4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8hr ago
Whuh? Warsaw? Do you mean Gdansk?
Whoops, yes, my bad. Another instance of posting while half asleep.
Sure, you wouldn't get landings like this, but controlling the Baltic (or, even more importantly, preventing NATO control of Baltic) would still give Russians considerable strategic advantage, starting with the security of Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. The Arctic circle even moreso - that's where the big missiles would be flying, after all.
Kaliningrad would be better secured by seizing Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania (which would also be significantly easier), and if Sweden and Finland remained neutral then NATO would be hardly "in control" of the Baltic at that point. Even then, though, I figure they would still be perfectly capable of knocking out any major ship in it, which would render it essentially useless (especially since in an open war against NATO I imagine even "civilian" shipping would be targeted - the taboo against that is only maintained by Western public opinion and the implicit threat of the collective West taking its gloves off if a violation is too egregious, which would not work if Western gloves are already off and would not be aimed against the West itself to begin with). As for the Arctic circle, why is Sweden and Finland relevant here? Russia extends further north than either; the only clay that would meaningfully extend its northern/northwestern reach is Norway's, and that's already in NATO.
If we're talking about 1944, we're talking about a completely different situation due to there already having been 3 years of war. And Winter War was precisely the sort of an invasion of a neutral country to obtain a strategic advantage in the midst of an ongoing separate greater-power conflict we are talking about here.
I was thinking of the 41-44 war after the siege of Leningrad. I don't think being different means that it's not applicable; the Soviet war machine was only gaining steam, and Soviet planners were clearly already thinking about a future standoff against the West, so I don't understand why they would not invest more resources in it if they actually thought it strategically advantageous for such a scenario. As for the original Winter war, I think circumstances then were actually materially different to modern ones: the Finnish border was significantly closer to Leningrad, between Mannerheim's White sympathies and Finnish irredentism towards the Russian parts of Karelia a proactive/opportunistic attack by the Finns on Russia would have seemed plausible, and there was an ideological component about Finland's abortive communist revolution that is wholly absent today.
The scenarios that I described wasn't concocted in 2022 - they've been standard fare in Finnish and Swedish security debates from the times of Cold War on, a part of a greater security calculus of whether it makes more sense to join NATO and risk getting directly involved a great-power conflict or not join the NATO and still risk being targeted by a separate SMO in preparation of such a conflict or as a separate but still connected part of such a conflict.
The scenarios you described might have been more relevant during the Cold War and into the mid-2000s, when the consensus among the major militaries of the world was still that littoral combat and naval landings are a winning strategy against great powers. (The US started its Zumwalt-class littoral destroyer programme somewhen around 2005, I think?) I remember hearing the first rumblings that A2/AD may render all of this obsolete in the 2010s in the context of China, and the the Ukraine war has now delivered fairly compelling proof.
For a long time, that calculus pointed towards the "not join" option, with majorities of both the population and the leadership of these countries sharing this view, but a full Russian attack on Ukraine of course upended the calculus almost completely (the year of Russia beating the war drum before the invasion had already started this process but the invasion made the opinion switch permanent) by demonstrating Russia's capacity for brash, previously unthinkable action, with both the people and the leaders basically changing course almost overnight. I live here and follow local politics closely, I am very familiar with how this process happened.
I mean, I actually lived in Sweden around the time of the 2022 invasion, and though I was not so rooted that I would be familiar with what average locals had thought before, within my academic bubble the sequence looked like (moral outrage at the invasion) -> (media blitz pushing the message that Sweden is also threatened) -> (skepticism gradually making way for socially backed belief that it is obviously so). For a few months in 2022, there would be almost non-stop charm offensives with US navy ships visiting Stockholm for photo-ops every other month and what-not as well; all in all it hardly read as a purely organic, bottom-up sentiment.
