naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
I have never used Twitter. Mostly, because I have read Amusing Ourselves to Death. I knew that absolutely no good could come of engaging in 140 characters.
As the platform evolved (threads! 280 characters!), I was occasionally tempted, but never tempted enough. It sometimes seemed like a place where interesting people were having interesting conversations--but with the caveat that, in terms of depth, insight, and "popularity contest" dynamics, Twitter is like attending a very large, very angry high school. Sure, you have some wild conversations at your lunch table, but is it really worth the cacophony? The kibbitzing? The sophomores?
The amount of coordinated astroturfing and, admittedly, occasional not-just-astroturfing I've seen for Bluesky in the last week is quite sufficient to ensure that I will not even dip a toe into it. I think their current marketing is clearly intended to capitalize on the current perception that it is Truth Social for Leftists.
Further strengthening everyone's filter bubble will surely have no negative knock-on effects whatsoever.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
That one is doing that which is approved by the Cathedral, yes? Left-wing speech is activism, right-wing speech is delinquency.
Well, it's been a while since I was really on the bleeding edge of these cases, but my experience is that it's rarely overtly political, except to the extent that "good student" sometimes codes "left"--which is less often the case in high school than it is in college. Kids who get detention and bully others don't get free speech. Kids who get good grades or excel in athletics do. Leftists may be more inclined toward activism? But at the high school level it tends to be silly stuff rather than serious culture war issues. Though perhaps in the last few years that has changed.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
I don't necessarily disagree, but pretty much every decision with a through-line to Tinker has eroded Tinker in some way without bothering to overrule it; why would they overrule it now?
(There is actually a discernible pattern in student speech cases post-Tinker and it's not "substantial disruption." Rather, in most cases, juvenile delinquents tend to get slapped down, while "model students" doing activism or whatever mostly win.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
4d ago
Thanks for adding context. It would probably be better without the somewhat blatant culture war bits.
I'm a little ambivalent as to the extent to which this arguably constitutes "recruiting for a cause," but I will, tentatively, allow it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5d ago
In Aristotle's Politics, he observes that families hold property "in common" while cities hold property privately (but for public benefit). He thinks this is natural, because if cities treated property as communal, no one would have stewardship and freeloaders would be a problem--but with our true intimates, it's actually normal and natural to live communally.
What you are saying sounds to me like kind of a modern take on the same phenomena, or maybe even just a more granular take. The reason we have the law of contract is to facilitate agreement between non-intimates. But the line between family and stranger can be more of a spectrum, and in many circumstances we find ourselves treating strangers as near kin, at least temporarily.
I don't think I have anything substantive to add, really, I just think it's always interesting to observe that these questions have been the subject of philosophical inquiry for all of recorded history.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.
Referring to a major medical condition as "aesthetic purposes" also seems pretty uncharitable.
No--this would require your interlocutor to assume the conclusion under debate. Here you are treating a genuine disagreement as "uncharitable." That is not how charitable discussion works. You should be trying to read the best possible version of the argument being made, without actually departing from the substance of the argument.
You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated,"
I disagree.
Then you are wrong; I just gave you a more charitable reading which adheres to the substance (and literal wording!) of the line under discussion, and you have furnished no warrant for believing your less charitable reading to be true. This may be a problem with your perspective on "charity," since you don't seem to grasp what "charity" means in this context--maybe this is why you also have failed to read others charitably.
A lot of posters here are in fact doubling down on "actual under 18 children ARE having surgeries".
Indeed, several have provided you with evidence of this actually happening. You seem to have learned something from them about the world, though you do not seem interested in revising your beliefs accordingly. That's okay, you're under no obligation to do so. But you remain under obligation to read others charitably. I have done my best to explain what that requires; at this point I don't know how I can make it more clear what you did wrong. So hopefully you've figured it out and can avoid it, next time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
Some distinctions: zeroth, you didn't get the job, and you didn't find out until later, and both of those things matter. First, even had you gotten the job, the laptop would not have been the difference between you and "tens of thousands of dollars," but between you and the opportunity to earn tens of thousands of dollars. Options are valuable, but they are not equal in value to the exercise of the option. Second, "only" a twenty is a similar offer, proportionately, to $10,000 to a multi-billionaire--or even a million dollars, if we factor in diminishing returns. So while I do not think it was cheap of you to sacrifice a twenty, I do think it was maybe impolite of you to ask. People are conditioned to refuse rewards for their good deeds. Aesthetically, I would have offered her the twenty; aesthetically, it would still be appropriate for her to turn it down, if she just had no particular need of twenty dollars.
