banned
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
I don't know. I think if some activity X is generally banned, but with an exception for Y, then you remove the exception for Y, your action is fairly characterized as "banning Y." You used to be able to do Y. Now you can't. Sounds like a ban to me!
sliders1234
2d ago
I got a couple upvotes on reddit replying to a post “with bad guy Butker whose the evilest player in the nfl”
Good Guy: Butker Bad Guy: too many to name
I am not sure if the Overton window of NFL player conduct has really changed that much. I think most Americans have always had some support for traditional values and even more support a religious community to do their own thing. Explicitly stating this publicly though was banned for a while.
This also has me thinking about the right to free association. Which has largely been deleted from the U.S. constitution. I largely support a right to free association but it feels like it does need some limits. I would like a company to be able to fire some one for any reason they want. If you get promoted to CEO and your personal view is that Indians are smelly vile creatures and want to fire them just because they are Indian I want you to have that right. And ideally those Indians you don’t like get scooped up by your competitor and build a better product.
Butker’s case provides the counter-point. If the NFL decided they don’t want Catholics playing in their league who do real Catholic things and fired Butker it would cause him real harm. Go start your own football league is not viable. This happens with a lot of product too. If Microsoft decided no Jews can use excel that would be an irreplaceable loss. Jews of course could build their own excel software, but since every other organization uses excel the Jewish excel would not be compatible with the Gentile Excel used by everyone else. They could not be accountants or investment bankers because all their clients would be using Gentile Excel.
Of course Courts can come up with tests to distinguish the difference for when giving free association is non-viable. The issue here is that if you are the wrong group at the time let’s say a Catholic kicker the court could declare it is viable for him to start his own NFL to be a kicker, but also find it’s completely not viable for Jews to create their own excel.
Whatever you guys might claim to be, this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation but not to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture.
You have either fundamentally misunderstood or are fundamentally misrepresenting the thread you linked. You are in fact allowed to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and many people have said here it many times before. You can in fact argue that Confederate statues should be torn down, and you can even argue that people who think otherwise are bad; many people have argued that here many times before. You do in fact have to be careful about how you talk about any group here, and quite a few anti-woke people have in fact been banned for failing to do so properly. The objection in that thread, as described to you repeatedly at the time, was that you were conflating people to object to the destruction of Confederate memorials with slave owners.
I think the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and holding the history constant to the start of the Civil War, I prefer our actual history where their society was destroyed through mass violence to counterfactuals where it might have been allowed to fade away peacefully, continuing to perpetrate evil throughout its decline. Further, I think that destroying Confederate monuments is both stupid and evil here and now. I'd be happy to discuss either opinion with you as time permits, as either side of either opinion fit comfortably within the rules here.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
2d ago
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity. People may do Y, but they can't do Y in furtherance of X. To concretize other possible examples:
-
There is a law against loitering in front of the mall, unless you're wearing a funny hat. The exemption for funny hats is set to be removed. Are funny hats banned?
-
You may not drink alcoholic beverages at the park, with the exception of beer. The beer exception is removed. Is beer banned?
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Carrying a firearm to intimidate others is illegal, but firearms in holsters are exempted. The exemption is removed. Are firearms or holsters banned?
marinuso
16hr ago
Will Elon throttle me if he finds out I’m short Tesla stock?
You probably meant this as a joke, but I'd be wary of buying a car from a tech company. What happens in X years when they shut the servers down that it wants to connect to? Or what happens if your account gets banned?
Tesla employees have been caught sharing videos from the cameras on the cars. That tells me that a) they can access whatever you can, and b) there isn't much stopping even individual employees screwing around with people's cars, neither in terms of IT security or company culture.
That's interesting. At first glance, I thought "why would Republicans support this law".
It seems like it would be better to get rid of group preferences. The problem is that, even when group preferences are banned, corporations, governments, and universities just go ahead and do them anyway.
Perhaps it's better to simply enshrine Republicans, conservatives, and Christians as new protected classes allowing the possibility of torts (or the threat of torts) to keep people from discriminating against them.
Since we can't stop disparate impact from being used as a cudgel, it's time to arm both sides of the culture war. Universities need to be sued for the fact that less than 5% of professors are Republican.
Spookykou
5d ago
I think it is unlikely that a fear of getting banned is very relevant to this issue. I think that people feel at least a mild incentive to upvotes a top level post where the poster clearly put in effort even if it is not particularly interesting, so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes and some engagement.