In general, the notion that Russia invading Ukraine was "brash, previously unthinkable action" itself seems to be a psyop to me. The writing was on the wall for a long time - Ukraine's pro-Western elements stood out as Russia's public external enemy number one not even just since the Donbass conflict or the 2014 revolution, but for several years before that as Russia accused Ukraine of stealing gas in transit while also threatening them with the possibility of cutting off their ability to export gas westward entirely, while colluding with the Baltics to interfere with any project to build new pipelines that would allow them to bypass Ukraine entirely. (Western media either mokusatsued this or at most reported on it with "Russia blackmailing Ukraine with gas"/"Russia unreliable in delivering gas to the West" framing.) The frequently repeated assertion that the invasion of Ukraine was unexpected/unpremeditated seems to mostly serve as a catechism to reinforce non-acknowledgement of this background, as Western governments are concerned that this would legitimize the invasion in the eyes of some of their population and thereby sap internal support.
Without the resentment and often downright seething towards Ukraine in the population, it seems inconceivable from a Russian perspective that the invasion would have gone through. More generally, I think the West still underestimates to what extent modern Russian foreign policy is based not on rationally optimising for some complex future goal, but purely on a calculus of rewarding allies and especially taking revenge for perceived slights. We can even see this in the context of smaller decisions within the war itself - Russia only started targeting Ukrainian power infrastructure as a response to the Crimean bridge bombing, and the strikes were actually referred to in official media as "strikes of revenge". Despite their effectiveness they basically ceased as the thirst for revenge was sated, much to the consternation of many milbloggers and armchair generals (some of whom were annoyed because the strikes were effective, and others because they felt that this was not enough revenge yet). Another volley of strikes came recently only as revenge for US deep strike authorisation. There are several other steps that would have been no-brainers if winning the war were actually the goal, such as deep strikes against bridges across the Dniepr; I can only surmise that they are being held back to have a topical target for revenge if the Ukrainians were to actually destroy the Crimean bridge, and despite their sabre-rattling the Ukrainians actually understand this and that is why it still stands. The thing is, even now, Russian resentment towards Finland and Sweden is basically negligible, and the two countries actually enjoy tremendous goodwill among the population. There might be some argument (even though, as I said, I think it is weak) that Russia would attack them if it actually operated under a goal-oriented framework to defeat the West; there is really no case to be made that Russia would attack them if it operates under the "prison social hierarchy" framework that I think actually drives them. (The Baltics, on the other hand, have done their utmost to actually be in danger now. Russia still isn't so irrational as to attack them without being prepared for a full-blown world war, but I would at least expect that in a putative nuclear standoff they have many more warheads set aside for them than would be warranted by their military significance.)
Even if we assume that Russia would actually engage in a direct conventional war against NATO (which continues seeming very far-fetched to me), and somehow could magically summon the manpower and materiel for such an undertaking, I don't see what benefits it would gain from expending its resources (which would presumably still be finite, even if we assume for the sake of argument they are ~10x what they have now) on such an undertaking. The Ukraine war clearly shows that naval area denial currently has the upper hand in a near-peer conflict, so all major surface combatants would be disabled or pinned in port within a few weeks of the beginning of such a war; and with anti-ship missiles taking some one-digit number of minutes to strike a target, an Incheon-style landing around Warsaw would be as unrealistic to stage from Åland as it would be to stage from Kronstadt (or more so, since it would be harder to get an air defense umbrella even over the staging area).
The obvious strategy for Russia to pursue if it for some reason decided to fight a conventional do-or-die war against NATO on the offensive would be to seize the Baltics and then try to ram through the Suwałki gap as in Cold War planning scenarios. They didn't attack Sweden in WWII either, when it still would have made more sense (as naval action had not yet been rendered quite as impossible by modern reconnaissance and targeting) and they had a bigger and better army; and even their action against Finland was decidedly half-hearted, seemingly only serving to loosen the Finnish chokehold on Leningrad's northern supply lines that gave them trouble during the first half of the war. (As much as it may be flattering to you, it seems implausible that they would have been unable to make it past Vainikkala after fighting their way through to Berlin, if they actually were equally motivated.)