But probably I get most of my aesthetics from fantasy novels and video games.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
How much of a debt do I owe the person who lent me their charger?
Owe? Nothing! In the scenario outlined, there was no offer, and no acceptance; no bargain was struck.
If I were personally made a muti-billionaire in this scenario, and the real alternative was in fact me becoming destitute, I would probably give the cord lender a million bucks as a show of gratitude. Someone who gave the cord lender less than, oh, $10,000 in this scenario I would regard as tastelessly cheap. But I would also regard it as tasteless of the cord lender to anticipate such a reward. In moral or legal judgments, it is appropriate to feel that one is due what one is owed, and that one owes what others are due. But I think aesthetic judgment applies better to scenarios like this one, where no contractual or moral obligations seem to be in play. It is a more beautiful world, where people penny-pinch neither their helpfulness nor their gratitude.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
I'd actually be curious if you'd ban gwern for the 2012 comments linked in that thread, btw.
Maybe! But Gwern seems pretty cognizant of context in those comments:
real-time chat cannot and should not be held to the same high standards like, for example, LW posts or comments
Gwern perceived IRC as a sort of "locker room," speech-wise, while Startling disagreed. I wasn't there so I have no opinion as to who was right, beyond a tendency to suspect that it's always a bad idea to bet against Gwern. My guess is that a hypothetical Motte-posting Gwern would express himself a little differently, when posting here.
The SSC subreddit and the Motte are different contexts, too. Has the Motte shifted left? I don't think so, but then I am pretty regularly accused of bearing some personal responsibility for this place shifting right. We're not explicitly conservative, so Conquest's Laws say we will eventually become progressive. But maybe the foundation counts as an explicitly conservative alignment, for such purposes? We've definitely had more mods bail because they found this space insufficiently progressive, than because they found this space insufficiently conservative. On balance, I remain pretty satisfied with this space (when I'm not feeling surprised that it has managed to continue existing for as long as it has!).
But like... if you don't like entryists, you really should stop giving the mod team shit over moderation decisions, ever. We're not perfect, we make mistakes. But even our most progressive moderators are much more committed to the foundation than they are to advancing any particular political narrative.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
But you can't let the place stray too far from leftist Orthodoxy, can you?
I appreciate you.
It honestly warms my heart to know that I can still generate responses like this in the same thread where I'm getting responses like this:
Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction? Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
If we're in agreement that "child mutilation" is an insulting and deeply uncharitable description, then my objection is pretty well resolved.
I agree that "mutilation" can be unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric. I would stop short of calling it inflammatory per se, however. Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.
I do think I've been consistent in my stance: SRS is a surgery like any other, and calling it "mutilation" is ridiculous hyperbole.
That can be your stance, but you aren't entitled to its adoption by others. Many humans object to cosmetic surgery generally, and those kinds of surgeries do not usually interfere with bodily functioning. Interfering with bodily function seems to raise the stakes. "Mutilation" may be ridiculous hyperbole in some contexts, but it does not seem per se to be so.
Calling it "child mutilation" is doubly ridiculous, since as far as I know, kids under 18 genuinely are not having surgery. I'm not saying kids don't transition, I'm saying they don't get surgery under 18, and that it's not mutilation.
The main reason I am replying to you again, here, is that you still don't seem to have grasped where you went wrong in the first place. WhiningCoil did not say "children are being mutilated," but rather that children were being put "on a path towards mutilation and sterilization." You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated," but rather "children are being channeled toward life outcomes that eventually include sterilization and the removal of healthy organs." Demanding evidence of children having functional tissue removed for aesthetic purposes is failing to address what WhiningCoil actually said, and hence a rules violation.
