Amadan
More equal than others
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
More equal than others
17hr ago
but your responses are still dripping with contempt with the "(yawn)" and the "Jesus". I have a feeling that if darwin did that to other users then he absolutely would have been told to knock it off by the mods.
Not really. It's true we discourage sarcasm and snippiness, but if you've been paying attention as closely as you claim to, you also know we generally have a pretty high tolerance for it and only mod when it does cross over into obvious antagonism or an attempt to derail threads into "Nuh uhs."
Yes, I will own that sometimes I am sarcastic and jaded. Mostly I keep it in check, but sometimes my exasperation shows. I cannot honestly say I feel much guilt over this, because I do not censure people for things I would not censure myself. Could I be more dispassionate and a model of toneless civility? Yes. I am sorry not to be able to conform to your customer service expectations. The expectation that mods are never allowed to so much as yawn at a tiresome critic is not a reasonable expectation.
Your claims about why leftists are being banned and rightists are not: well, I flatly disagree, I think you are wrong, I think you are arguing that the sky is green and gravity is sideways, and I think nothing I say is going to disabuse you of this because we had almost this exact same exchange a year ago and nothing has changed. Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic and jaded with my "sky is green and gravity is sideways" crack because I am exasperated.
But as per your suggestions:
Hire a genuine leftist or two into the mod team and then consult them when issues arose in regards to modding leftists.
First of all, I reject your implicit assumption that the mod team is all rightists and we are biased against leftists. You are simply - pardon my exasperation - not just wrong, but fucking wrong. Maybe none of us qualify as "leftists" nowadays, but we are definitely not all rightists. Honestly, I think only one of us identifies as rightist and one another identifies as moderately conservative. Like, that's it, man. So how "leftist" do you think your proposed sensitivity consultant mod needs to be to restore fairness to moderation?
Have stricter rules regarding tone when it comes to users interacting with other users.
We could do that. Back on reddit, we'd occasionally have periods we tongue-in-cheek called "reigns of terror" where for a week or two, tone moderation became much stricter and bans were handed out more easily. Usually this was when we sensed the temperature going up and an increase in antagonism and low-effort sneering making conversations less pleasant. There was, unsurprisingly, a mixed reaction to this, with some considering it a needed corrective, but most thinking it was just mods going off on a power trip (and of course, always, always, we were persecuting viewpoints we didn't like). We haven't done it since coming here because the community is smaller and we really don't want to hand out bans like candy. But honestly, I just mostly disregard your opinion of the tone here since you're clearly only seeing meanness in one direction and you only care about meanness in one direction. I will say that most of your proposed rules from NeutralPolitics are more or less the rules of the Motte. You are not wrong that we don't enforce them that strictly, and perhaps not as strictly as we used to. So it is worth discussing amongst ourselves. Maybe it is time for a "reign of terror" or at least a "reign of increased strictness."
But here is the problem: none of that would make you happy. Because you are the kind of person who will never believe that we are being fair, no matter how we adjust the dials. So, there is that.
Amadan
More equal than others
22hr ago
As the "bad mod" (yawn) who "chased Darwin away," let me point out that no one is keeping him away. And I personally have committed to not trying to rub my last post that apparently shamed him into silence in his face if he ever returns, even though I absolutely do not respect how he tucked tail and ghosted when finally pressed on some bullshit he'd been saying for a long time. But I cannot promise others will not.
About liberals: you are right and you are wrong. Leftists do not get extra mod scrutiny. Jesus, how many times do we have to go over this? Once again, in the same thread we're being accused of being extra-strict with leftists and also of giving them too much leeway because we don't want to drive them off. Look, it's a known problem. The site has converged mostly to the right, and leftists get reported more, and the mods are very aware that a leftist is going to show up in the mod queue more often and thus we cannot help but be hyper aware of leftists who are annoying people. And we have to balance "Is this person really out of bounds?" with "Are we just seeing this person more because everyone reports him?" It's... the Darwin problem, basically.
We still have some liberals here (raises hand) and even a few leftists. Yes, I get that it's hard to be a leftist here. I sympathize, but also I don't. This, also, is old ground I'm repeating for the umpteenth time, but the convergence here is not because we drove away all the leftists. It's because leftists drove everyone else off every other site, and we still see the pattern here where sometimes a leftist will show up and participate for a while, and then leave in a huff when they realize they're not allowed to just call people Nazis and that we don't ban leftist-feeling-hurting viewpoints.
That was a ramble, but I feel like a lot of you are just rehashing things we already know. So, like, what are your concrete proposals?
Amadan
More equal than others
1d ago
Man, I know you love dredging up old shit, but if you want to relitigate threads from eight years ago, talk to the people who were mods then.