It seems pretty clear to me that the Åland/Gotland explanation was advanced by politicians who had personal incentives to make your respective countries join NATO, and lapped up by a media and population eager to see themselves personally involved on the right side in a conflict that they perceived as just (much like in religious apocalyptic fiction in the vein of Left Behind, the devil always takes very specific personal interest in the author's/reader's country and people).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
On what basis do you figure? There is little use arguing about counterfactuals, but I would have taken a bet against Russia attacking either Finland or Sweden conditional on them not joining NATO at very high odds. I never saw an argument for why they would do so that was not based on some form of "because it would be the evil-maxxing thing to do", or ascribing territorial expansion to them as a motive (which also doesn't really seem to mesh with reality, and is instead fielded as part of a rhetorical trick to deny their stated reasons for attacking UA).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
Well, on the other hand Georgia (erstwhile NATO candidate) just reelected an anti-Western party, and Erdogan is flirting with BRICS. It may be fair to say that the war galvanised the cultural West, so Sweden and Finland (which realistically had nothing to fear from Russia either way) joined as a symbolic gesture of support; but as far as the idea that siding with NATO will make your life materially better (as opposed to any spiritual satisfaction you may derive if you sympathise with its cause) goes, we have at least weak evidence (and justification) that fence-sitters became more skeptical.
Thanks for the links, but there doesn't seem to be anything in there about the ADL helping or sponsoring European NGOs, as far as I can tell...? The picture that these seem to paint is that Europe has active pro-immigration NGOs, and the ADL independently has made some noises saying that immigration into Europe is good, for which some of their intra-American allies have criticised them.
Even the last article is just opining about a falling-out between the ADL and American pro-Israel orgs, seemingly in the context of the ADL also supporting American pro-Palestine activism; the only mention of "Europe" is some throwaway remark that seems based on an assumption that making the US more welcoming to the pro-Palestine position would harm the Jews in the US in the same way in which similar positions are harming them in Europe - surely if they believed that the European situation were a consequence of ADL activity, they would not choose this wording:
“The ADL should be fighting anti-Semites and Israel-haters, not helping to bring them to America to join the anti-Israel lobby,” Klein said. “Does the ADL enjoy seeing horrific Muslim activities in Europe against women and others?”
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
I picked 100 years rather than a larger figure on purpose (and I'm reasonably familiar with German history; that's where I got my passport and most of my schooling!), and I'm happy to elaborate the rule as being against irredentism in case of doubt (so no German pre-Bismarck claims survive). The situations I opined on just all seem to be fairly clear-cut cases of nationhood continuity.
An even easier solution might be to posit a one-sided onus based on present-day claims of inheritance - so e.g. a hypothetical Russian Empire acquisition of North Africa would be morally open to a claim by descendants of the Carthaginians the moment the Imperial Russian government opens its mouth to say something about being the "Third Rome".
(I'm not trying to propose a counterintuitive-but-defensible rule, but rather some simple rule that aligns with intuitions about right and wrong that I have independently, as one does in analytic philosophy.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
Did you actually read my post? I'm not setting arbitrary clock cutoffs (see: my opinion regarding the case of the Japanese), but instead using cultural continuity as acknowledged by the people involved. The present-day Germans think of themselves as the same people as the Germans from 100 years ago, before any significant Arab immigration commenced; and conversely there is a continuous chain from the ones of 100 years ago to the present ones where older generations thought of younger generations replacing them as "their people". It's an interesting question whether the same reasoning should apply to wider or narrower circles of ingroup status as well, rather than just those at the scale of a "nation"; but if there actually were descendants of Western Hunter-Gatherers alive today that had some semblance of this sort of continuity, I would at least be open to considering it valid if they demanded that Indo-Europeans should gtfo back to the steppe.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
Which ones? Can you provide some concrete data of that and relevant pressure on social media companies?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
Do you have some concrete evidence that they put the thumb on the scale about European migration? It would be a bit surprising to see, since one would think the opportunity cost of not investing that money in the American political market would matter more for them.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
Out of these examples, the flooding of Japan by hundreds of millions of, let's say, cloned Ainu and the surrender of Israeli territory to Palestinian Arabs are the two that strike me as different and more justifiable, and I suspect that I may not be alone in that view.
