banned
Thanks for that. I actually got a dark chuckle out of it.
I was thinking since last night if I wanted to address that comment. Would it be worth my time? Would anyone even read it and contemplate what it's like to have had those experiences repeatedly? Can I even write it without getting worked up and using a no-no word or a turn of phrase that will get me perma banned? I wrote it over and over probably 3 or 4 times, deleting and thinking it's not worth the effort or it's too risky. But when I finally sacked up and had a version of the post I thought would pass, in the back of my mind I wondered if anyone would even read it, or would it just be dismissed out of hand. Fitting that the first comment, so hot on it's heels, is just rank "I don't believe you".
Yes, I know people don't believe me. That's why I'm so angry all the time.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
I see he's banned now lol.
For two weeks. He'll be back and probably get another chance before a permaban.
But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here.
For this specific problem? Almost certainly graft by left-wing NGO's is the culprit in the eyes of most posters.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9hr ago
Oh, thanks for outing yourself. I already banned you for two weeks because you keep making shitty comments, but since you just admitted to being a very specific ban evader, I will make it permanent.
I don't get why you think this makes you clever, but whatever.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11hr ago
Alright, well, this is news to me, and I'm not holding it against you, and Amadan isn't the only moderator warning you or banning you. I'm communicating all of this to you because I would like to not ban you. This is the same process we went through with TPO, with Darwin, with penpractice, with others. We assure you that yes, actually, we do appreciate your good posts, we insist that this does not give you unlimited leeway, and so on, and so forth.
You're not banned yet! You can totally keep it that way.
WhiningCoil
12hr ago
Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username
I don't think so.
I know what your original account was on reddit (1). You switched to a new one (2), came here with yet another one (3), and I am pretty sure you went through a couple others (4+) along the way-I will admit I might be misremembering those (though I think I could name them). I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using.
Numbering is mine. Amadan seems to think I've had at least 4 accounts and is holding this against me in his moderation decisions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13hr ago
That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.
Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.
Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.
Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
13hr ago
I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts.
Two days ago.
Less than a day ago.
"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."
Both from @Amadan.
Barfknuckle
13hr ago
Yeah, about that, I sent a modmail about this accusation that I'm running alts, because it's bullshit, and I'd appreciate a response.
You should just make some alts. The trick is that the alts should say absolutely nothing the least bit controversial at least until the current main is kaput. They should just make obvious little comments and build up a few points until it's time for them to become the new main.
By the time your new main goes from "newbie with a clean record so far" to being someone the mods remember in their own right, your last account getting banned should be old news.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
AI art is a democratizing force, anyone can use it. Consider George Droyd for instance, a Solana shitcoin supported by AI video memes: https://x.com/FloydTerminal
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1927219300055572563
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1888370796550373792/video/1
The far-right has less resources for art (see https://x.com/DacistRapian, clearly talented and artsy but nobody is going to give him money, he keeps getting banned off twitter and making new accounts) and the MAGA-right just aren't that rich in art either, though they do have resources. MAGA by nature is not well-organized, not a top-down force. It's mostly Trump charisma and the sincere effort of his supporters, not a honed hollywood/media operation. There's no Trump equivalent to the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice_(2024_film), which is basically a hatchet job on Trump. They don't have the resources or the organization. When they do try and do something top-down it often ends up being hideously crass and cringe.
What people on the right can do and do well is repurposing and rearranging other art for their own purposes. The only time I see The Apprentice referenced online is when the film version of Trump gives his sigma speech about tactics and Trump supporters go 'based!' see here for an example. They reappropriate the work of others: https://x.com/PierceKeaton/status/1865222291157598458
Or in 2016, remember MAGApedes? Can't Stump the Trump? WH40K God-Emperor memes? Today on the far right there are chudjaks, soyjaks, basedjaks and troonjaks. That was all bottom-up stuff. It's the opposite of hard to MS Paint up a drawing.
AI art is a natural extension to the resource-poor, bottom-up approach. One person can do it in a few hours with a trivial amount of money, often for free. It meshes poorly with the left-wing top down approach. Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert were running with million dollar budgets, Colbert supposedly was burning through $100 million a year, which is why his show was cancelled. With those resources there's no need for AI art, you can just do it the slower, more expensive way. The left are the slow-moving established players, the right are the disruptive start-ups, they're always going to make more use of new technology.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20hr ago
I see he's banned now lol. But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here.
WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.
"Deport them all" is certainly an opinion some people have here, but as loudly as it is sometimes expressed I would not bet that it is prevailing. It's not uncommon for people to make the libertarian argument for open borders, for example--Bryan Caplan has some cachet in the rationalsphere.
I think your circumstances are not unusual. But there is a potential rejoinder you might want to consider--
My eldest is going to enter the same public high school I went to. The children of the first generation immigrants I went to school with now have their own families and, like me, have stayed in the same county to raise their children. They're indistinguishable from my family in the ways that matter to me.
That's great--my classical liberal heart is warmed--but it would be interesting to know for certain whether you are indistinguishable from their family in the ways that matter to them. If one demographic says "we love everyone, we help everyone equally, this is how we all work together to make the world a better place," but the other demographic responds "thanks for the help, we're going to take everything that is given to us to help our ingroup and, if possible, to become the dominant power, at which point we will then suppress our outgroup." The quote from Frank Herbert's Dune books is--
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
I am not saying this is how your neighbors think! I hope it is not how they think. But that is the angle and the concern that tends to arise when people make arguments like the one you have made here.
FoundViaTwitter
21hr ago
I mean, as I said
Interesting comment...
From my perspective, America has outperformed its economic peers in Europe and Asia over the last forty years despite this supposed "anchor". It's not that I'm completely allergic to your argument, but I do think more evidence is required before, um, deporting everyone you think is genetically incapable of "pursuing generational projects".
I will admit to a bias here. I live in Northern Virginia in a HCOL area where I'm surrounded by immigrants. I grew up here and stayed to raise my family. My eldest is going to enter the same public high school I went to. The children of the first generation immigrants I went to school with now have their own families and, like me, have stayed in the same county to raise their children. They're indistinguishable from my family in the ways that matter to me. The neighborhoods are immaculate and the people are friendly, like they were when I was a kid. The generational project seems to be working pretty well from my perspective! You may have had much more negative experiences with immigrants.
As I said in my first post, I found this forum in a roundabout kind of way through via Alexander Turok's Twitter account. I see he's banned now lol. But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here. That would be fine, of course! I need some ideological diversity in my media diet.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
@fmac thinks that you (plural) would be interested in the following summary of the several mods that I've written for Victoria 3. I am inclined to think that this comment is both too narcissistic and too niche to be interesting, but whatever. Maybe I'm a bad judge and you'll find this comment more interesting than this week's court-opinion summary, which seems to have fallen rather flat.
In an effort to make this comment less narcissistic, I will emphasize that you do not need to be a 1337 h@xx0r to mod this game. It's just editing plaintext files, not compiling code like some other games.
Premise: In the vanilla game, slaves are created from poor people in countries with the Debt Slavery law, and thence are exported to countries with the Slave Trade law.
Problem: It makes no sense that countries with Slave Trade do not enslave their own low-acceptance (i. e., discriminated-against) people.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, a country with Slave Trade now will enslave its own low-acceptance people (using the same logic that the vanilla game uses to re-enslave recently-freed people when slavery is abolished and then reinstated).
Premise: In the vanilla game, a colonizing AI country will spread its focus across up to five different colonies, depending on how much population it has. Colony growth also is capped, so focusing on a single colony is detrimental.
Problem: I don't see any reason for these mechanics. Splitting focus between multiple colonies only increases the chance that multiple countries will split a colonial state, which I dislike. And what's wrong with rushing a single colony?
Solution: In a mod that I have written, a colonizing AI country now will focus on only a single colony, and the cap on colony growth is removed.
Premise: In the vanilla game, the AI will never incorporate a state that contains fewer than 100,000 people.
Problem: I'm not really a big fan of this limitation. Yes, the sparsely-populated territories of northern Canada and northern Australia are legally "unincorporated" even in year 2025. But Rhode Island barely had reached a population of 100,000 in the time period of Victoria 3. Am I really supposed to believe that Rhode Island should not have been incorporated until after year 1830?
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the minimum population for incorporating a state is set to 1—i. e., effectively removed.
Premise: In the vanilla game, several different fonts are used—Garamond, Open Sans, Noto Serif, a custom font called Paradox Victorian, et cetera.
Problem: I dislike seeing a zillion different random fonts.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the game uses only Open Sans.