(For whatever it's worth, "gender affirming mastectomies" clearly involve the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes, and do not appear to be terribly rare in adolescents aged 12-17. If someone were to call that "child mutilation" I would probably need to spend some time weighing whether I regarded the rest of the comment as inflammatory, "boo outgroup," or otherwise rules-violating, but that characterization of the data in isolation does not look like a per se rules violation to me.)
I am responding to what was literally said.
Your response was insufficiently charitable.
Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction?
First, other people's bad behavior is irrelevant to your own. Second, I already banned WhiningCoil for comments in this thread. If that wasn't enough to stifle your whataboutism, then I don't know what else I could possibly do to assuage your persecution complex.
Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?
There are ways to make substantive assertions along these lines, and people often do. But they have to do so within a context of following the rules, which you have failed to do here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
I mean, if guys had a Shaving Club, I'd imagine some women with PCOS might benefit from showing up. If the club is really about shaving, that shouldn't be a problem, should it?
This is a remarkably terrible analogy. Consider instead a support group for sufferers and survivors of prostate cancer. Having a bunch of women show up to talk about their experiences with cervical cancer would not really fit the discussion prompt, even though there would be some obvious overlap in experience of, say, chemotherapy or medical malpractice or whatever.
The article didn't say anything about language policing or otherwise acting rudely. It's just upset that there's women at the shaving club.
No, it's upset that there are Men at the Women's club. It's upset that an organization dedicated to the advancement of women's health is being co-opted for the advancement of men's preferences and desires.
Presumably learning more about male lactation would help the mission of infant health and breastfeeding: either it turns out to work and we have a cool new option, or it turns out to be a bad idea and now we can articulate specific concerns and help people understand why it's a bad idea.
I am doubtful that you will ever find anyone who is able to do the actual science without their political biases fucking it up. But if you could, like, okay? That has nothing to do with this case; if you want to make this argument, do the actual science first, instead of doing the activism first by filling women's spaces with men.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
First of all, am I being moderated for the tone/content of my posts or for ban evasion as a suspected alt?
We moderate on tone, not content. Your post was uncharitable and antagonistic.
I'm assuming from your comment that there was a previous user on this forum who used to engage similarly to me
More like "a never ending stream of users," actually. Bad faith posters who use "just asking questions" rhetoric to troll the forum are a dime a dozen; in the parlance of the age, "ya basic," sorry. "New" users who jump in on election day and seem immediately comfortable navigating various community norms are suspicious enough. Following up by "just asking questions" rules lawyering in response to moderation dramatically increases my suspicion that you are a repeat customer. We've had hundreds of new users over the years, and to put it mildly--you do not fit the profile.
But it's not impossible, so... here we are.
Until this comment I had not received any mod feedback.
We can't moderate every comment, and queue approval should not be taken as a sign of endorsement, beyond perhaps "this isn't obviously spam." Moderation is qualitative and adaptive; we usually mod comments directly, but sometimes we have to take into account a pattern of commenting instead. This is a reputation economy; post lots of good stuff that isn't rage bait, then occasional rage bait will get a shrug.
If not, does this comment act as a warning that all of my previous posts were unacceptable?
Many of your previous posts are bad. But the goal is not to try to get away with being just enough of an asshole that you are allowed to continue being an asshole. Rhetorical brinkmanship is bad. At a glance, your comments with negative karma scores should probably be taken as a sign, to you, that you did something wrong. (This isn't always the case--some substantive positions just get downvoted, which is annoying--but if you can't spot the difference, I don't know what to tell you.)
For some examples, this comment, if I had seen it when you posted it, would probably have gotten you a short ban. This comment's "citation needed" snark honestly tempts me to ban you now.
