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I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.
As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
Bad phrasing. Don't do this. If you see someone else doing it report them, don't imitate them and start a flame war.
You have this tendency to only respond to and then imitate the maximally offensive or most rule skirting of right wing viewpoint posts. This makes your value as a "counter-viewpoint" poster very minimal. This is a forum for discussion, and there are network effects. Our best users provide unique viewpoints, follow the rules of discussion, and participate often in a positive manner. I rarely see you engage with these users. SSCReader and Walterodim have some nuanced and careful takes in this thread, you responded to neither. Both users have long mod notes of just AAQCs. Instead you respond to ArjinFerman who has long mod notes of warnings and short bans.
Your net-effect seems to be to create flame-wars here, and only engage in discussion with our more troublesome users.
Some people think we give you leniency because you have a unique viewpoint. I just want to nix those complaints right now. We provide standard leniency to guesswho. And guesswho does not provide value to most of the users we care about, so there is no reason for us to provide extra leniency anyways. As far as I can tell guesswho upsets a bunch of people because he basically holds up a mirror, but seems intent on only holding up that mirror in front of uggos. The lovely looking users that might appreciate a mirror get nothing.
Pretty damn funny to me that OP who introduced this topic using that same terminology gets a one-line 'please phrase this better', and I responding using the exact same language get a four paragraph 'you are awful, you are terrible, I'm informing everyone else reading this that you're worthless' tirade. It might look less like a double-standard if you made one post modding the actual behavior that violates the rules, and a separate post with the personal attacks?
If no one should engage with posts like the one I'm replying to, why aren't the other 10 people who have done so getting a warning?
It's bad to engage with things that are egregiously wrong or offensive, because that draws more attention to them? That's a central tenant of cancel culture, surprised to see it endorsed here.
I literally (did)[https://www.themotte.org/post/882/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/188688?context=8#context] reply to Walterodim already, maybe you should look at my posts outside the report queue before confidently declaring what my posting tendencies are like?
And the only post I see by SCCReader is the reply to my own comment, I considered replying with 'Yeah of course you're right and the real answer here is that OP's premise is wrong and they're just being histrionic', but I thought that would be more rude and confrontational and not worth getting into!
OP is getting their first warning ever, and most of their engagement in this thread was not rule-violating. You are on your 8th, and you are actively flaunting the rules in another comment. OP's response to modhat: 'oh sorry, didn't mean to do that'. Your response: 'i did nothing wrong'
It is possible to engage with a post that does things badly, without also doing those same bad things. Or at least it seems possible for other posters.
That comment wasn't loaded when I was looking through the thread, so I missed it. Sorry for accusing you, but in this case I do feel like it holds up my general point. Your posting is like a mirror to those you speak with. Your response to walterodim is measured, reasonable, and without any level of flaming. If you only responded to our top quality posters you'd probably be considered a top quality poster yourself, instead of a troubled case that constantly causes us headaches.
You are assuming a level of equivalence there that SCCReader and others might disagree with. And the point can easily be made in a non-confrontational way. "I agree with you, but I think the point you are making that rightists mostly just go about living their lives is also true for leftists. {optional addition if you want to make a good post:} For example [x complaint about leftists is mirrored by rightists doing y](repeat for two or three different values of x and y)"
Yes, this is true. I'm pretty autistic and don't understand tone and norms very well, I ussually get by through mirroring.
I would try harder to avoid doing this if I thought it was more wrong to do so, but... I don't see why people should get away with being rude or antagonistic without getting the same in kind?
And more importantly, given that most of this board is anti-leftist/anti-woke in ideology, I don't see why one side of that conflict should get to use rude and antagonistic tactics, but the other side shouldn't get to use them back? That seems like it creates a clear double-standard that pushes the board in one direction only.
It's not that I don't understand your point, having rudeness met with rudeness does create more total rudeness on the board in a way that decreases the overall quality of the average post. And I know a lot of teachers, I understand the logic of 'I don't care who started it, fighting is not allowed and you're both in trouble'.
But I do think that if that's going to be the standard you hold people to, it creates a greater responsibility for you to clean up the people starting things even when they don't degenerate into fights. You're correct that my interactions with Arjin are often suboptimal on both sides, but they reply to so many of my comments in ways that seem confrontational or ridiculous, how long am i supposed to just ignore them (especially when I've received lots of critiques at other times about 'not answering my critics and dancing away when I get challenged')?
I'm confused, didn't SSCReader already basically say that in their last paragraph?
Given the ratio, you're inevitably going to draw more reports, so this is a bad game for you to play.
I'd recommend rather to just try to defend your positions/show yourself right sufficiently clearly. (Yeah, that's hard when people don't want to listen to you.)
I sometimes feel like I'm too confrontational, and I'm definitely less confrontational than average (where average is defined by the possibly highly biased measure of what I notice).
Maybe point out the lack of civility, and then respond more levelheadedly? But you're often fairly levelheaded anyway, from what I've seen. (I'll gesture back at the comment about what I notice.)
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Well this helps explain some things and makes me less frustrated with you, thank you for that.