Premise: In the vanilla game, in order to avoid losing its "civilized" status (as opposed to "uncivilized", like China and Egypt), the Ottoman Empire must complete four of seven available missions. One of those missions, "Tanzimat: Urbanization", requires that 75 percent of the Ottoman Empire's states be both incorporated and urbanized.
Problem: This doesn't make much sense to me. What's wrong with having unincorporated states?
Solution: In a mod that I have written, "Tanzimat: Urbanization" requires that 75 percent of the Ottoman Empire's incorporated states be urbanized.
Premise: In the vanilla game, an AI country will incorporate a state if a culture that calls that state region a homeland shares a trait (whether a heritage trait indicating race or a cultural trait indicating a non-race characteristic) with a primary culture of that country.
Problem: Under this criterion, both a fascist Britain with the Ethnostate law and an open-minded Britain with the Multiculturalism law will incorporate all European states and all Anglophone states (including the black ones in the Caribbean), with no regard for whether the cultures living there are actually accepted. That doesn't make any sense.
Solution: In a mod that I have written: The AI incorporation logic is disabled. Instead, a country (whether AI or human) will automatically incorporate a state if a culture that calls that state a homeland is accepted under that country's current laws, and will automatically disincorporate a state if no culture that calls that state a homeland is accepted under that country's current laws.
Premise: In the vanilla game, most countries start with all or nearly all of their states incorporated. It is generally expected that a country will have most of its states incorporated.
Premise: In the vanilla game, once a civilized country has acquired a bunch of land in Africa, it can organize that land into a "colonial administration" country, which is created with all its states incorporated.
Problem: These two mechanics are completely contrary to the AI incorporation logic (whether vanilla or modded) that I described in the previous section! It makes absolutely ZERO sense that the British and Dutch East India Companies have incorporated all of their states at the start of the campaign, despite having NOTHING in common with the Indian and Indonesian cultures. Also, when the mod that I described in the previous section is enabled, the complete absence of incorporated states in the two aforementioned countries causes some problems.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, if a subject country has zero incorporated states, then it is automatically annexed by its overlord. In a different mod that I have written, the colonial-administration mechanic is disabled.
Premise: In the vanilla game, up to five autosaves will be retained, and any older autosaves will be deleted.
Problem: A campaign of Victoria 3 lasts for a hundred years! If you've set your autosave interval to six months, you will not be able to look back even one decade to see how the world has evolved.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the autosave limit is set to 99999—i. e., effectively removed.
Premise: In the vanilla game, if a state region is split between multiple states that belong to different countries, a state will receive the unmodified name of the state region (e. g., "Guyana") if it includes a majority of the state region's provinces, and will receive a modified name ("British Guyana") otherwise.
Problem: If one country owns almost all of of a state region and another country owns just one or two provinces (such as a treaty port) in the same state region, it can be difficult to realize that the state is split, because the first state will have an unmodified name and the second state will be very small and unobtrusive.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the threshold for a state to have an unmodified name is increased from 50 percent to 99.9 percent—i. e., effectively never.
Premise: Several different factors affect an AI country's enthusiasm about the prosecution of a war. In the vanilla game, one of these factors is time. An AI country becomes more interested in ending a war as time passes: −100 when the war starts, increasing quickly to +0 at 10 months, and then increasing gradually to +100 at 110 months.
Problem: The quick increase in peace desire before the 10-month mark (before the battle fronts and the participants' economies have had a chance to get settled) makes sense, but the gradual increase in peace desire after the 10-month mark does not make sense (is duplicative of the factors for angry population, war-ravaged land, and high debt; often causes an AI country to make a white peace when it is on the precipice of victory).
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the gradual increase in peace desire after the 10-month mark is eliminated.
Premise: The USA starts the game with the Legacy Slavery law. In the vanilla game: If the USA experiences a civil war caused by the anti-slavery movement, then the other side becomes the FSA (Free States of America) and enacts Slavery Banned immediately (without going through the normal law-change process); and, if the USA experiences a civil war caused by the pro-slavery movement, then the other side becomes the CSA (Confederate States of America) and enacts Slave Trade immediately.
Problem: These forced law changes are unnecessarily heavy-handed. If the CSA wants to enact Slave Trade or the FSA wants to enact Slavery Banned, then let it; if it doesn't, don't force it.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the aforementioned forced law changes are eliminated.