Be charitable. Be kind. If someone else is breaking the rules, report that instead of breaking the rules in response. The more closely I look at your profile, the more I am inclined to permaban you rather than go through the motions with what appears to be a (so far) consistently garbage level of engagement. If you really would like to continue posting under this account, knock it off.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
The charity failure in cartman's comment was that WhiningCoil argues that children consenting to sex acts is analogous to children consenting to treatment for reasons of sex or gender preferences, i.e. "if children can't consent to sex acts then children can't consent to puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries, and if parental authority does not extend to vicarious consent for sex acts then it also does not extend to vicarious consent for puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or sex-altering surgeries."
People can argue about whether that analogy is a good one. But if one person builds their argument on the validity of the analogy and another person builds their response on the invalidity of the analogy, then they are not really talking to each other, they are just competing for who can make their take on the analogy into the consensus by being loud and insistent about it.
This is a complicated thing to moderate because we moderate on tone rather than substance, but like most informal fallacies, it's hard to recognize this one without some grasp of the substance of the argument.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
This response is not sufficiently charitable. You may note that I have banned the user to whom you were responding; one big problem with rule-breaking comments is that they tend to proliferate by encouraging further rule-breaking responses. But responding to a rule-breaking comment in a rule-breaking way does not excuse you!
...actually, looking through your rather fresh comment history, you seem to have a remarkable knack for sussing out problematic posts and making the discussion even worse by responding, not to the substance of the post, but to its rhetoric. Somehow that is, actually, most of your posts! The odds of this are so low as to not be worth contemplating.
Still, in the interest of charity, I will hold off perma-banning you as a suspected alt until the next time I notice this peculiar pattern. Once, after all, may be happenstance.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.
This is not sufficiently charitable. Specifically,
we ask that responders address what was literally said, on the assumption that this was at least part of the intention. Nothing is more frustrating than making a clear point and having your conversation partner assume you're talking in circles. We don't require that you stop after addressing what was literally said, but try, at least, to start there.
It's fine to raise questions about source veracity, but if you're going to respond to others, you need to actually be responding to the substance of their posts--not ducking into your motte when they raise points you don't care to substantively address. Actually several of your comments in this thread do the "law of merited impossibility" and "Russell conjugation" thing, where you oscillate between "this isn't happening" and "it's good, actually" while rhetorically re-framing specific concerns. This kind of engagement creates frustration and lowers engagement quality, even though it basically keeps to the rules on tone. If done deliberately and repeatedly, it amounts to a kind of trolling. Please engage with what people are actually saying, rather than substituting your rhetoric for their substantive concerns.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk.
Your first comment got a lot of reports, which opened a mod conversation about whether to ding you for it. One mod said "not bannable, but warnable," another said "not even warnable." I tended to agree that it was not a great comment, but that it ultimately fell on the permissible side. The meta-moderation system agreed with me on this. However the low-quality responses you've generated certainly lend credence to the inclination toward moderation there.
This comment, though, fails the test of "write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation." In particular, "your ilk" is a quintessentially antagonistic framing; we're here to engage with ideas above people, and watch our tone in preservation of content.
It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.
And this, of course, is worth moderating all on its own.
You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here?
The League was founded in part on specific concern for infant and maternal health and development. Men don't lactate without hormonal intervention (or, in some cases, cancer) and studies on the health impact of such choices are... not nonexistent, I suspect, but almost certainly some combination of weak, bad, or politically motivated. The difficulties a new mother might have with breastfeeding may have some overlap with the difficulties a lactating man might have, but there are no clear health or infant development reasons to help men who lactate, the way there definitely are with new mothers.
The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.
When you create an organization specifically to address women's issues with a natural feminine process, then "Men" clearly articulates a pretty damn specific objection. I assume there would also be frustration with women who present as masculine, if they keep trying to police the language of breastfeeding with absurd neologisms like "chestfeeding." If you make an organization dedicated to breastfeeding and a bunch of entryists show up to tell you to use a different word, failure to address that swiftly and unapologetically will probably result in, well, pretty much what the article describes.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.
Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.
I'm well aware, which is why I said "not . . . quite as much . . . as" rather than "none at all."
I was saddened this morning to read of the resignation of one of the founders of La Leche League from that organization.