Look, we do our best. I can't say anything that hasn't already been said. The next time @guesswho or someone like him goes on a tear, there will probably be discussion about it in the mods channel. There already is frequent discussion along the lines of "This poster is super fucking annoying but he's not reeeeally breaking the rules, what should we do about it?" And usually the consensus is "Let him have his leash." Is that the wrong consensus? Maybe it is. Maybe we should just start dropping banhammers the moment someone becomes super fucking annoying. But be careful what you wish for, as they say.
Amadan
More equal than others
1d ago
Yes, how many times do we have to distinguish between de jure and de facto applications of the law? You're just repeating the same point for the fourth time. What I asked for was very specific, not yet another example of "Well, we know it's usually men arrested for abuse."
Also, from my understanding, more and more police departments are in fact treating allegations of abuse from either sex seriously, to the point that now it's sometimes the husband or boyfriend saying "Wait a minute!" when the cops arrive, hear both sides, and put cuffs on the woman because she put hands on him first. (Watch a lot of police body cam videos and you see this often - the cops are no longer ignoring it when a woman slaps or scratches or throws things.)
Amadan
More equal than others
1d ago
Perhaps I responded with too much heat, but it is tiring being constantly accused of playing favorites, privileging certain perspectives, or just being unreasonable and unfair when every single one of us tries our honest best to be as fair and impartial as we can humanly manage.
"Animal Farm" to me suggests an Orwellian hierarchy where we make a pretense of equality but are actually treating one group as clearly more equal than others. Hardly a method of rewarding good behavior, but merely an arbitrary caste system.
That's not the intention with the policy of granting more (but not infinite) slack to posters with a positive record over posters with a negative record, but I suppose if you must see it that way, fine. I disagree because basically anyone can join the ranks of the "privileged" by being a good poster and not being a bad poster. But I realize there will always be people who see themselves as being persecuted, and rather than observing the consequence of their own actions, it must be because the mods are unfairly twisting the rules to punish people they don't like.
Amadan
More equal than others
1d ago
What would you tell the female voters who accuse you of misogyny for favoring the ability of abusive men to kick women out of the house?
I'm not a politician, so I am not concerned about that.
For someone who's the #3 He-man Woman-Hater on the Motte, I really don't understand your cringing attitude towards the prospect of female disapproval. I get that it's harder when you're out there in the dating market, and I won't lie, I am glad not to be there, but still.
Anyway, I admit to laying a bit of a trap because its been red states passing laws aimed at protecting female rights, Which do try to draw a very direct black and white gender distinction.
Yes, I figured that, but as I expected, they aren't actually what I asked for. And even by your own admission, they are actually "textually reciprocal" (i.e., de jure they apply both ways, even if it is pretty obvious that no one is worried about trans men being excluded from men's spaces). So... you gave me oranges and said "Look at them unfair apples! Gotcha!" Uh, right.
I'm not even convinced "normies" buy the "protecting girls" framework here. To the degree leftists are in favor of trans rights bills, they see trans women as an oppressed underclass, but I am deeply skeptical as to how many really and truly perceive them as "girls," in the way that provokes the male protective instinct you are so despairing of.
Amadan
More equal than others
1d ago
Can you point out any previous serious pushback against laws that explicitly favor women/protections for women?
No. But I can't recall any recent laws that made a black-and-white distinction like what you are hypothesizing. If you can show me a law (in the US) that literally says, for example, "Abuse is defined as a male hitting a female," or something like that, I will reassess my opinion.
Would YOU vote against that?
Would I vote against a law that explicitly defines abuse in such a way that men hitting women is abuse and women hitting men is not? Yes, I would.
Amadan
More equal than others
1d ago
The Darwin Question gets brought up over and over, but no one has ever offered concrete policies we should change, just "calibrate your tolerance" or "be quicker to ban people on vibes." There isn't a good solution. You have to think of it as a classification problem: moderation that allows some of the people you want to stay also allows Darwin. Moderation that would ban Darwin is also going to ban the sleazy tacticians, bad faith propositions, and devil's advocates for your side.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
Irrespective of Dase’s ban, the motte is very much a case of an Animal Farm, and has been so for some time.
A lie I get tired of refuting. No one who claims this has ever been able to substantiate it with anything more than vague "You banned someone I like but you didn't ban someone I don't like."
To play the devil’s advocate, counterpoint: Darwin. Who’s behavior was so egregious
Darwin's behavior was of an entirely different kind. He used disingenuous debate tactics, he played devil's advocate, he would intentionally take positions and phrase things in a way calculated to rile people, but no one post crossed the line (there are many people who I think regularly use disingenuous debate tactics and are here more to stick thumbs in eyes than actually engage in discussion) so back on reddit, he only got banned after a very long accumulation of black marks when his mask slipped. He was sleazy. Yes, it was and is annoying, but Darwin didn't have special privileges. There are people I'd happily ban right now because I think they are sleazy, add negative value, and are extremely annoying, but we don't do that.
