banned
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
7mo ago
Why get caught up playing the game of "that's misinformation! Well, maybe it's true but it's still malinformation! and anyway you're banned for Hate Speech, read the room." You can see all the moves coming 20 steps ahead, being right in retrospect doesn't matter because you still lost the social power game, and the only winning move is not to
I've been feeling this too, but contemplating that it may just be a side effect of getting old and having done all this before.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts
WASHINGTON — Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service, raising concerns about the influence of their onetime agencies over the social media giants.
At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psychological operations” at the National Security Council, The Post has learned. Another is Matthew Williams, the company’s co-lead of its Trust and Safety department who spent more that 15 years in intelligence with the agency.
The discovery of the DC-to-Silicon Valley pipeline comes amid an outcry over revelations that the FBI influenced Twitter to suppress The Post’s account over its reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas business interests in October 2020 and has regularly demanded specific accounts and tweets be banned.
The irony if you never hearing about this, because the FBI/CIA has such control in the first place should be a punch in the gut.
Dem win, as I've been predicting since the biden-trump debate.
Literally nothing matters in this country except the institutions, and they are now as dominated by the ruling party as anything in China. And like in China, any apparent loosening of total control is just a slipup caused by intra-party feuding, like the Connecticut voting fraud case where someone got caught dropping off a garbage bag full of ballots for the wrong democrat in the primaries.
The real difference in this election is how little discussion there's been. I haven't felt the need to debate whatsoever, because it's as pointless as arguing with chatgpt. "Issues" don't matter, reality doesn't matter, only framing and who holds the megaphone matters.
Why get caught up playing the game of "that's misinformation! Well, maybe it's true but it's still malinformation! and anyway you're banned for Hate Speech, read the room." You can see all the moves coming 20 steps ahead, being right in retrospect doesn't matter because you still publicly lost the social power game against the guy who demonstrated his power to rig it, and the only winning move is not to play.
A nonexhausitive list of examples: violent crime & shoplifting rates, the state of the economy, inflation, #s of illegal migrants and the very existence of government programs importing them, Biden's senility, assassins' motivations, "woke and CRT doesn't exist it's all in Republicans' imaginations," Biden's nuclear crossdresser stealing women's underwear, there's no censorship on social media you're just banned for being a bad person, we must criminalize residential school mass grave genocide Denial, leftists don't support Hamas at all you're crazy for thinking so, "yeah well you're weird for noticing!". I could go on and on.
The people lying about all of these didn't lose anything by lying. They actually beat you by demonstrating that they can maintain the lie longer than the truth can stay solvent and then bury it in a ditch afterwards.
Like Scott said about arguing with Vox: they can lie endlessly and force you to burn ever more weirdness points correcting them.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7mo ago
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation. Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user. (I could expound at length why I would consider him to be a single-issue poster - as I see it, he is here to produce impassioned defenses of US neoconservatism with the same single-minded determination, attention to detail and absolute lack of interest in countervailing evidence as our most notorious JQ posters - but you have made it clear that you would not want to hear) Personal antipathy and feuds between users are a pretty normal sight here, though. Normally one would expect mods to act as a, well, moderating force on them - yet this sort of statement fills me (and presumably anyone else who would disagree with him) with negative levels of confidence that in the event of an interaction gone sour I would get a fair hearing. That is only moderating in the way Putin's rule is moderating opposition in Russia, which is to say it channels resentment into other outlets rather than reducing it.
RenOS
something is wrong
7mo ago
Right, but we're talking about people who don't have that thick skin. The asymmetry means that if you want to hear their ideas, you'd have to "take it", as it were, when they say uncharitable and unkind things.
Is that even good enough? My experience increasingly is that any place not straight-up banning people in accordance with progressive views will bleed away all the progressives posters, who'll explicitly state that they're leaving since they're not willing to share a space with -ists. And it's obvious why, given that they can always go to reddit or similar where they can and do get anyone banned when they're losing an argument. The SSC subreddit, while still better than reddit overall, is a prime example of this dynamic.
I don't even completely disagree with you, this place is clearly populated by a very stable niche at this point, even if it's a very different one than what some on the left allege. But I also don't know any place more tolerant of differing viewpoints, and at this point I'm at a loss how you even can get progressives to join a not-progressive space.