It's not hard to come up with a fairly coherent principle that rationalises this pattern: if your homeland gets seized by another people, your people get a perpetual moral claim to reconquer it from the people that seized it, but not from anyone else that may further seize it from those people and thus has not perpetrated a direct injustice against you and yours. This way, the German/French/... claim against Arabs is live; the Arab claim against Israelis is live; the Jomon claim against Yayoi Japan is, somewhat surprisingly, still live; but the Israelis only have a claim to the Levant against the Romans who scattered them, which is long dead.
Under this framework, in fact, the Jews have a much more plausible claim against the various peoples of Europe who expelled them (especially, if you want to appy the "invader" framework to their whole history, where they settled on lands that changed hands to some entity that was later cut down to size by someone else). This agrees with my long-standing intuition that after WWII a Jewish State should actually have been carved out of the losing nations in Europe (which I remember @Southkraut taking great offense at for reasons that still strike me as insufficiently thought through; imagine the different trajectory many things could have taken had Germany been allowed to discharge its blood debt with soil in this way).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
3d ago
The White Feather Movement did not get large numbers of British men to elope with the droves of eligible German bachelorettes. Are you sure nothing like the many factors that led to this are present in the modern US scenario? The cutting of ties that would have been necessary to move and socially establish yourself in an enemy country will surely be necessary to a lesser degree for a blue->red defection, as will the circumstance that red women might not necessarily like blue men over red men (as German women may not have chosen British men over German ones).
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4d ago
This is commonly treated as a slam-dunk argument that Western 4B is counterproductive, but is it really so? What if the intended effect is not that progressive men continue whatever they were doing and get arbitrarily punished with sex withdrawal, nor that some random conservative men also get caught up and punished, but that the men of the tribe go and figure out some way of making sure Trump doesn't win again, be it by running a better campaign, falsifying votes, principles-be-damned lawfare or one million assassination attempt suicide runs on him? What is the actual ratio of blue-tribe men who see the 4B threat and defect to the red tribe to ones who will redouble their efforts whether because they think of tribal duty or imagine that maybe they can personally get ahead enough on the newly established "fight against Trump tooth and nail" ladder that an exemption from 4B is quietly granted to them after all?
Throughout history, propaganda of the form "women will spurn you if you don't do this self-sacrificial thing" has been leveraged too often to be dismissed out of hand. In fact, per what some other posters in these threads say, in general the Korean message that women will not put out unless men work 60-hour weeks to buy a house seems to be achieving its goal just fine, and most Korean men do go on to climb the standard career ladder and work 60-hour weeks and support the lifestyle of their women through the system, rather than "defecting" and going to fraternize with and dedicate their labour to some group of enemy women from the 4Bers' outgroup. Tribal loyalty is strong, and if you write from the perspective of the outgroup it is all too easy to be biased in a way like "Why would blue men not just go red then? As far as my red eyes see, life on the red side is perfectly fine!".
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
4d ago
It only works because the counterargument is less catchy than the quip and therefore loses according to Twitter debate rules. I don't think the women who are threatening 4B want, or claim to want, to "keep their legs closed", everything else being equal; their argument is instead that because of lack of abortion access, they can't open their legs safely, and therefore they will abstain from it, to their own detriment and the detriment of other beneficiaries of them opening their legs (men who want to have sex).
Compare something like "if you ban airbags, I will refuse to ride cars". Is it not obvious that "if you were capable of leaving your car keys in the drawer, airbags would not be your top 1 issue" would be a nonsensical retort?
Cringe of the day: US military spawns yet another UFO investigation workgroup, logo contains a "Latin" motto seemingly made by butchering a stoic motivational poster quote.
I want to put this on the record to have a sign to tap anytime someone brings up "officials at the DoD" as a particularly trustworthy authority on anything. Consider what must have gone wrong for this to pass muster - the individual(s) in charge are so childish to think that slapping on a random Latin motto makes you look legit, they are not skilled or diligent enough to construct a motto that is actually correct, not resourceful enough to hire or ask someone who could do it right, nor capable of sufficient reflection to anticipate that they would fail at it and the result may be embarrassing. (It's not like show-offs like me trying to decipher random Latin is a rare occurrence!) If any other employees looked over the materials at all, either those people also failed the attention or skepticism check, or there is not enough of a culture of criticism that they could report it upwards. What sort of useful contribution can a group of people like that make on the topic of sifting through blurry and contentious footage and deciding if it is evidence of UFOs or some other explanation has been missed? All that is really evidenced is that under the aegis of the US military, there is space for amateurs to do whatever with little oversight.