Dase, by contrast, very straightforwardly engaged in personal attacks on another poster over a disagreement.
The thing that is true is that some animals are cleverer than others and will game our moderation policy to get away with as much as possible. And it's not like we don't see this, and eventually we'll usually get fed up, but acting as quickly as you might like would not actually make you happy, because we wouldn't only being acting against the Darwins.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
I don't think he was, actually. There are some commonalities, but TrannyPorn's writing style was quite different from Cremieux's, even allowing for the latter adopting a more social media-friendly persona.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
As I said in the thread where I banned him, I am ambivalent, but it is being discussed by the mods, with most of us leaning towards reducing it to 3 to 6 months.
That said, here is where I am at:
The thread started because @RandomRanger came back to argue in a year-old thread with some new development. I don't have feelings (or opinions, really) on whose AI analysis was more insightful. But midway through the thread Dase went off with this:
My emotions are not so much Deepseek partisanship as cold contempt for you personally, your ritalin-addled writing style and attitude, you irritate me about as much as self_made_human, so I'm using grok to repeatedly mock your year-old prediction driven by faith in Musk successfully brute forcing problems.
Realistically, Americans will pussy out of trying due to the normal fear of retaliation.
Basically, raging out over a disagreement over the state of Chinese AI, turning it into a series of personal attacks, using the opportunity to take a shot at another person he dislikes who wasn't even participating in the thread, and then ending it with what has become his boilerplate sneering at Americans because he wants to make sure we know he hates all of us.
Nobody is allowed to behave like that, no matter how entertaining and readable they may be when they are on point. I am willing to cut some slack for regulars. I am willing to let anyone have a bad day. I am not willing to say "Sure, you're allowed to sperg out and behave like an angry child because someone disagreed with you and you think you're too good to treat other people like human beings, and you're allowed to do that every time someone commits the sin of having an opinion you think is wrong." So if we do unban Dase, I expect he will do exactly the same thing five minutes after his ban ends, and I will ban him again for a few months. Though I would be pleasantly surprised to be wrong.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
Okay, bring receipts for the claim that there would be no pushback to a law the explicitly allows a woman to kick a man out of a shared household for abuse, but does not allow a man to kick a woman out of a shared household for abuse. A law literally written that way, with language that makes it black and white that it only applies in one direction.
"Lindsey Clancy" and "Child support laws" are not receipts.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
I am increasingly disappointed how often argumentation (really just kneejerk snap responses) here resembles the same level of reflection and analysis found on /r/news. Much has been written in the "State of the Motte" thread that has already been said, including the pros and cons of moving off reddit, but the worst of it is this kind of "Durkahurk somethingsomething-current-news-cycle NUh-uuuuuHHHHHHHH!" response. These have largely replaced long effortposts when people would at least bother to pretend the capability to consider the thoughts being thought by people who are not them. To be clear, the latter still exist, but I think it's not a coincidence that the signal-to-noise ratio keeps going down, while some people persist in complaining that we put too much value on "moar words."
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
Okay, sure, but I'm very intentionally questioning the assertion you actually made, that no one would push back on a de jure law that only applies in one direction. That it de facto heavily benefits one sex over the other isn't surprising, but, you know, 27% of filings and 20% granted being men is a minority, but it's not nothing, or even statistically insignificant.
And, courts unfair to men women never held responsible yadda yadda whatever, but men are more often the ones being removed for physical abuse? I am shocked. To the degree these court orders are weaponized (a push or a slap becomes "threatened my life"), I would be very surprised if men aren't doing that just as often.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
There'd be little pushback if you wanted to pass a law that made it legal for women to unilaterally kick their husbands out of the house for alleged abuse, but specifically banned men from doing the same.
Really? I think there would be considerable pushback against a law that is that explicit about stating that female abuse doesn't happen and that only men can be abusers. I realize there is a sizeable contingent of feminist legal theorists who functionally believe this, but I doubt your hypothetical law passes anywhere in the U.S. At most, they try to write the definition of "abuse" in such a way that it's much more difficult to accuse a woman of it, and even that would be tough.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
I'm not debating the particulars of individual examples with you. You understand my point and pedantically pretending not to will not earn you any extra slack.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
White women do write a lot of trauma porn too, but I really do see more variety in topics covered in white female lit fic. In fairness, there are a lot more of them so it's easier to see a wider range.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
I'm not offended. I just don't believe that you are unable to comprehend that if you asked a pro-choice person if they care about the well-being of children, that they would not say "No, I don't care about the well-being of children." Just as you are aware that people who protest Columbus Day are not doing so because they think Aztec human sacrifices were good.
