domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Tree
3hr ago
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
darwin had AAQC's. But just presenting a somewhat uncommon, solid argument is high quality in my book, and he did that often, because by virtue of his politics, most of his arguments were uncommon here. We banned the only progressive voices we had, all to maximize the content-free comments complaining about the enlightenment, modernity and the sexual revolution - the motte equivalent of complaining about boomers, or neoliberalism.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5hr ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.
Tree
6hr ago
Here’s an idea: Just fucking take it. Argue whatever the hypothetical is. Or don’t. But don’t censor. You are among friends here, right-winger. You don’t need to use the mods to crush your political opposition. You have your numbers, your downvotes (Turok is consistently downvoted even for neutral comments, which btw already censors him). This burning hatred for any left-of center commenter is embarassing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.
Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole
This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
Tree
4hr ago
I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :
-
he was the most progressive commenter
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he was a capable debater
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he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
Tree
5hr ago
Personally if I was a mod I'd take a pretty hands-off approach. Permabans essentially never, suspensions only rarely.
Amen to that. I wanted to express that I do not "understand the frustration". This isn't a therapy session, your feelings aren't valid.
Tree
3hr ago
You: show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
Me: His AAQCs
You : sure, he made AAQCs....
ez win.
I'm not convinced guesswho is darwin, because guesswho was treated antagonistically, and constantly accused of being darwin, and if you are to be believed, a 'bad faith' poster.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
Do you have an actual point here?
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
11hr ago
Doing a similar standard of job for 30% of the price, or even doing the same job to an 80% standard for 30% of the price for almost all jobs is a very valid component to the merits of an individual for a job. Microsoft choosing to recognise and reward this doesn't reflect badly on either them or the person doing the job for cheap, the only person to boo here is the person who wants to extract economic rents by artificially restricting competition.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't. JK Rowling wasn't actively debating on this website, so things are different for her as a public figure than they'd be for a poster on the Motte responding directly to me.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong. This might seem utterly arbitrary, but I think Darwin's statement here is about on par with a Republican claiming "Biden wants to take all our guns away". In one sense, Biden was in favor of further gun control. In another sense, the literal statement of "Biden wants to take ALL our guns away" is clearly wrong since he never advocated for completely taking all guns away. If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
OK, thanks for an actual link.
I... don't really see what's so bad about this particular post. I disagree with Darwin since I don't think his points are particularly correct, but I really don't see how he's being "dishonest" or "manipulative" or "bad faith". The worst part he does is claim "JK Rowling wants to ... eradicate trans people", which seems like it was originally a throwaway line that Amadan obviously latched onto because it was both inflammatory and untrue. But then Darwin clarifies what he really meant, and it just came down to butting heads over whether that was reasonable or not. Nothing else Darwin said seems particularly egregious in terms of "this is a political debate". If anything, Amadan was a total jerk in responding with statements like these:
Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.
you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll
you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.
You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit
Like, yeah, I think Darwin is wrong too, but I certainly wouldn't want to interact with a person who responded like that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
I didn't interact with him that much since I didn't share his views. He was far more left-leaning than I've ever been.
Again, I request examples of your claims. If he really was as bad as you claim, you should have no problem posting examples of where he was particularly egregious instead of just broadly motioning at it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
If there's not a rule against attacking your opponent as "living in denial" separate from the actual arguments, there should be. It adds nothing to the conversation but heat.
The second one didn't receive a mod warning. There's a mod warning a different user downthread, but nothing to the post claiming the outgroup politician is a foreign agent.
Turok is clearly arguing against a line of though that, will not predominant, mostly certainly exists on the fringes of the Republican party. I don't understand how you think what he's doing is "performance art".
Tree
3hr ago
I know guesswho claimed that. Still. You should have asked him if he was ever wrong on the smollett thing to determine his identity. If he said yes, it wasn't him.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6hr ago
The statement "happened to get away with it" seems like it's doing a lot of work here. My entire point is the right-leaning posters seem to "get away with it" quite regularly in ways that functionally give them a different set of rules.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7hr ago
Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.
Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
This seems like a ban based on vibes alone.
Another way of saying vibes" is "tone." Yes, we moderate based on vibes. It's not quite that fuzzy- we try to follow the rubrics we've developed over the years- but yes, when someone is being an obnoxious trolling shitstirrer, and has been posting obnoxious trolling shitstirring threads for a while that so far have been just barely this side of acceptable discourse, eventually we're going to say "Enough, knock it off." @AlexanderTurok has been there for a while, and he's been warned repeatedly. He just got a 1-day slap on the wrist, and so promptly writes a post absolutely dripping with sneering condescension.
Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!
You know what my least favorite category of bitching about modding is?
"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"
Playing this kind of game is never productive. Every one of us mods has explained, many times, that while we try to be more or less consistent, we do indeed mod based on "vibes" to some extent, and a lot of those vibes are "How obnoxious is this particular person being right now?" "How annoying has this particular person been recently?" and "Does this particular person have a long record of AAQCs, or a long record of being warned to knock it off?" There is also a lot of subjectivity in whether a particular word or phrase strikes this mod on this day as being over the line.
(Also worth noting that sometimes someone is filling the mod queue with reports, and he'll eventually get banned for one of them. Unless you're absolutely sure that the person you're complaining about didn't get a ban around the same time for some other post, don't assume that whatever post you're linking to is an example of "Mods thoughts this was okay.")
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
Ah, OK, fair point on that. Thanks for the link. Now if anyone can point me to anything particularly egregious he posted on that alt I'd accept it as a point where darwin himself was egregious.
I'll admit I'm only somewhat familiar with his postings instead of intimately familiar, yet everything I saw really didn't strike me as the kind of poster who'd post obviously egregious things. This notion has been moderately reinforced as I've consistently requested an example of such behavior and people haven't been able to give it to me.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5hr ago
Darwin had a particular style of bad faith
appear dishonest and manipulative
Do you have a clear example of this? Because every time I saw people get into heated arguments with him and accused him of "bad faith" or being "manipulative", it was mostly just the two sides not understanding each others' positions. I didn't follow him super closely so maybe there are some clear counterexamples, but I have a somewhat strong bias towards the null hypothesis that people just didn't like him because they disagreed with him, so they claimed he was "bad faith". Every time someone has accused me of being bad faith on this site, it's been exactly that: a stronger, somewhat more intellectual way of saying "I disagree with you".
Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.
I don't understand how the use of quotation marks in general would be worthy of a ban, or what you mean by "scare quotes". E.g. writing HBD as "HBD" probably just means he thinks it's a euphemism that he doesn't really agree with, but he's using it here for the sake of clarity as that's what it's often referred to. None of his other use of quotation marks seem bad either.
This seems like a ban based on vibes alone. Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!
... while right-wing posters get to regularly accuse people on this forum of being delusional, claim outgroup politicians are "foreign agents", claim that anyone who holds specific positions is "too dumb to vote", etc. without even getting warned most of the time.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
6hr ago
Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned
Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements, which was what AlexanderTurok did here. Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
9hr ago
It's only poison for disproportionate economic growth of your country relative to the other countries of the world. It's poison for a selfish country level view of the planet yes, but that is not a bad thing; much like how pesticide is poison for aphids but is very much a good thing. If you support policies that lead to long term global growth instead of merely localized growth then this laissez faire approach isn't bad at all, in fact it's the fastest way to get global GDP growing as fast as possible.
Genuine applause for taking one for the team. I protest your ban as unjust silencing for stating true facts about the world, with your only crime being that your blade was too sharp and well honed. I stand with you in solidarity. Omnes pro uno.
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