Premise: In the vanilla game, some important countries are formed through the "major unification" mechanic. Most prominently, in order to form Germany, Prussia normally declares a "Unification War", which automatically (1) annexes all German members of its sphere of influence and (2) declares war on any non-sphered, non-former-unification-candidate countries that hold German states (i. e., France, but not Austria-Hungary).
Problem: This is disgustingly ahistorical. Historically, Prussia did not attack France for Alsace-Lorraine. Rather, Bismarck tricked France into attacking despite being weak!
Solution: In a mod that I have written, all major unifications are eliminated and must be formed the normal way (by acquiring the required states through means other than a unification war).
Premise: In the vanilla game, different still-uncolonized states in the North American frontier are claimed by different countries, and therefore are not colonizable by other countries. The USA claims Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas; Mexico claims Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; and the Republic of Texas claims New Mexico and Texas; while Nevada, Colorado, and Oklahoma are claimed by no one.
Problem: Historically, Nevada was claimed by Mexico, Colorado was claimed half by the USA and half by Mexico and Texas, Oklahoma was claimed by the USA, and only half of New Mexico was claimed by Texas.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, Nevada is claimed by Mexico, Colorado is split into two state regions of which one is claimed by the USA and the other is claimed by Mexico and Texas, New Mexico is split into two state regions of which one is claimed by Texas and both are claimed by Mexico, and Oklahoma <del>is claimed by the USA</del><ins>is not claimed by the USA (because that causes problems with premature annexation of the Indian Territory, due to the game's limited mechanics), but instead the state region of Texas is extended through the Oklahoma panhandle (as it historically was prior to 1850) and the Indian Territory is expanded to eliminate all uncolonized land in Oklahoma</ins>.
Premise: In the vanilla game, canals can be built in the state regions of Panama and Sinai, and nowhere else.
Problem: Historically, the USA actually picked Nicaragua for a canal, and switched to Panama only after getting a lower price for the assets of France's bankrupt Panama Canal Company.
Problem: Due to Victoria 3's focus on states rather than on provinces, if Colombia refuses to sell the Panama Canal Zone to a great power that wants to buy it, the great power then receives a claim, not just on the Canal Zone, but on the entire state region of Panama. The same applies to Sinai. This is absolutely nonsensical.
Premise: In the vanilla game, armies can march from Colombia proper to Panama.
Problem: Historically, this was impossible.
Solution: In the same mod (necessary due to limitations of map modding): Panama has been split into three state regions, western, central (Canal Zone), and eastern, and the eastern state is disconnected from Colombia proper in the invisible pathing system. Nicaragua has been split into two state regions, northern and southern (Lake Nicaragua), and the Panama Canal events have been copied-and-pasted for a Nicaragua Canal. [Sinai has been split into two state regions, eastern and western (Canal Zone).](not yet complete)
Premise: After the USA annexes northern Mexico, the annexed states become homelands of the USA's primary cultures. The Yankee culture gets California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, while the Dixie culture gets Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Problem: Historically, California could have been divided into a free north and a slave south. And I find it unfair that Dixie doesn't get a window to the Pacific.
Solution: In the same mod (necessary due to limitations of map modding), California is divided into two state regions, northern and southern, and the southern portion goes to Dixie rather than to Yankee after the Mexican–American War.
Premise: In the vanilla game, the Corsican culture has three traits: European, Francophone, and Italophone.
Problem: Francophone??
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the Francophone trait is removed from the Corsican culture.
The mods can be downloaded here, if anybody cares.
Goodguy
1d ago
I've been temporarily banned here before for going on rants against my political opponents and so on. When I chilled out and let the matter settle, I always realized that the mods had been right to ban me. "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument" is a key rule that helps to prevent this place from turning into a largely useless cesspit of outrage bait and insanity, like Reddit or X. AlexanderTurok certainly broke that rule many times, but he is not the only one. I've broken it before. I think you've broken it before. It happens. We're emotional beings, after all. I'm about as pro free speech as it gets, but of course in order to keep this forum from turning into chimpanzee shit-flinging, some rules have to be enforced. I think that the ideal of "try to bring light instead of heat" is a good one. No matter what the content of your opinion is, there are more and less inflammatory ways to state it. And again, I say this as someone who is very pro free speech. But the pragmatic reality is that this forum would go down the tubes very quickly if the rule against being inflammatory was not enforced.
