Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
I'm the opposite, until recently I thought there was a big drop in the amount of moderating, to the detriment of the space. Hopefully the additional mods, mean we can keep a tightly moderated space. The whole point of theMotte is that civility needs to be modded for, in order that people with very different opinions can interact. TheMotte allows you to say almost anything...as long as you do it with an eye to framing it civilly for even your opponents. Good faith is helpful, but you still have to maintain your civility. That means not using terms that are likely to be inflammatory to your outgroup, unless those terms are vital to your post.
That requires a significant amount of moderating I think.
Many moons ago, on old reddit, when the ultra-progressive subs like SRS started banning certain words like ‘retarded’, everyone laughed at the futile attempt to stop the euphemistic threadmill. Now, even here, new words are regularly put on the index.
There are no banned words here. You're still welcome to give an example of calling people a slur that isn't antagonistic and waging the culture war.
If you call someone stupid, you will be modded. That doesn't mean "stupid" is a banned word.
Let me venture an attempt, using just the words HlynkaCG used.
"Fagots (sic) exist."
"Trannys exist."
"Elf Brahmins exist."
These seem to be "calling people a slur". Is it "antagonistic and waging the culture war"? Am I already modded? I must say, if even these examples count as bad, I cannot imagine any possible way they could be used that wouldn't be considered "antagonistic and waging the culture war". Perhaps they could be mentioned, but again, I believe this would be enshrining exactly the use/mention distinction into the rules of the forum and simply banning all uses as being inherently "antagonistic and waging the culture war". You're right that the result isn't that they would be "banned words" at the same level of utter stupidity that led to that business professor getting fired for teaching his students a common Chinese word that sounds a lot like an English slur, but I think it'll be pretty hard to maintain that there is any possible way that someone could use them without being banned.
I say this as someone who has no interest in actually using such words1, and I don't think you'll find any sort of inkling toward wanting to use them in any of my comments; I'm not that kind of person, myself. But I sure do prize clarity, especially when it comes to rules that result in folks like HlynkaCG being banned... and right now, we ain't got it.
1 - The only exception being 'retarded', because I think it's, uh, dumb that it's gotten the hate it's gotten. It's a clear example of an impossible euphemism treadmill that will never stop eating every word that even comes close to it, even when they're perfectly fine words on their own. I will forever continue to talk about internal combustion engine timing as being advanced or retarded, and if someone is late to the party, I will almost certainly joke that, "It's okay, they're just retarded. They'll be here soon."
Probably, but it would depend on the context. It's not like we make a judgment based on a single keyword. If your entire post is a rant about your outgroup, including "faggots exist," we're probably going to point out that dropping insulting terms just because you hate your outgroup is making it unnecessarily inflammatory. If you are responding to someone who said "Faggots don't exist" and said "Yes, faggots exist," we'd probably let it go (or maybe tell both of you to chill out). Of course that's a contrived example, just as your sentences above are contrived examples (why would you be asserting that "X exists" but using the most pejorative term for X?)
Obviously not, this is clearly a mention and not a use. Don't be disingenuous.
We don't usually start by banning people, we start by telling people "Please speak like you want everyone to be included in the conversation." We have never had a policy of banning people outright because they used a bad word. We have always had a policy of telling people not to use slurs just to express how much they despise their outgroup. Don't be disingenuous.
Don't be disingenuous. Hlynka was banned not because he dropped a bunch of slurs in one post, but because he was using slurs to be excessively belligerent to another poster for no reason, and he has a long track record of doing this (not necessarily with slurs, but being unnecessarily belligerent), and we've told him repeatedly to dial it down and he won't. And you have been around long enough that you know this.
Seems reasonable that the line is not just the use/mention distinction (as you had previously said, leading to the current confusion). instead, it's just about some ethereal balance of positive/negative vibes that your comment gives concerning the group in question. Thus, why @FiveHourMarathon can point to his comment where he said, "The obnoxious slurs were right," but if you had essentially the same post focusing on geopolitics, but found a way to say, "Of course, the obnoxious slurs were wrong," that's probably a moddin'. Gotta get enough positive vibes to pump those numbers up, make sure it doesn't sound like you're just dumping on the outgroup.
This is right and good.
If the rule is against being antagonistic, or boo-outgroup, that is inherently a vibe-based thing.
Use of slurs can be done without those pitfalls, but it's easy to use them badly, and it's unsurprising that people get modded for using them in antagonistic comments and not for using them more suitably (as he explained why it fit his comment).
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We have always modded taking context and intent and the overall tone of posts into account. If you want to call that "some ethereal balance of positive/negative vibes," sure, whatever.
You know what dumping on the outgroup looks like, and you do not have a principled objection to the distinction between use and mention, or between @FiveHourMarathon's post and @Hlynka's.
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