the mods apparently don’t want to see.

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