Regarding @WhiningCoil and why I didn't mod him: first, sometimes a mod doesn't want to mod a particular comment for any number of reasons. It might be because they have a history with that user and are afraid they might be too biased. It might be because they are uncertain how "bad" it is and whether it merits modding (and honestly, they want some other mod to make the call). It might be because it's ambiguous enough we actually need to have a discussion in the mod channel about it. It might be because they just don't feel like taking the effort to write a justification statement for the banning, which especially in borderline cases, where the user is popular, and/or when we expect pushback, needs to be written with some effort to explain our reasoning, rather than just "Bad post, 3-day ban." Regardless of the actual length of the mod message, they do require more effort and thought than a regular post, because I assure you, we all take the responsibility seriously, we don't just react on impulse and ban people when they sufficiently annoy us.
In this case it was a little of all of those. I thought @WhiningCoil's comment was bad, but... eh, assuming you take his story at face value (which generally one should not, you might have noticed how very, very "on the nose" most of his stories are, with anecdotes stocked with horrible NPC caricatures from Central Casting), yes, he was very clearly making an intentional, racialized comment, but he was also (allegedly) describing a real situation. I expected a modding would result in people complaining that we're trying to forbid Noticing (tm). I didn't want to make the call because I am well aware of his animosity and I felt like a mod warning would be better from someone else he can't scream is persecuting him (and whose mod message he would actually read). I knew modding him would require me writing a detailed response justifying it (the sort that @naraburns is much better at), for the benefit of other posters, if not WC. And also, ironically, I like WC (as a poster, though not so much as a person) and he writes quite a few AAQCs. I would prefer he just tone it down rather than getting banned or rage-quitting, but unfortunately his cumulative record is bad enough that he's getting close to a permaban, and I just didn't want to add another stone to that pile, even if he deserves it.
As for the stated principles of the Motte: those are principals. They are aspirational. Do we always achieve those lofty goals? I am certainly not going to say every thread here is high quality discussion full of smart people saying intelligent things. We definitely do not see everyone acting with "charity and kindness." Still, I do think this place is not quite like anywhere else. There are reddit communities that are still good (for some value of "good") but only if the discussion stays away from certain topics. There are places where people can talk about "forbidden" topics (HBD, Holocaust denial, trans-critical views, etc.) but those places are full of people who outright hate the people they are talking about, and no matter how lofty and intellectual they try to be, the seething hate is always evident (and they are not much better than reddit about dealing with contrary opinions).
So is the Motte "converging" on an accepted range of opinions? Maybe, kind of, but we still have some leftists here, there is anything but a unanimous consensus on HBD and trans people and Jews, and the current events topics, the AI topics, the history topics, do often have genuinely high quality and interesting discussions from knowledgeable people with very different perspectives. We get accused of various things from being a "right-wing" site to being a den of seven zillion witches, but I think our principles are still intact if imperfectly enforced. I see the Motte kind of like America: it's never really lived up to its ideals nor fulfilled its promises, the "community" and sense of shared goals is often a polite fiction, and we flounder and sometimes fail, but damned if it doesn't still beat the alternatives.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Dude, for someone who has outright made up so many things about me and what I have said when I have not, it's rich you calling me a liar. (Yes, I know you have me blocked, but I also you know you'll see this message anyway when you look for messages while logged out.)
I know what your original account was on reddit. You switched to a new one, came here with yet another one, and I am pretty sure you went through a couple others along the way-I will admit I might be misremembering those (though I think I could name them). I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using.
You can feel how you feel, but my moderation of you has been, if anything, more charitable than what other mods would have been.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
Since I keep getting pinged in this paragraph, I want to make one thing clear.
I have not been banned on various alts. I had a single original account that I was afraid of getting doxed under when something I posted attracted the wrong sort of attention. I burned it, made a new one, and immediately came to Motte moderators and told them the entire situation. Maybe that's before Amadan's time, or maybe he just likes to invent lies to make me look worse. But that's another reason I'm generally better off not engaging with him or respecting his moderation of me at all.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1d ago
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
I can see two ways of looking at this mod reply. Slightly uncharitable take: Mod leaves WhiningCoils reported message to mod queue, but has the time and join in the reply pile-on to a rage-quit message with a 3k character lecture about principles of the Motte. More charitable take, WhiningCoil's comment got both pushback from the commentariat and mod attention, so the mods feel need to point out the rage-quitter's complaints were not justified.