Felagund
7mo ago
Yes. He was unmodded on reddit. (I was never on reddit myself) He was banned here a couple months ago for deficits in etiquette, despite being warned. (And I think I remember something about him not accepting that people can recognize racial differences in the aggregate without being white nationalists.) It was something of a shame, in my book, since having additional perspectives is nice.
hydroacetylene
7mo ago
Republicans voting against free birth control because some money would go to planned parenthood is what actually happened there and the uberconservative wishcasting to ban the morning after pill was walked back by the Louisiana state legislature, let alone by the national GOP(and aside from a few deep southern states there has not been a case where republicans had a realistic path to getting the morning after pill banned- in all cases they chose not to do it).
This is a really bad idea.
Activist rich people like Soros, are bad enough. It isn't true that they are wasting their money. Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs. Which includes both direct quid pro quo but also attack dogs organizations that influence outcomes by attacking people who don't play along.
My impression with your constant "its fine" is that you rather sympathize with the ideological characteristics and agendas of the people who are most involved in funding politicians who do have some similarities ideologically, and even ethnically (plenty of Jews very highly overepresented among the top republican and democrat donors) and want them to get their way. In observing the results of their agendas, these rich activists are more fanatical, less objective, and reasonable on various issues, like policing, prosecution policies, DEI, relations with Israel, than what a good policy, that is independent, objective and in line with the common good would promote. They have bad ideas of how to change things, and their character is questionable too.
I would rather someone like Sam Bankman Fried who was one of the top donors in last election, to not be deciding things.
They are also more connected with foreign governments too. The negatives of one's goverment becoming subservient to foreign goverment interests are real and it is pretty obvious how this would lead to bad governance against the interests of the actual people but in line with the interests and agendas of foreign governments and billionaires.
These rich activists, do not have an inherent right to rule and in fact such claim for their right to run things can be very fairly interpreted as a form of treason. My wacky idea is that they can in fact be stopped from exercising their current influence, and their NGOs banned, and restricting large donations, giving all candidates a goverment backed x amount of money and a right to get small donations. In so forcing politicians to not have to do what AIPAC, ADL, a shitload of NGOs, or rich donors want them to do. Which will result in representative democracy which is already like many systems, a flawed system and not a perfect formula, to come closer to something that could potentially work.
That and restricting citizenship rights to natives with minor exceptions and restricting numbers of foreigners and deporting where there has been mass migration. Not allowing parties to hack democracy by replacing the electorate with foreign population who has to be loyal and prioritize getting away with replacement, or other benefits. Which is it self constitutes an example of a violation of the inherent rights of a people for their continued existence and service of their common good, since you are replacing them and destroying their nation, and also putting the rights of foreigners above them.
Modern states should take much more seriously the currently huge problem of treason and of the violation of the rights of the people that happen when their rights are disdained and foreign groups are favored. Even if we consider a society to not just be one nation's state that has guests but a multiethnic society, even there the consideration of not screwing the majority ethnic group of its inherent rights, which include cultural/ethnic rights, to perpetuate their ethnicity, instead of having an oppressive negative identity that treats this as evil.
Plenty of constitutions have things written in line of this, but an unwritten constitution has been followed that does the complete opposite. My wacky idea is restore the nation state democracy and enforce it, while restricting the agendas that destroy it. Down with the idea of fake postnationalism oppresses the natives, while allowing nationalism for groups of the progressive intersectional coalition.
The influence of billionaire activists and most NGOs result in a very skewed, harmful direction. With enormous overepresentation of certain identitarian agendas and complete absence of the interests of other groups such as white people in the USA for example. It represents massive agency problems and makes a complete mockery of the idea of democracy. So yeah, my idea and favorite evolution of democracy is one in anti corruption, anti treason, where both laws and elite ideology is against the DEI, replace the natives, multiculturalism (which isn't even genuine multiculturalism but no culturalism for natives and allowing culture and nationalism, and even extreme versions of that, for approved groups), and where such tyrannical agenda is not allowed to run the media, governments, NGOs. Where it is taught as an example of tyranny, oppression, corruption and civilization destruction. It has backlash today where its supporters have marched on institutions and created their influential networks, NGOs. Imagine how much it would be hated if it was encouraged to dislike it.
So under this system there would be much fewer influential active NGOs, while all these state within a state NGOs would be banned and subject to further justice measures where necessary and where they are found to have done other crimes like spying. NGOs should be few and influential NGOs involved in activities that enhance the common good, and not in civilization self destructive criminal agendas. They must operate under a framework that has such restrictions, so you don't get any new ADLs to ever come into existence.
