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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3662 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

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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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.

So is "I think {thing} is retarded" alright?

As long as {thing} is not another poster.

Wait, 'Trump is retarded' would be OK? That seems inconsistent with recent moderation around 'tranny'?

I'd treat "Trump is retarded" the same way I'd treat "Trump is an idiot." If you're making an effortful post with a real argument (the thesis of which is Trump's idiocy), I probably wouldn't mod it because you called him "retarded." If you're just dropping a "Trump is retarded" comment because you don't like Trump, I'd ding it for low effort, but I'd do the same for "Trump is an idiot."

That makes sense -- but what I mean is that this seems inconsistent with "Contrapoints is a tranny" being a problem -- even though "tranny" doesn't particularly imply anything bad about Contrapoints ! (unlike, say, "Contrapoints is retarded")

I observe a 100% correlation between those who call someone a tranny (besides themselves in jest) and those who imply something bad about that person and about them being trans.

You might as well try to argue that "retarded" doesn't imply anything bad because arrested intelligence isn't necessarily bad.

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