Speaking of the principles of the Motte ... the stated principle is "to be a place where people can say the things they can't say elsewhere, and then have to defend it". Very eloquent, but many people and groups have lofty-sounding idealistic principles that fail to produce intended results. Is the Motte a place where people come to say the things they can't say elsewhere and have to defend it? How often? Do the rules help or hinder such interactions?
Looking at the previous CW thread, I think the Epstein discussions had most back-and-forth argumentation with most genuine effort to present evidence and argue. Quickly scanning, this OP, this discussion of shot-down airplanes in Serbian war and movie script discussion yielded some discussion with occasional real disagreement. So did Turok's top-level posts, which were perhaps not the best as arguments, but they produced adversarial disagreement. Not certain if any of the rest of top-level posts satisfy the same criteria. More often than not, it looks like people chiming in with not too dissimilar opinions, not a vigorous argumentation to dismantle or defend a controversial opinion.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I think that a month is much too much, given how many right-wingers here get away regularly with breaking the rules and the ethos of trying to bring light instead of heat. Which I'm not blaming the mods for, given how much content there is to mod, but it's a matter of proportionality. I think a week would be fair. Giving him a month just feeds into the narrative that critics of the right are being persecuted here for being critics of the right, instead of just being modded when they are snarky and so on.
I have no particularly strong opinion on the ideal ban duration here. I'd be open to anything from a week to a perma ban. I did say it was provisional, and I'm happy to change it to a different value once the other mods chime in. If the others think a week is more appropriate, I can change the duration retroactively to make it so.
What concerns me, quite immensely, is that Turok has shown no particular signs of being corrigible. Even after multiple warnings from other mods, I can't make out any difference in behavior. Other people who have been banned usually learn to knock it off. If they don't, they earn a PB. For such people, gradual escalation from warnings to short bans to longer bans usually works! For people who don't seem to give a damn? I'm inclined to reach for the gun.
You can mod him for being repetitively unnecessarily inflammatory, same as various right-wingers are modded for that. If you ban AlexanderTurok for writing things that drive people crazy, you should also give WhiningCoil another ban for the same reason.
WC was just modded by Nara for his comment calling black orphans a "virulent invasive species". He wasn't banned, and did manage to come up with a semi-reasonable explanation for that choice of phrasing. You can review the mod log for details.
We didn't ban him for it, but that was absolutely a formal warning, and will be taken into account should he do so again. I'm not going to go into detail about our internal mod discussions, which happen to include concerns about our neutrality in enforcing moderation decisions as well as community sentiment, but rest assured that bans are very much on the table. Just not today.
This is the last straw, Alex.
Barely a day ago, @Amadan gave you some rather clear operational advice, with his mod hat on:
There is a problem here, and the problem is you.
The problem, specifically, is that you post a lot of these kinds of sneering borderline kinda-making-a-point-but-mostly-just-sneering comments, and increasingly people are getting frustrated and angry and snapping at you, and then we have to mod those people (because you are not allowed to attack someone) and it's starting to look very much like this is your game.
Sometimes we ban someone not because any one post was terrible but because their overall effect on the community is so negative that there seems little value in allowing them to keep throwing shit. We don't like to do it; it's very subjective. We can't read your mind. Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy. But we've warned you enough, and you keep doing exactly the same thing, that I suspect you know what you're doing and you're doing it on purpose.
So I'm telling you now: stop it. Or I will propose to the rest of the mods that you should be banned under our catch-all egregiously obnoxious category.
He said it well, I can't say it any better. Our (very weak, if it even exists at all) Affirmative Action policy for left-wing trolling is, shall we say, not up to the task of tolerating this any longer.
Quoting a tweet that "someone made on Twitter" without attribution or source is a... choice. If it was made with the intent of rules-lawyering our BLR guidelines, by not submitting a link at all, it was made poorly.
That's a minor quibble at the end of the day. You have been repeatedly warned to behave yourself, and you've clearly annoyed both the commentariat and us mods well past the point of being justifiable on merit. You are being egregiously obnoxious, and show no signs of stopping. We tolerate more from those who give the forum more. You're not there, quite the opposite.
Banned for a month. Consider this provisional, since the other mods are asleep and I've asked them for their opinions regarding a duration. Me? I'm open to the idea of a permaban.
Edit: I've elected to cut down the ban to 2 weeks since two respected commenters are willing to speak up on Turok's behalf. Hopefully he gets the message.