I would also add that the system to not become predatory internationally, while should be very adamant and vigilant against foreign subversion, and agendas at the expense of one's own nation and represent a self confident civilization that perpetuates it self and serves its common good and its interests, it should be willing to have genuine win win cooperation with foreign nations were there is a genuine opportunity to do so, rather than being predatory and out to win by screwing over others. Else it isn't a scalable model.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7mo ago
[re-quoting yourself] ”You seem to have misunderstood the point of the opening, which was to contest your characterization of the limit of child soldiers, which itself wasn't limited to Hamas. A child soldier is not a 16 year old. A child soldier is a child who is used in the function of war, regardless of their age, and as such age alone does not disprove someone from being a combatant unless the age is so low that they physically cannot.”
The definition of “child soldier” is <18, agreed. Ages lower than 18 do not preclude one from classification as a child soldier, agreed. But the NYT focuses on <13 children, and my original post specifies <13. This means we are not talking about legal definitions, but a specific cohort of <13 children. If Hamas is not employing <13 children, then the IDF is not expected to be killing <13 child soldiers. If the IDF is not expected to be killing <13 child soldiers, then we shouldn’t have loads of dead <13 children. Yet there’s evidence that we do have these dead <13 children (NYT+Guardian). So Hamas’ hypothetical employment of teenagers is an immaterial red herring to this topic.
The issue of child soldiers was raised as was a definitional dispute
I don’t see why a definitional dispute would be raised at all.
and as an omission not addressed by the NYT editorial that served as the OP's basis of posting
They did not need to address it, because it’s immaterial to their reporting.
Moreover, child soldiers had nothing to do with the majority of arguments in the post nominated for the AAQC
It was the quoted line and it was included in your post as an argument. It is what I find most disagreeable, and I don’t have to post everything I find disagreeable.
The concluding arguments didn't even raise child soldiers as a basis for the children being shot when listing a half dozen competing hypothesis.
Right but you included it and it was quoted in the award. Perhaps some other time we can discuss your other arguments if I don’t get banned for doing that.
Since this clarifying argument was not disputed, challenged, or otherwise responded to
This is too opaque for me to decipher exactly what you mean.
and the entire subject of child soldiers was only used in the AAQC as the introductory lead-in / hook and to establish a relevant topic missing from the NYT editorial
It was an assertion, and you didn’t prove it was a relevant topic to their reporting.
it is possible that the clarification has simply been ignored to further advance criticism of the position
Not sure what you mean.
just as the sources discussing to the Hamas youth wing child soldier activity within the last decade that was referenced within your article was also ignored
Now we are getting close to something. “Hamas youth wing child soldier activity within the last decade”. Wonderful. Is it <13 children and what’s the evidence?
Truzman 2021 is supposed to be evidence that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers. Rather, it’s evidence that there is a military summer camp for teenagers run by Hamas. America also has military summer camps for teenagers. JROTC begins as young as 15, and there are military camps that begin as young as 8. “Hanover and the surrounding districts combine for Young Marines meetings, with a total of around 40 students. Nationwide, the youth group has around 300 clubs. The ages range from 8-18.” They do gymnastics, drills, maybe some shooting practice. Do the tens of thousands of children at American military summer camps constitute clear evidence that America employs child soldiers? No. Of course not. And that’s the same for Hamas. A Hamas summer camp is not the same as employing child soldiers, any more than an American military summer camp is the same as employing child soldiers. Israel has similar summer programs.
There is no military necessity argument for training children instead of adults if you want adult soldiers.
Why do both America and Israel do the same thing? From the New York Times
“They told us it was mandatory,” Ms. Thomas said. J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines. But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled. […] J.R.O.T.C. classes, which offer instruction in a wide range of topics, including leadership, civic values, weapons handling and financial literacy, have provided the military with a valuable way to interact with teenagers at a time when it is facing its most serious recruiting challenge since the end of the Vietnam War. While Pentagon officials have long insisted that J.R.O.T.C. is not a recruiting tool, they have openly discussed expanding the $400 million-a-year program, whose size has already tripled since the 1970s, as a way of drawing more young people into military service. The Army says 44 percent of all soldiers who entered its ranks in recent years came from a school that offered J.R.O.T.C.
