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And some claim themotte doesn't downvote opinions. And this is from a centrist regular, not a truly progressive opinion. It appears you still have enough credit with the userbase, and you're socially conservative enough, to avoid the bad faith and strawman accusations for now, Ashlael.
I think one should probably not try to draw too many conclusions from votes on trump threads. I'd hazard at least half of regulars just collapse any thread with trump in it immediately. I suggest others do the same, it makes the place much more enjoyable.
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As a leftist liberal, I downvoted this because the commentary was inflammatory with almost no substance. I don't think the downvote count of this comment tells us anything about whether or not theMotte downvotes opinions (it does).
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I didn't downvote here, and don't downvote for disagreement in the general case, but I've personally called out and gotten warned for calling out AshLael's bizarre and uneven behavior on this topic.
This post might not have gotten as much downvote-spam as its Red Tribe equivalent, but that's more a fault for the people overlooking the consensus-building and evidence-free claims when their team makes them.
Ashlael is literally a political operative, which might explain some of that bizarre and uneven behavior.
I'm flattered to be the subject of a conspiracy theory, but no, no one is paying me to shit talk Trump on themotte.org. This is entirely my own pathology.
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And there's the bad faith accusation. What's the theory, anyway? He's BLM shadow liaison to the australian government, moonlighting as autist whisperer?
@gattsuru
Yeah, I still don't see the problem, like I told you in that thread. Your standard for sinister behaviour is frighteningly low. Not denouncing BLM more than once or twice is bizarre and uneven behaviour apparently.
What consensus is he building, all alone and despised?
And the good thing about evidence-free claims is that one can refute them with evidence. There really is no reason to write everything in blue.
@07mk
Frank disagreement is always inflammatory.
Frankly, I disagree.
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I'll repeat the arguments from there, then: you can't proclaim law-and-order credentials if you don't care about the law, you can't claim public order as a priority if some disruptions of public order can go unpunished for years lest orderly-but-not-state response squick someone out, and you can't claim anti-violence as a principle if you're willing to excuse it at the drop of a hat when the state wants to use it.
I don't think there's anything sinister, unless you're making a left/right pun -- and even then, Aussie politics doesn't break down into the right/left divide.
But if in one case, people honking horns and blocking traffic are so bad that they justify suspension of civil rights and all the normal protections of democratic processes, and in the other case, riots that burn down buildings with people in them are nothing special and should be resolved through democratic means. Some riots, and some terrorism, it turns out, are special.
... the sentence structure for consensus-building is around the right-wing posts you (and I) are bitching about.
And part of the warning I got was that I'm not allowed to do so. So there's a bit of an eyeroll, here.
I'll address @fuckduck9000's question below, but stop claiming you were told you're not allowed to refute claims with evidence. That isn't what you were warned about, and you know it. You may disagree with what you were told to stop doing, and you can keep arguing that point with us if you must, but it wasn't "Stop refuting people's arguments."
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So he's seemingly guilty of mild, year-spanning contradiction, as interpreted by you. I'm not going to waste my time explaining in detail why ashlael's positions are not contradictory, suffice to say you don't have a smoking gun. And all of this has nothing to do with the downvotes you were trying to justify.
You implied he was consensus building, like the post's Red Tribe equivalent. But those posts actually have a consensus to build on. At best he's gathering a coalition of the damned.
The rule against "Consensus building" doesn't have anything to do with how many people one is immediately appealing to. "We (you and I) agree on X" can be an appeal to common knowledge to your opposite number, provided they actually do agree; if you're not sure whether they agree, it's best to phrase it as a question rather than a statement.
"We (me and others, not you) agree on X, so clearly you're the odd one out" is consensus-building, whether the others are specified or not, and whether the others are present or not. Speaking for other people is generally frowned upon.
You genuinely do not appear to understand the rules this place operates under, and you are rounding all disagreement with your flawed understanding to evidence of bias. This makes your arguments against the actual, considerable, and quite damaging bias that does exist counterproductive.
This is not an endorsement of the object-level claim above.
I think you confuse consensus building with appeal to consensus. The latter pits an external authoritative perspective against the opponent, the former excludes a perspective from the debate entirely, and is characteristic of echo chambers.
From the rules:
If you think it helpful to criticize the behavior of the evident majority here, a position I wholeheartedly agree with, then an understanding of the actual meaning of the rules the Mods have put in place and enforce will help you do that more effectively. If you're worried about the rules being used against you, understanding how they work will help you stay on the correct side of them. The mods are remarkable in their good-faith commitment to trying to inculcate the norms that page describes.
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The reason why we have the concept of "conflict of interest" is to prevent that general sort of thing even when it would sound silly and be impossible to prove.
Remember the adage "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Do you think we could convince him that Trump is a good guy, or any other non-left idea, when his lobbying position depends on not believing that? (And yes, I think that applies even though Trump is not running for any office in Australia.)
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Whoa. In case anybody didn’t read the link:
@AshLael, I get if you can't tell us, but I'm curious: what did that year of your time end up going towards?
I'll DM you. My commitment to OPSEC is pretty thin and easily pierced, but I'm not quite willing to fully dox myself here.
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I downvoted it because it's not actually contributing anything to the debate.
I can go read people being mad at the right existing and having opinions on /r/politics, I can do the converse on /pol/, this isn't what this place is for.
I wouldn't say I liked it as a post - I'm happy it was posted if only because there just aren't enough toplevel posts in general - but if it was the right-wing equivalent, it'd be at the minimum +10.
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I got an actual death threat one time, that was wild.
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I always said it's an "I disagree" button, and that we should just get rid of voting, because it seems to cause too much distress for some people.
Better to let the mob have this impotent outlet for their censorious impulse than through accusations of rules-violating behaviour.
Would you like to have a conversation about this?
Anytime. Why don’t we step inside and settle this like women?
That was a legitimate question.
I don't think my behavior was objectionable, but I recognize you didn't like it, apologized for giving offense, and promised not to do it again as a show of good faith. Now you bring it up two comments in a row, which leaves the impression that you don't want to let it rest. So what sort of response are you looking for here?
Look Craven, there is no bad blood between us, I am happy to debate this or anything else with you. No offense was taken, but for obvious reasons I'd prefer not to be accused of bannable actions.
I think the rules can be, and have been, weaponized for censorship. I thought this before I became aware I could be a target too (back when my opinions were closer to motte-mode, instead of somewhat motte-left now, due to the rightward shift).
Believe it or not, we don't go looking for reasons to ban people. That said, I don't know if calling someone "Craven" is an ongoing joke between you two or what, but it looks like a gratuitous snipe.
As for weaponizing the rules for censorship, if you tell us how you think that's happening, we will discuss it. Usually I see these sorts of claims thrown out there as basically a complaint that the Motte is not modded according to how the complainer would prefer.
As he noted, FC is an abbreviation of Faceless Craven. I've mentioned it from time to time, and do not mind people using it.
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I did not mean it that way. FC is Faceless Craven, and Craven sounds to me like a more normal name than Faceless. It was meant to express familiarity and lack of antagonism, like calling you Dan.
No need to rethread it, but the background of our disagreement is darwin and similar cases, where imo the majority of the sub was so pissed off at differing opinions that they managed to get people banned on specious grounds. The mods are not really complicit in the ideological purge, it's just that the mob brought so many charges that it was inevitable that one would stick.
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