Magusoflight
2d ago
To be serious for a moment (and because I don’t want to get banned again for making a joke)
I’m of two minds with this - on the one hand I can totally believe that Trump was a client of Epstein. he is a history of using prostitutes, cheated on his wife, had leaks about grabbing women by the pussy, probably groped some women before, dropped in on a teen beauty pageant while they were changing (?), and other scummy things. He was friends with Epstein, talked about having a fondness for young women, etc
On the other hand, the letter is way too on the nose, and it comes up JUST WHEN HEAVY SUSPICION IS COMING DOWN ON TRUMP FOR BEIG A CLIENT OF EPSTEIN?
Seems way too convenient. Why hasn’t this been dug up before? Why now? And it doesn’t read like something Trump would ever write and it’s basically a confession.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is.
There is just not enough moderator time in the day for that. If someone's comment doesn't get reported, it is very unlikely to get moderated (that would require one of us to just happen across the comment). Of the comments that do get reported, probably a majority of them are plausibly rule breaking, but I'd be shocked if we actually moderated even one of those in ten. I cannot tell you how many times I've thought, "Yeah, I agree that's a bit low effort/antagonistic/whatever, but it's six replies deep and seems approximately within community norms and the metamoderation is low-certainty and it's not part of a pattern of bad behavior, it's not worth the effort." Or--"Oh, this is also a pretty bad comment, but I just moderated this user for the same thing in a different thread, do I need to say more here? Nah, I'll catch them next time."
And yeah--"oh, this is a super quality poster, I'm just gonna let it slide this time" is definitely on the list of time saving excuses. But never fear! We have in the past banned quality posters eventually. It's just a much more protracted and painful process.
It is certainly possible for a comment to be sufficiently bad that I will ban a user on sight, first offense, no questions asked, no matter how many AAQCs they have. But barring those egregious violations of the rules, we are actually almost always moderating with an eye toward patterns of behavior more than we are moderating for precise adherence to the rules in specific cases. Indeed, the rules themselves are only in service of the foundation. This is not a sport where we are calling balls and strikes based on high-precision measurements; this is the messy work of curating a community dedicated to the practice of disagreement!
So when you say--
Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for...
--and then you provide a direct quote, you've already missed the mark. That user is getting dinged, not for any particular statement, but for an increasingly established pattern of behavior.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
It's fine to use AAQCs as giving a higher threshold to ban someone, but it shouldn't give them a higher threshold for warnings. If a person is breaking the rules (or is close enough to it) they should get dinged no matter what their past history is. This helps good-faith posters stay within the lines and helps build a sense of consistency in what types of actions are rule-breaking. Right now it strains credulity to see a leftist get dinged for:
conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities
While I can scroll down a bit and find this type of post not receiving such treatment, thus implicitly being seen as fine enough:
The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits
we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned
For the record, I'm not saying you guys never ban right wing posters
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts...
Amadan has given you sufficient explanation, but let me add to it. First, nobody reported those posts, I hadn't seen them before you linked them. Second, every single one of those links is to a user with recent AAQCs. You yourself enjoy the benefit of the doubt in that you have accumulated 3 AAQCs and just one warning over the course of at least three years of activity.
By comparison, in four months, Turok has accumulated eight warnings from three different moderators, including our most left-wing moderator!
Can you see why we might be starting to think that this is not a person who posts in good faith?
(And yes, we do also get right wing posters who match this pattern, and yes, they do get banned. One thing I will say for them, typically the most vocal radical leftist trolls take their ban as a badge of pride and go brag about it to credulous strivers in other communities who imagine this place to be somehow "alt-right." That is a pleasant change from the alt-right trolls, who often proceed to wage DM campaigns throwing every accusation and epithet imaginable in our direction. I don't know why it shakes out this way, but it does!)
This seems like some remarkably bad faith on your part.
First, you claim that nothing like this happens. Then you Darkly Hint that no one will provide examples, because they have a convenient excuse not to do so.
Then two people provide an example, despite your Dark Hinting.
After that, you employ what I can only call a reverse isolated demand for rigor to blow it off as an isolated incident and not useful as any kind of corroboration for lived experience. You and other mods have banned people for that kind of bad faith behavior in the past.
At this point, I'm going to ask you outright. What would you actually require to believe anything that I have said? Because from where I'm standing, it seems like your mind is already made up.
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