I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action. Honestly, if a modhat came along leaving the only comment saying you didn't try hard enough, ten people would suddenly come in out of nowhere to defend your post even if they would have never engaged with it otherwise.
cjet79
6d ago
Banned on request, he did not say he plans on coming back. My impression was that this was permanent and from a building discontent with the community. The main point of frustration was with people dropping bullshit or unsubstantiated claims. And then those claims mostly going willfully uncorrected.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity.
I'm not sure I agree. I don't read any intent requirement in the text of 14-12.7. It seems like what's banned is "being in public wearing anything that could conceal your identity." Your intent about concealing your identity doesn't enter into it.
As to your examples I think it would be fair to say "they're banning standing around in front of the mall in a funny hat" or "they're banning beer in the park" but the firearm one is trickier.
I know LLMs are banned here so mods please don’t ban me for this. Here is what I get from chatGPT when I ask “what does it mean for something to be low entropy in the context of the information it contains?”
In the context of information theory, low entropy indicates that the information content is highly predictable and ordered. Entropy, a concept introduced by Claude Shannon, measures the uncertainty or randomness in a set of data. When entropy is low, the data has less randomness and is more structured, meaning that there is less information content or fewer surprises in the data.
For example, a string of repeated characters like "AAAAA" has low entropy because the next character is easily predictable. Conversely, a string of random characters like "G7d2#k9" has high entropy because the next character is unpredictable. In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.
This is what I mean. Very low information, skimmable (because it’s predictable and repetitive).
I agree that “low information density” would be a better way of phrasing this, it seems like I am using this term wrong. Thank you!
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
I'm not sure how to bridge our different reading of the statute, but I don't agree with that summary at all. The text there [emphasis mine]:
§ 14‑12.7. Wearing of masks, hoods, etc., on public ways. No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State. (1953, c. 1193, s. 6; 1983, c. 175, ss. 1, 10; c. 720, s. 4.)
This seems really clear to me that intent aside, the effect needs to be concealing the identity of the wearer. For example, the proverbial immunocompromised patient going to a hospital - we know they're not concealing their identity because their actions require the people they're interacting with to know who they are! It's true that determining whether someone's "face is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer" requires some degree of interpretation on the part of police and prosecutors, but I think that's just an unavoidable part of criminal law. The change here isn't actually a change to the need for contextual interpretation, it's just removing health as a fully general exception.
If someone wanted to take the principled stance that you should just be allowed to conceal your identity, I think they could probably make a pretty reasonable case for that, but it would be a pretty different argument than what we see the legislators and newspapers running with.
I would agree that in my example that funny hats at the mall are now banned. What I wouldn't say is that funny hats were generally banned. You can wear your funny hat to a lot of places! You just can't do it at the mall anymore. In the mask case, people that have some actual medical reason and aren't concealing their identity shouldn't really bump into much of a problem. The one area of overlap that I could see this actually being a thing is someone that insists it's medical getting into a conflict with a business-owner that just hates masks and wants them to take their stupid mask off. In the hat analogy, I would think it was weird if someone was super pissed about the funny hat change when what they really don't like is the loitering rule at the mall.
SkoomaDentist
13hr ago
Well, the last-last one did just get banned...
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1d ago
Anyways look at the results and ask yourself the question about your rules bringing you to this -- what good did this ban do the forum?
We always ask that question. This is not the first time a well-liked and generally positive contributor has been (temporarily) banned. This is also not the first time that @JTarrou, specifically, has been banned. At one point he even wrote a long post about how he expected to get permabanned, no hard feelings, because he just couldn't comply with the rules about not shitting on his outgroup.
I realize there is a substantial contingent here who would like people to be allowed to post freely about how women are hypergamous bots, blacks are low IQ crime-monsters, Jews are invidious parasites, libtards should all be given helicopter rides, etc. etc. If that is the forum you would like, advocate for that but be clear about it. Maybe if that's what everyone wants, we will change our moderation and let the shit fly. But until now, the consensus has been that that is not what (most) people want, and hence that's why we mod people who cannot keep their seething hatred in check when posting. It's not like you aren't allowed to talk about women, blacks, Jews, liberals, etc., in a negative fashion. @JTarrou wasn't confused or caught unawares at crossing some invisible line he didn't understand. He knew what he was doing because he's done it (and been warned about it) before. So have 90% of our regulars who get rapped for breaking the rules, no matter how much they complain about it.
