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Backseat modding does.
You guys are allowed to mod however you want---it's your website. It's just dishonest to pretend to be a neutral "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" when there's a pretty clear bias in which groups you're allowed to use this kind of antagonistic language against and which you aren't.
Whatever you guys might claim to be, this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation but not to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture.
You've already gotten a response from two mods, but let me add mine:
We don't claim to be "neutral." We claim to (attempt to) be fair. Not the same thing.
You are bitching about a post not being modded when in fact it was modded. As we have told people many times (and you're not new here), we sometimes don't get to posts right away. Sometimes we want to see what another mod thinks, sometimes we don't want to deal with a borderline low-effort shitty post because we're not feeling in the mood to deal with annoying anklebiters and we're hoping some other mod will shin up. Sometimes we're all busy and no one has gone through the queue in a day or two. If a post is less than 24 hours old and hasn't been modded yet, it's premature to start hollering about how the mods are totally biased.
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You can do that just fine without getting modded.
Antagonism isn’t just the word you choose. It is about attacking the people with whom you’re speaking.
Do you think there are no Indian or Chinese, bay-area tech workers on this forum? I thought part of conceit of a public forum like this is that you are talking to some notion of "everyone". Either way, I'm definitely sure there aren't any antebellum southerners on this forum (they're all dead), so it's still super confusing why my linked comment wasn't also not antagonistic by this standard.
I understand your concern, but look at it in context.
I said that
and I am one of them (though I wanna leave the bay area asap)
It is a phrasing we use among ourselves all the time. It is easy to be self-deprecating when you're making bank.
Yes, I can call my own group of people whatever I want. I was being edgy, sure. But, you're making quite the leap, going from 1 mis-used word to accusations of chattel-slavery era racism.
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The point is: report, don't engage. The rules explicitly do not support defensive/retributive rules violations.
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You have either fundamentally misunderstood or are fundamentally misrepresenting the thread you linked. You are in fact allowed to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and many people have said here it many times before. You can in fact argue that Confederate statues should be torn down, and you can even argue that people who think otherwise are bad; many people have argued that here many times before. You do in fact have to be careful about how you talk about any group here, and quite a few anti-woke people have in fact been banned for failing to do so properly. The objection in that thread, as described to you repeatedly at the time, was that you were conflating people to object to the destruction of Confederate memorials with slave owners.
I think the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and holding the history constant to the start of the Civil War, I prefer our actual history where their society was destroyed through mass violence to counterfactuals where it might have been allowed to fade away peacefully, continuing to perpetrate evil throughout its decline. Further, I think that destroying Confederate monuments is both stupid and evil here and now. I'd be happy to discuss either opinion with you as time permits, as either side of either opinion fit comfortably within the rules here.
I never conflated these two groups in that entire conversation and repeatedly tried to explain that I didn't. From the very first post, I tried to be very clear that I was only talking about the antebellum south:
This is in fact the main issue. If you try to argue many points on this forum, you get pattern-matched and rounded-off to a very different point that is actually objectionable. You can take however many pains you want to say that you are just talking about the antebellum south, and even the moderation team thinks that you are somehow also talking about the modern south. Like how are you supposed to interpret the group that's being teabagged by melting down a statue as something other than the group led by the person the statue represented?
In the case here, a similar effect creates huge blindspots when applying the guideline:
How is "infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over" at all being careful while talking about a group? Pointing this out, however, gets conflated with other crying wolf about racism, so this rule about not casually and unjustifiably sideswiping large groups of people doesn't really get applied properly.
Reading the conversation, it looks to me like you did in fact conflate the two groups.
"the outgroup" in this comment is pretty clearly referring to contemporary people, not the Confederate slavers. The context of the entire comment is about people in the present day.
Your reply:
(bolding mine.) He's talking about one thing, you respond with a line that makes it seem like he's talking about something else. That doesn't make for good discussion. Especially when you follow it up with:
I find it doubtful that you were actually confused by what he meant by "moderate". If you want to argue that such people aren't actually moderate, you can present an argument. You offer a declaration, framed uncharitably. This is building consensus, and it also makes for bad discussion.
You seem to have a habit of writing posts in a way optimized, intentionally or not, for maximizing heat and not light. You also seem to have a pattern of conversation centering on moral outrage that people might possibly disagree with you. If you are actually interested in discussing why someone might not want confederate statues destroyed, or why they should want them destroyed, that's something we can do here. It would help to start from the assumption that people might reasonably disagree with you.
It's not, and he has in fact been warned. On the other hand, at least it's not an uncharitably-framed argument over definitions of words. The person you're complaining about is pretty clearly a racist, and they aren't hiding it or being weaselly about it. That's actually preferable to the alternative, which is why we have the "speak plainly" rule, and, as I understand it, is one of the reasons we tolerate significant amounts of vitriol toward parties who are not actually present in the discussion.
This is not clear at all (except for literal neo-confederates who want to bring things like slavery back). The confederacy is a completely different culture from the modern south and making the connection from destroying a statue of a confederate leader to somehow teabagging modern southerners is almost a non-sequitur! Sure, some people mistaken about who actually represents their values might be upset but this is an unfortunate side-effect and really the fault of those people. It's definitely not anyone's intention in melting down the statue and really confusing if it's referred to by such a motivated word as "teabagging"---to the point where the most natural thing is to immediately dismiss that as a possibility.
Again, the far-and-away most reasonable interpretation for which group is being teabagged by a statue being destroyed....is group the person led/was part of.
I'm clearly missing something here that made modern southerners an at-all reasonable interpretation for that group: which of the following is it?
Like maybe it was clear to you he was talking about one thing, but that's completely opaque to anyone who doesn't share the politics of this place.
I thought he was referring to neo-confederates as moderates and trying to double-check this because that isn't really a reasonable definition of moderate.
My explanation for the modern southerners being the intended target:
Most modern southerners are the descendants of Confederate soldiers. They live in the same places, have the same names, sing the same songs and sometimes wave the same flags. Like most people, they generally prefer to venerate their ancestor's impressive deeds whilst downplaying or forgetting the ones they disagree with.
Taking their statues, deliberately mutilating them, and then melting them down can be seen as, and was seen as, an attack on those people. It's saying, "This is what I think of your history, this is what I think of your pride," and it's also saying, "you can't stop me from destroying things that matter to you".
You may think that southerners shouldn't have taken it personally, but they did. And on observing this fact, the Left did not go, "Shit, dude, I'm sorry. I didn't realise this stuff mattered to you." They went, "Ha! Suck it, racists." Which to my mind tells you who they were aiming at.
In other words, it's 1.
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If a lot of people complain about Jews who eat Christian babies, it's fair for Jews to feel targeted even though they don't eat babies.
Whether someone is attacking the outgroup doesn't depend on whether they are accurately characterizing the outgroup. It can be simultaneously true that 1) southerners don't have the values that Confederate statues represent and 2) they consider attacks on the statues as attacks on themselves. They can figure out what's in the minds of the people attacking the statues, and that's all that's needed.
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