La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States. Many people are unaware, or do not fully grasp the implications of, the fact that the mid-20th century was an era of hyper-medicalization and scientific interventionism. Probably most college students today know how to make the proper noises concerning the historic exclusion of women (or racial minorities) from medical studies, but few could tell you why in 1965 Robert Bradley made waves by arguing that childbirth shouldn't be such a medicalized process. It would be a good half century before skyrocketing c-section rates persuaded the AMA (etc.) to take seriously the idea that medicalization was harming mothers at least as frequently as it was helping them.
Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at. One is probably just that breastfeeding does not typically present quite the same "life-or-death" questions that childbirth sometimes can. Another is that, historically, not all mothers have been successful breast-feeders, whether by chance or by choice; relying on other mothers to feed one's own infant, at least for a time, is attested cross-culturally. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for babies and mothers both (in particular, nothing else is more decidedly protective against breast cancer), but between the availability of adequate (if not really optimal) substitutes, psychological difficulty some have treating breasts in non-sexualized ways, and a sometimes steep learning curve, many mothers find the whole proposition... unpalatable.
La Leche League's most visible influence (at least in my experience) has been their gratis lactation consultants. Some mothers, and some babies, take to breastfeeding like the proverbial ducks to water, but many, maybe most women have at least a little difficulty. Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing, what if I don't produce enough milk, are there foods I need to avoid, etc. are things women once shared with their daughters, or learned from their midwife, and aren't necessarily things your average OB/GYN has any grasp on. (It's not unusual for full-fledged OB/GYNs to spend 6-8 weeks (or less!) in their entire training learning about normal pregnancy and childbirth; their job, after all, is to fix such problems as may arise.) For women who are willing to accept input (and, I suppose, for women who capitulate to the sometimes, er, zealous lactation consultants), La Leche League has filled the gap left by the steamrolling of familial bonds by cultural "progress."
So why, as a 94-year-old woman, would Marian Tompson denounce decades of work brought about, in large measure, by her own efforts? Here is what she wrote:
From an organisation with the specific mission of supporting biological women who want to give their babies the best start in life by breastfeeding them, LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding, despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.
This shift from following the norms of nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organisation.
Helen Joyce of British women’s rights charity Sex Matters commented:
By including men who want to breastfeed in its services, LLL is destroying its founding mission to support breastfeeding mothers.
It also goes against the wishes of many mothers, group leaders and trustees around the world, who have been fighting to convince LLL International to hold fast to its woman-focused mission...
Conquest's Laws win again. La Leche League has been profoundly nonpartisan, but it was not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, and so "another previously innocent activity" heads toward "World War I style trench warfare."
Wasn't this strenuously denied for years and claims of it were met with accusations of being paranoid conspiracy theorists?
My inclination is to say "no" but on reflection I have vague memories of this being something the mod team was maybe disunified about for a while (maybe still is). It's also possible I'm giving the wrong impression with the phrase "affirmative action." It's possible different moderators have had, and expressed, different ideas of what amounts to "affirmative action" in various cases. Zorba has always made it our top priority to make this a
place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases
which necessarily involves having people who don't all share the same biases. So we've always tried to moderate in ways that would encourage the development of such a community.
On the other hand, the mod team is accused somewhat regularly of going too easy/too hard on red tribe/blue tribe posts, and we have often cited this fact as evidence that moderation is not actually especially biased in one direction or the other; everyone always feels like their ox is the one being gored. Thumbing the scales a bit in favor of including heterodox views does not rise to the level of nuking the rules, any more than QCs do. And I don't think we've ever thumbed the scales for tribal reasons (either pro or con)--just for specific users in specific cases, where it was, say, understandable that someone might get a little hot under the collar.
So I would suggest that the way to parse all of this is that moderation is a qualitative and adaptive process in a reputation economy. We do go easier on new users, generally. We go easier on people who make QCs or otherwise contribute to the health of the community (e.g. by expressing heterodox views), for the most part. We go harder on people who habitually make bad posts, or express unwillingness to abide by the rules. We moderate tone rather than content. What that amounts to, in the end, is... what we have here. If you're getting moderated occasionally, it's probably nothing to worry much about. If you're getting moderated a lot, it's definitely because you're breaking the rules and showing no inclination to even try doing better.