That said, sometimes there are phases where the mods all happen to be moderating more strictly or less strictly for a while. It's usually not an intentional or coordinated thing (we have not had a "reign of terror" recently, and no plans to do so). Remember those? When the forum would get so heated and antagonistic that we had to start issuing bans even for small infractions to get people to chill out? Some people thought that was necessary and some people hated it. Usually the people who hated it were the ones who wanted to shit on others. If you think we've been stricter lately, maybe it's because people have been shittier lately.
Corvos
4d ago
I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action.
Yeah, I'd say getting modded is rare whereas having proof people aren't really interested in what you have to say is much more intimidating.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Please don’t threaten him with a good time.
Also, he’s already banned.
cjet79
5d ago
that many of them perceive the barrier to entry to be too high.
Exactly! Its a perception thing, so I am trying to clear it up by changing that perception. WhiningCoil and others are making it more difficult by adding to the false perception. You of course are asking them to stop posting these bad interpretations of the rules, and thus discouraging posting, right?
Saying that they're mistaken, it's really not that high, isn't going to change anyone's mind.
There are different barriers to posting. One of those barriers is being afraid that the mods won't like your post and you'll get banned or in trouble. I can lower that barrier. I can't lower other barriers like "I don't know what to post about", or "I don't really want to talk about anything".
Take their names away. You could try enforcing uniqueness across the public-facing Internet (it won't stop organization in private channels, but because visible attention-whoring is the driver of this damage, this will make it inconvenient).
For owners and higher-ups, use a unique username that's divorced from your other identities.
Off-topic chat is banned from the project's mailing list.
This is 4chan 101 stuff. The problem with it is that it requires foresight and isn't obvious to people who don't understand why those measures are necessary, which people who tend to post about more interesting things clearly underestimate.
To add to The_Nybbler's point, oral arguments in Rahimi were November 2023, a case where an incredibly unsympathetic defendant (alleged multiple shooter, drug dealer, and girlfriend beater) was indicted for possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic restraining order. We won't know for certain how the court rules until the opinion drops, and that probably won't happen for a month (or up to three).
But it's extremely unlikely that this will result in a significantly broadened understanding of the Second Amendment. The most optimistic takes in the gunnie world hope that the Court will allow Rahimi's conviction and just require a finding of 'dangerousness'. Most expect that they'll overturn the lower court, or leave only the most narrow process grounds to protect Rahimi.
And there are reasons beyond oral argument tea-leaf reading for that. It's already happened before in Gary/Greer, where unsympathetic plaintiffs made it easy for the court to decide that for process reasons a prohibited person didn't need to be proven to know they were prohibited.
But even more broadly, there's just not that much of the court touching this right to protect all but the most aggressive infringements in the cleanest-cut cases across the wide scope of all people in a jurisdiction, and sometimes not even that, even as case after case was teed up.
If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who hadn't been violent, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he was convicted of counterfeiting cassette tapes in 1987. And they punted. If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who had suffered mental illness long ago and recovered, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he had a depressive episode in 1999. And they punted. States requiring guns to have technologies that don't exist? Taking private property without warrant or compensation or grandfathering? License denials for driving while black a police encounter that did not result in an arrest or any evidence of wrongdoing? Punt punt punt.
The best result the gunnie sphere other than Bruen was Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016! and see the massive resistance in O'Neil v Neronha, only finished in 2022). After that, there's maybe the GVR on Duncan v Bonta... except they GVR'd it to the Ninth Circuit, which even at the time had literally never allowed the Second Amendment to do anything, and since broke rules to slow Duncan down further. It's not like Bruen is even the only example: Caniglia v. Strom, was more a Fourth Amendment case, but see the later punts on the massive resistance it has faced by lower courts.
Maybe I get surprised here, or VanDerStok is where (... in 2026? assuming it doesn't get punted then?). But despite an environment with a massive variety of low-hanging fruit, these are the only things the Court cared about, and that's not random.
A lot of the posters here are just very bad communicators who are good at writing gigantic, very low entropy walls of text.[1]
Those walls of text have become semi-required by the moderators[2].
Thus: normal posters don’t post about any of these (interesting almost always fruitful for discussion) topics because they don’t want to get banned. I suspect that most of the interesting people have already left the party, but unfortunately I don’t know where went.
[1]: If you are into cryptocurrency, watch the episode of Alexi Friedman with the founder of Cardano on it. He talks for like 6 hours and says NOTHING. This is a good example of what a 2024 motte poster does in most top level posts.
[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.
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