Now you claim that at these camps the “children” (teens) are taught to take hostages. But when Israel takes back PoWs they also put cloth over their head, so you can’t allege allege from this they are being trained in atypical terrorism or something.
certainly a take for an ongoing practice in the current war.
This article specifically says that “as young as 14” are attending training, not that they are being employed by Hamas. If I attend JROTC, am I being employed as an American child soldier?
It is also not covering easily-findable but also easily-dismissed-on-account-of-(Israeli-)sourcing from the current war, which includes reports of children-sized explosive belts, children carrying explosives in vegetable bags to hamas ambush points
Correct, Israeli wartime propaganda can be dismissed in the same breath as Hamas wartime propaganda. We have third party observers: UN, Amnesty, journalists, doctors. Israel is trying to eradicate third party observers from Palestine, of course. Something Israel can do is take their abundant drone recordings and share to the world examples of child soldiers, right?
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Wow, so the ban on talking about Israel even includes sub-comments?
You haven't been banned from talking about Israel. It was just something you are pushing me toward contemplating.
The rest of your comment is sufficiently repetitious, uncharitable, etc. that I can see it was a mistake to attempt to have a productive dialogue with you concerning your bad behavior.
The threats or whatever are so lame.
My apologies. I will just go straight to a ban next time. Cheers.
I value his presence here highly.
His own AAQC record suggests that you are not the only one! Which is why I would like him to not decide to get himself banned by pulling this shit.
zoink
7mo ago
Coworker and I were discussing election betting market when a woman on the team asked how concerned she should be about Trump winning. She’s married, has a young child, and, if not outright smarter than me, definitely has better math chops. She’s the best product forecaster we have. I asked her what she was most worried about. Her answer: birth control getting banned.
In case someone doesn't know, birth control is literally the least controversial political issues there is.
aqouta
7mo ago
I'm personally giga device banned from reddit. Even with updating an IP and spoofing several finger printing things and going in with a VPN any account I create has every post auto hidden and the password to the account doesn't work to log in. Almost certainly for /r/drama related posting though. Things like that were becoming more common.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
is this really the standard you want on themotte
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
7mo ago
I just tried to count how many times that happened and had to use both hands and take a shoe off, so it definitely wasn't one time.
How do you get that high? I've been around since the days of the /r/ssc culture war thread and can count the times I remember seeing on one hand.
But iirc the most prolific of those guys is still unbanned and active on theschism (throwaway0# or something), unless I'm mixing him up with someone else.
For some reason it doesn't seem to spark the same reddit admin ire as all the other stuff.
Yes, I am still unbanned and active on theschism. I would guess that I don't spark the ire of reddit admins primarily because I'm only really active on theschism and don't bring up pedophilia very often (and am very careful about what I say when I do) making it unlikely anyone bothers to report my comments. I think reddit admins are in a position similar to the mods here in that they respond reactively to user complaints rather than proactively looking for "bad" content, only on a much larger scale, so it's easy to fly under the radar if you avoid high traffic/particularly contentious communities and don't have a comment history that is pretty much entirely about pedophilia.
SteveKirk
7mo ago
that one time that guy candidly admitted he was a pedophile
I just tried to count how many times that happened and had to use both hands and take a shoe off, so it definitely wasn't one time. But iirc the most prolific of those guys is still unbanned and active on theschism (throwaway0# or something), unless I'm mixing him up with someone else.
For some reason it doesn't seem to spark the same reddit admin ire as all the other stuff.
TheFooder
7mo ago
Hlynka banned? Wasn't he one of the main mods? I missed a lot of lore apparently.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7mo ago
People tend to get banned for that when it's caught / suspected, the problem is that it's hard to detect, and prove objectively. What made you think that this is what happened here?
2rafa
7mo ago
how is this legal? it seems like the legal theory is just add 'in minecraft' after the illegal act and then its ok. the people involved are very clearly receiving consideration for their vote as long as the 'in minecraft' clause was not added.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/expenditures-to-influence-voting
In simpler terms, this means it is illegal for anyone to use money or anything of value to influence someone's vote.
i'm going to solicit people to kill other people but make them check a box that says 'in minecraft' or 'this does not really create a legal agreement' and everything is ok.