Arguments can be made (and have been made) about revealed preferences, willful ignorance, mistake theory versus conflict theory, etc. But you aren't making those arguments. You are just asserting a priori that a maximally uncharitable interpretation of your outgroup is in fact what they really believe, regardless of what they say.
Therefore, based on that and your previous posts, I infer that you are making bad faith arguments to smear your outgroup. The rules apply to everyone's outgroup, right or left.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
How should I present my arguments in a way that is palatable to you?
Read the rules. I will not indulge your bad faith justifications.
Amadan
More equal than others
2d ago
Left-wingers clearly don't care about children's well-being when they support abortion. They also do not in general care about child abuse, or they would not demand the mass importation of parents from countries where the standards of child safety are significantly relaxed.
This is going too far into culture-warring and boo-outgrouping. When you are describing your outgroup and what they "clearly" do or don't care about, if you can't describe them in terms they would recognize or agree with, you are not describing, you are projecting. "Left-wingers clearly don't care about child abuse (because they disagree with me politically)" is just a cheap accusation that "My enemies are evil and lie about not being evil."
You may actually believe that-- we've had this conversation many times, with many people, and clearly many people do sincerely believe that left-wingers are uniformly evil and hate children. I'm sure it is not news to you that many left-wingers think similarly vile things about right-wingers. And if a left-winger came here and said "Right-wingers clearly don't care about laws or democracy or child-rape because (insert a random scrape of social media)," I am sure you'd expect us to tell him that such generalizations are not acceptable here. Even if you really believe your enemies are all cartoon villains.
You're already on our radar as a likely troll and/or alt, so if you're testing the waters, consider them tested, and you as well.
Amadan
More equal than others
3d ago
Yeah, this tracks. I've read a fair amount of lit-fic and it's a rare Asian female author (in Western publishing, I should caveat) who doesn't write about... basically Asian female trauma.
Almost all SFF written by Asian women basically uses interstellar or fantasy empires as a metaphor for Western colonialism, and usually the Asian female character will have a white boyfriend and feel Very Conflicted about it.
Amadan
More equal than others
6d ago
But in the context of hlynka vs smh it is the more class superior view to have, so you're not really refuting my point but rather reinforcing it broadly
No, I am not. I have read many words by smh and by Hlynka, and while I won't judge their relative literacy or education levels (that would be "classist," wouldn't it?) it's very clear smh has perfect command of the English language, and Hlynka knew that. In other words, he was lying when he said he thought there was a communication failure because smh spoke "Indian." He had been on the forum, reading smh, for years. We're not talking about some ESL learner who still misspells words or uses foreign grammatical constructions. I am not saying this to defend @self_made_human (whom I do blame for being too AI-brain-rotted lately), but to refute your disingenuous point that Hlynka only said something that was a plain, truthful observation and got called "racist" because we're a bunch of redneck-haters here. No. That is not true, Hlynka knew it was not true, and you know it is not true.
Yes this is the sad part about classism, that it excludes people. The solution to just ban people who are already on some level feeling left out is wrong imo
He wasn't banned because of classism, and I don't care if he's a sad about feeling "left out" - all he had to do was stop being a dick to the people he wanted to "leave out."
Enough with this nonsense.
Amadan
More equal than others
6d ago
I have had more interaction than most people with non-native English speakers, including as a teacher. There are many second language learners who do in fact achieve native proficiency, often with a greater understanding of grammar and vocabulary than the average native because they have studied it so intensively.
You (and Hlynka) are the only ones who ever referred to him as "white trash." No one else gave a fuck about his background. He had a massive chip on his shoulder about being "not like the rest of you" when we're all just names on a screen here. No one is hearing your diction or your accent and concluding "white trash," nor does being a veteran, working class, or living in a red state make you unique or special.
Your accusation that we only judged his dig at @self_made_human as racist because we're a bunch of latte-sipping Blue tribers who don't know how Real Americans talk is pestiferous bullshit.
Well, of course I too think I am open-minded and available to be persuaded, and that you are not, and there we are. But to break this down to the fundamental point of disagreement, I dispute that in order to mod "fairly," one has to share political opinions with the person being modded, and therefore leftists can only fairly be modded by (or in consultation with) other leftists. May I remind you that Darwin got argued with a lot, but was actually rarely modded here?
This may be true, but then why the fuck are we here?
No, nobody gets persuaded in one thread to change their worldview, or even their opinion on one topic. But I do think my opinions on a number of things have changed over time, partly because of my participation here. In some aspects, I have become more liberal; in other cases, much less so.
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