In the process, do we have our biases or pet issues or whatever? Sure, we're just people. Do I think we do a pretty good job at impartiality and fairness anyway? Yeah, I do. Are we perfect? No, I can't imagine. Are we better than basically every other message board moderation team on the Internet? Yeah, I think we actually are. Are we going to change? Sure, over time that's bound to happen.
Has anything in this thread come anywhere near identifying a real identifiable problem with moderation in our community, and suggesting novel but plausible ways to address said problem? Well... not yet! Which makes the amount of effort I've put into it so far pretty wasted, and probably reduces the likelihood of my bothering to respond effortfully to similar complaints in the future. The people most inclined to complain about the rules are basically never the ones who are consciously and positively contributing to the effectuation of the foundation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13d ago
The change I would prefer would be to make shutting down consensus a goal that is at least equal in weight to enforcing post quality.
Well, as I noted somewhere upthread, we already do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action" moderating. Which is maybe not quite what you're asking for but sounds pretty close to me. We tend to go easier on people who are bringing underrepresented or heterodox viewpoints into play.
(In this particular case, uh... I have to say that coffee_enjoyer's position on Israel is not one that strikes me as underrepresented or heterodox, here. I understand that probably everyone feels dogpiled at some point or other, but no, I'm much more likely to cut slack to a rule-breaking Wokist than I am to cut slack to a rule-breaking Israel critic, simply because we could probably use more of the former, but I can't imagine us ever running short of the latter.)
I might find it hard to dispel the accusation that this amounts to "moderate my enemies more", since I am on the balance unhappy with the Overton window here and therefore naturally am an "enemy" of the majority of highly-upvoted positions; but this does not mean that I am "friends" with most of the downvoted ones, unhappy families all being different and what-not.
Well, "friends" in the loose sense that you have identified a common "enemy" (me!). My impression of your follow-up is that, yes: you want more moderation for your enemies, and less for your friends. But now you've made two suggestions that, actually, the mod team already follows, more or less--if not, perhaps, to the degree you would prefer. So you're not wrong, exactly, you just seem to think that your prescriptions will yield results that, actually, we can say from experience they do not especially yield. None of this is terribly surprising, the mod team really does think about and discuss this stuff amongst ourselves a fair bit, so it would be pretty surprising if you were to say something original about the project we've got going here. But you're always welcome to try, provided you do so within the bounds of the rules we've established over the life of the community.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13d ago
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness.
Are you not reading carefully, or are you just reading selectively? Look at my mod comment again. I first said
grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best
That's the wildcard rule, applied not for what he said, but for grumping about what someone else said--so you mischaracterized my criticism in exactly the same way that coffee_enjoyer mischaracterized it, by suggesting it is about my "taste" rather than about coffee_enjoyer's insistence on his own taste being the proper determinant of quality. So right from the starting gate, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.
Then you said
someone who only ran afoul of that rule
but this is clearly an unforced error. In my very first mod comment I also wrote:
your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly
"Be charitable" is a very clear rule. Coffee-enjoyer broke it, as I demonstrated by mentioning how he broke it, and I said all of that quite clearly. So the rest of your comment fails to land entirely; I'm sure you can think of some other reason to criticize my moderation, and yet at this point it seems that your real goal is just that--to criticize my moderation, regardless of anything I have actually said or done. By your own logic, at this point it seems like you should probably just recuse yourself from criticizing my moderation approach.
I will address your parting question anyway:
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
I imagine there are many such arguments and evidence; I hardly imagine myself to be a paragon of human judgment. But as you have not presented any such arguments or evidence--as you indeed failed to even notice the rather explicit rule breaking I spelled out in my initial post--what is it you expect me to change?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? You mention recusal but actually the whole mod team does recusals pretty often, calling for others to come in and handle stuff they don't think they can be impartial about. However it's basically never about topics, because the whole mod team has opinions on just about everything. If we recused ourselves from topics we happen to know and care about, none of us could moderate anything! Rather, usually mods will recuse themselves from dealing users who get under our skin (or are just particularly under our skin on a given day). You mentioned darwin; back in the day, I recused myself from moderating him a lot.