ah: i missed the link that explains the courts have decided no money involved no problem:
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2007/08/06/0655517.pdf
Whatever the wisdom of using vote-swapping agreements to communicate these positions, such agreements plainly differ from conventional (and illegal) vote buying, which conveys no message other than the parties’ willingness to exchange votes for money (or some other form of private profit). The Supreme Court held in Brown v. Hartlage, 456 U.S. 45, 55 (1982), that vote buying may be banned “without trenching on any right of association protected by the First Amendment.” Vote swapping, however, is more akin to the candidate’s pledge in Brown to take a pay cut if elected, which the Court concluded was constitutionally protected, than to unprotected vote buying. Like the candidate’s pledge, vote swapping involves a “promise to confer some ultimate benefit on the voter, qua . . . citizen[ ] or member of the general public” — i.e., another person’s agreement to vote for particular candidate. Id. at 58-59. And unlike vote buying, vote swapping is not an “illegal exchange for private profit” since the only benefit a vote swapper can receive is a marginally higher probability that his preferred electoral outcome will come to pass. Id. at 55 (emphasis added); cf. Marc John
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7mo ago
The surge in the 70s depends on Supreme Court jurisprudence which probably couldn’t have occurred before the New Deal. But I think capital punishment advocacy does date back to the 1800s. States like Michigan banned it early with explicitly Christian arguments.
Today’s split probably has more to do with partisan habits than with religion.
Tractatus
7mo ago
GOF research was being funded by Fauci the entire time it was supposedly "banned"
Reuters: Diwali celebrations hit air quality in New Delhi
New Delhi topped charts on Friday as the world's most polluted city after revellers defying a ban on firecrackers to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, helped drive air quality to hazardous levels.
Thick smog wreathed the Indian capital, shrouding the presidential palace in the central district and the surrounding gardens popular with joggers and cyclists, after Thursday's celebrations.
Local government officials have banned use of firecrackers during Diwali and the winter over the last few years, in line with Supreme Court directives, but have had difficulty enforcing the measure despite the threat of jail.
In New Jersey, the posting of celebratory swastikas by Indian immigrants is causing some confusion.
After the Montville Township Police Department received a few phone calls about swastika sightings in October, it posted on Facebook to explain why.
The reason? Diwali.
"With Diwali coming up this October, I want the residents and citizens to be aware that a common symbol of this holiday is a Diwali swastika," the Oct. 16 post read. "...This post is in light of our police department already fielding calls regarding people seeing this symbol on cars and houses. We are trying to eliminate any unwarranted hostility toward any person displaying this for their religious purposes."
I'll take the point that I was being overly dramatic with the comparison, and that this did not help my case. I got somewhat drunk on spite there. However, I stand by the intended point, stripped of the drama: if you make it so that certain users or viewpoints can't be attacked, you might get some more people to like those users and viewpoints, but you'll make others quietly hate and resent you and the organisation that gave you the power.
I've been following the discussions about the moderation system for long enough that I'm quite familiar with these principles you explained; I just think they are bad and have done a lot of damage to the discourse, which you only don't see because you keep grading yourself on a curve and by deferring to the sentiment of the very community that you create by following this approach. If you drive away most people who disagree, you will naturally see agreement up until the point where you have evaporated down to a size such that sentiment shifts to "we have a great community, but somehow nobody wants to join and listen to our great points". /r/CWR, in its own "community sentiment", felt that it was doing great right down to the point of maybe getting 100 posts a week. If you were serious about wanting a space in which people with different politics talk to each other, you should if anything have done the opposite, and treated any tendency in "community sentiment" as indicative of a growth that needs to be pruned.
Either way, being this explicit about protecting a user from criticism on the basis of a long record of AAQCs is a new extreme for this system; we seem to be evolving from a soft loop along the lines of "n% of the community like this user -> user gets upvotes and AAQCs -> user gets away with more extreme posts -> some people who dislike this leave -> m% (m>n) of the community like this user" to a harder loop where the penultimate step is "some people who dislike this get banned". In some alternative timeline that might have only differed from the current one by a handful of votes here and there at first, coffee_enjoyer would have been the "excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history", and Dean would be the one getting called a single-issue poster and told that he narrowly avoided a ban. I don't want to hide the bias that stems from the circumstance that I would mildly prefer that timeline over the current one (very mildly, though), but that callouts based on substance and discussion discipline get treated this way at all is bad, and that you have set up a system that amplifies small differences in initial conditions in such a fashion makes it seem unlikely that this was an intentional act of "gardening" as opposed to excuses being made for a yard full of weeds.
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