I'd just suggest picking better people to mirror. If you have some basic negative emotional reaction to a comment I'd try just reporting it and not responding.
I think there is a reporting bias but not an enforcement bias. When I see reports there is definitely bias towards more reporting of leftists, but when I get to the thread I have to go through and read the whole thing, and I'm gonna hand out warnings and bans based on my assessment of people's behavior, not just on who is reported.
I think the bias I'm talking is more of a structural network effects thing rather than something anyone is doing actively. Like...
Toy model, a board is 90% anti-X, 10% pro-X, and has 100 people who are willing to engage in name-calling (90 anti, 10 pro). Each name-caller makes one post per week. All name-callers have a 10% chance to respond to each name-calling post on the other side with a name-calling reply. Each participant in such an interaction has a 10% chance of getting banned for it.
(I'm going to switch to A and P as name-callers on each side, and 'bad post' for name-calling post)
Week 1 has 10 bad P posts. Each of the 90 A posters responds to an average of 1 bad P post, meaning each A poster gets about 9 bad P replies. From these interactions, every P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.
Week 1 has 90 bad A posts. Each of the 10 P posters responds to an average of 9 bad A posts, meaning each P poster gets about 1 bad A reply. From these interactions, again, each P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.
Taking those two chances together, next week we expect to have about 81 A posters left, and we have a 10% chance of one A poster surviving.
The end result is the same if you start at 51% vs 49%, and if the reply rates and ban rates are 1% instead of 10%. It just takes longer.
You can try to decrease the rate at which people make bad posts, and the rate at which people reply to bad posts. But again, that just takes longer.
You can try to ban people for bad posts even if no one replies to them. But I'm pretty sure that again just takes longer, as long as you're hitting both sides a proportionally equal amount I don't think it changes the long-term trend.
As long as your policy is to not care who started it and punish both people in the exchange, you will long-term converge towards whichever side has the larger starting population ending up with complete domination.
They will at some point become the only side making any bad posts at all, and you will have an ideological echo chamber at least on the fringes.
And once that's established, new people making bad posts on the dominant side can join and not get punished because there's no one to reply to them and trigger moderation. So the number of bad posters on that side can swell ad infinitum.
And new entrants making bad posts on the non-dominant side are especially screwed. As the numbers are so lop-sided, they're very likely to disappear immediately, so that side can never build up more numbers to challenge the existing dominance.
From a structural perspective, I only see two simple ways out of this.
1 is to ban people for making bad posts before people make bad replies to them, and remove those posts so people can't make replies. I don't think you can/should have to respond that fast, and I think it goes against the ethos here to remove the posts.
2 is to respond initial bad posts more strongly than bad responses. It's galling and may feel like a double-standard from one perspective, given that both did the same behavior in the abstract. But I think it's the only policy that doesn't a priori lead to one side dominating over time.
Or, you can just accept that one side is going to dominate as an inevitable result of your policy, and accept that as better than the other consequences of changing your policy. That may well be the best you can do.
But if you're doing it, then it's kind of disingenuous to claim that you're not an A-leaning board, that your moderation does not favor A posters. If you know that your policies, enforced fairly and regularly, will lead to a board with lots of egregiously bad and antagonistic and aggressive A posts, and few to none on the P side, then own that consequence and talk openly about how it is an outcome you are accepting in your moderation policy and vision for the board, even if only as an unfortunate but necessary evil.
(and of course, it's not really that there are posters who are 100% and others who are 100% bad, it's that each poster has some percentage chance of each post being bad, with wide variance. In the very long run, any A with a non-zero chance of making a bad post ever will be eliminated by the same structural network dynamics above, eventually creating a complete echo chamber across the whole spectrum of post quality)
These are all things we are aware of.
We don't remove posts that have been publicly visible at any point for any reason. (there are extreme exceptions to this rule that have not yet been triggered, such as doxxing, or things that are illegal to share)
We do respond to stuff as soon as we see them, and part of bringing on new mods was to increase response time. We can get through the modqueue every couple of days with just two or three active mods. But with about 5 active mods, someone will get through it every day.
We do have a policy that top level stuff gets judged most harshly on multiple dimensions. Especially on low-effort posting, but also on culture-warring and antagonism.
I think the reason things do not totally devolve in practice is that neither side is monolithic. You have a pet example and the math checks out, but people don't always fit perfectly into the ideological boxes. I disagree with you on woke/progressive topics, but I'm also probably more in favor of open borders than you are. And that topic gets me dogpilled around here. And I certainly get some amount of downvotes that might make me come out net negative in those threads, but the report volume is generally very low or non-existent.
Ymeshkout also manages to make semi-regular posts about the 2020 election, and is consistently defending a minority viewpoint around here. But again, rarely any reports, and their behavior is great despite lots of disagreement and downvotes.
I'm aware enough of being a minority viewpoint that I even tried to write some helpful advice for people that get ratioed on themotte. That was before you created your account, so if you weren't lurking you likely missed it.
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I know I ain't no [insert latest hunk the ladies are swooning over], but this is bordering on abuse!
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