So beyond that, what "argument or evidence" do you think you have in mind, that you think should change moderation policies here? Sometimes you write as if you think people should be moderated more ("Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago...") but your argument in this case is that coffee_enjoyer, at least, should be moderated less. As far as I can tell, you are engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: "why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?"
And once it is recognized that that is the substance of the question being asked, well, it kind of answers itself, doesn't it?
If someone showed me a study concluding that "most men are autogynephiles," I wouldn't have any difficulty believing it. I have seen several studies suggesting that a significant percentage of "straight" men find male genitalia sexually arousing. There is also quite a lot of evidence that men are extremely sexually adaptable, i.e. will have sex with anything, if necessary for release--historical accounts of homosexuality at sea or on long military campaigns contribute much to this perception, but also further edge cases like the cross-cultural recurrence of bestiality. So I'm not sure where arguments like this really get you.
I am sympathetic to "empathy" arguments. I gain nothing, personally, through cruelty to others. However "be nice" cannot possibly mean "always affirm that what others are doing is good for them and/or for society." You say:
This seems fair, but what is the actionable content of that empathy? When I see a homeless person passed out in the street, filthy, half naked, and clearly stoned out of his mind, surely the empathetic response is not, "aw, look at that guy living his best life. It's not what I would choose, but hey--different strokes for different folks!" Similarly, if I see a man wearing a dress, I'm unlikely to say anything to him about it--but if I see a man walking into a ladies' changing room, I might quite reflexively say, "Hey, do you know that's the ladies' room?" So: what should I do if I see a man in a dress walking into a ladies' changing room? Do I try to help him the way I would try to help any man making that mistake, or do I exempt him from the care I normally afford to others, to help them avoid embarrassing and possibly dangerous errors?
("How do you know he's a man!?" Well, if a man in a dress really looks like a woman, then it would not occur to me to stop him from entering the ladies' room. It's true that I am not always a perfect judge of an individual's sex, but I generally do not permit my own fallibility to stop me from helping others when it seems warranted to do so, and see no reason to deviate from that policy in response to the existence of edge cases.)
I have no reason to defend moralizing busybodies who make a hobby of policing even the tiniest of deviations from the social status quo. But I think there are many reasons to, politely but firmly, refuse to go along with trans advocacy of this kind. For one thing, I suspect that for every person with serious gender dysphoria, there are at least dozens of people whose lives will be made worse by indulging trans advocacy--for example, by giving edge cases a nudge to behave in ways that will actually make their lives worse, than if they had just not. When I read that "28.5% of Gen Z women and 10.6% of Gen Z men identify as LGBTQ+," but in 1992 "3.2% of men and 1.6% of women aged 18–49 identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual," I find it very unlikely that this is the result of people being more free to behave as their "true selves." Rather, that looks to me like a serious mental health crisis born of a toxic memetic environment. That is: it looks like social contagion. How does one treat social contagion? I don't know, but I feel pretty confident that acting as if there is just nothing wrong or bad or sad or regrettable or even worth mentioning about transsexuality is the opposite of helping.
Not accidentally, your entire post could just as easily have been written about drug addicts, schizophrenics, preppers, Nickelback fans... people like what they like. Tautologically! People do what they do. I don't think there's any reason to be cruel to any of those people. I think it's a better world where we are all kind, and thoughtful, and polite, and treat others with humanity and respect. But that doesn't free us from the hard work of making value judgments, and finding ways to act on those judgments. There is a large-breasted man I see on my walks, sometimes. I have never commented on the fact that he looks like an especially tasteless parody of a woman; I'm pretty sure he knows, and I suspect it's even deliberate. There is also an anorexic woman I see on my walks, sometimes, and I don't comment on her obvious mental issues, either. But if either of them were a family member or particularly close friend--I would definitely comment, and it wouldn't be to affirm the validity or goodness of their choices.
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