(Fun thread because there isn't really much that falls along standard CW battle lines here. Happy to move if the implications are too contentious after all.)
It's satirising the circumstance that the ones engaging in the protest are the outgroup of the ones being protested, and they essentially protest by performative self-sabotage. Surely Aragorn is happy to see the Orcs not getting any action; surely Trump and his supporters are likewise happy if hardcore progressives voluntarily make themselves miserable.
If you are hung up on the mean-spirited orc comparison, that joke works equally well in reverse - "Gondorians protest rise of Sauron by refusing to have sex", or even "Jews protest election of Hitler (...)". If I were in charge of the Onion, I would have considered running the latter: it still insults the "right" target, while also making a point of how ridiculous the protest movement is.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6d ago
Neither of those is an example of "mutilation"
To be fair, the parent poster only talked about a "path towards mutilation". I assume that the "mutilation" in question is gender reassignment surgery, which typically involves cutting off external sexual characteristics. Is it not fair to say that this is a typical or at least commonly desired endpoint of transitioning, so actions that make it more likely that someone will reach this endpoint in the future could be fairly described as putting them on a "path towards mutilation"?
Can you provide a source for the claim that schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition?
I figure the assumption of the anti-trans side is that children can't meaningfully consent, nor be held accountable for their interest or lack thereof in the context of a managed social environment like school that may encourage or discourage said interest. Either way, the poster you are responding to didn't claim anything about interest or consent, did they? They are only talking about secrecy, presumably from the parents.
Mind you, it also seems strange to first claim that the driving concern is parents disowning the kid, but then to also defend a forced disowning if they refuse to let the kid access transition-affirming medical interventions. In a scenario where the parents find out anyway and are not willing to "own"/support a transitioning kid, your preference is evidently for the kid to be separated from the parents anyway. If you are willing to use deception to make the parents make a sacrifice (of money? time? support?) that they would not make willingly, why can't you instead support a policy that at least respects them as adult citizens and simply says that they will lose visitation/influence rights if they interfere with the transition but will still be compelled to provide financial support for the kid?
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8d ago
I still think that the circumstance the investigations appear to have found nothing is only strong evidence of the investigation not having been conducted properly - based on my understanding of US election and vote-counting procedures I would estimate the probability of there being no voter fraud in any national election at a single-digit percentage (3%, maybe, with the probability mass dominated by scenarios in which I systematically underestimate the checks and balances?). It's just that I would expect fraud to exist benefitting either side (P(fraud only for one party|fraud) is low), and don't have a strong prior as to which side benefits from it more in a given election. My expectation is that the "investigating bodies" know that any truthful answer takes the form "we found abundant evidence of fraud, but no evidence that the number of fraudulent votes each party got isn't basically roughly the same", but they do not believe that making this common knowledge is something that the American electoral system could survive.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
8d ago
Hm. This line of argument does not seem persuasive to me because (1) I see the same "threat to democracy" rhetoric, at the same level of intensity, being levelled against candidates and parties running on an anti-establishment line in other countries (Germany, Italy), where there has so far been no indication of them refusing to acknowledge official election outcomes, and started in 2016, not 2020; (2) given that Trump did in fact cede power, I find discussion of counterfactuals to be unproductive since it's not like there is a trusted neutral party that can provide us with particularly likely ones; (3) between the "faithless elector appeals" in the US of 2016 and cases such as the recent elections in Georgia (the country) where the same suspects are actually backing an opposition's refusal to accept election results and currently trying to instigate a violent overthrow in the name of "democracy", the idea that "democracy" and not contesting election results is correlated seems ill-supported.
I do recognize, though, that if you do not accept context from other countries, an argument about Trump on this basis seems more compelling - I guess you would only have to accept that the 2016 rhetoric about him being a threat was properly prophetic, as opposed to self-inflictedly so in the "claim someone is violent to coordinate provoking them into proving you right" way.
Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument? As far as I can tell, it's really the core scissor statement of the mainstream-left-versus-alt-right divide in Western countries. People on the left side seem to hold it to be so self-evidently true that you cannot disagree with it in good faith, while it is in equal measures self-evidently false to the point that good-faith agreement is inconceivable to those on the right. I personally always have figured myself broadly closer to the left than the right (if perhaps coping that the race/gender collectivism social justice movement is a temporary aberration), but with one's position on this statement now being treated as a shahada by both sides I find myself driven into the arms of the right wing simply because the left-wing position strikes me as too insane to accept. Unless "democracy" really is code for "whatever my allies want", how can you justify iterated statements that amount to "giving the majority what it keeps voting for is a threat to our democracy"?
If anything, it seems to me that the opposite sounds plausible: democracy as I understand it is threatened by political insiders collectively pulling all stops to prevent giving the majority what it wants, even if this requires wrecking a considerable amount of systems and societal machinery as collateral damage. What is actually the notion of democracy that is imperiled by the right, rather than the left?
(To forestall a possible line of argument, I do find it plausible at this point that, say, the German AfD, if it got into power, would engage in some sketchy reprisals against left-wing institutions, such as pulling funding from nonprofits. Even if on its own this would be a concerning move, I find it hard to put causal blame on them for this, given that the other parties were openly saying since day one that they would sooner ban the AfD than let them get into a position where they could implement their voters' preferences. Something like pointing a gun at someone and then saying that you were right about them being violent all along when they try to wrestle it from you.)
Yes, though I haven't paid attention to it in about half a year so I couldn't answer what the capabilities of the best models are nowadays. My general sense was that performance of the "reasonably-sized" models (of the kind that you could run on a standard-architecture laptop, perhaps up to 14B?) has stagnated somewhat, as the big research budgets go into higher-spec models and the local model community has structural issues (inadequate understanding of machine learning, inadequate mental model of LLMs, inadequate benchmarks/targets). That is not to say they aren't useful for certain things; I have encountered 7B models that could compete with Google Translate performance on translating some language pairs and were pretty usable as a "soft wiki" for API documentation and geographic trivia and what-not.
If you use llama.cpp, you can load part of the model into VRAM and evaluate it on the GPU, and do the rest of the evaluation on CPU. (The -ngl [number of layers] parameter determines how many layers it tries to push to the GPU.)
In general, I strongly recommend using this over the "industry standard" Python-based setup, as the overheads of 1GB+ of random dependencies and interpreted language do tend to build up in ways beyond what shows up in benchmarks. (You might not lose so much time per token, but you will use more RAM (easy to measure) and put more strain on assorted caches and buffers (harder to attribute) and have more context switches degrading UI interactivity.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
10d ago
Not to dispute your point that nothing changed about what they are saying, but equivocating the two positions seems a bit off. Chinese "red lines" are drawn around the PRC itself, a bunch of reefs and one island next door; US "red lines" are conterminous with the PRC border on a good day, while on bad days they actually reach inside the country to also enclose HK, Xinjiang and/or Falun Gong.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
12d ago
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
Fair point, I overlooked this part. Sorry.
(I would however counterclaim that your moderation on charity is selective enough to border on the anarcho-tyrannical. I don't recall seeing many instances of people getting modhatted for the very regular sport of slightly shifting the interlocutor's categories for the sake of argument, and to begin with your own insinuation that I am only motivated by personal animosity or tribalism is hardly charitable either.)
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.
How is it a mischaracterisation of your criticism to describe it as being about your taste, when the very first thing you say is that his post is "obnoxious", which is clearly a judgement of taste?
To begin with, he is not the moderator, nor the AAQC compiler. I would have no objection to the essence of what you said if you had said it with your modhat off. How can you treat taste-based opinion posting as analogous to taste-based moderation?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? (...)
(...)
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?"
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. The dominant consensus on many topics has become sufficiently overwhelming that there are hardly any users left that are willing to put in the time to argue cogently against it, and that includes topics on which I agree (such as categorical opposition to wokeism, or favouring market economy over socialism). A forum which produces a stream of quality posts for just one side is a partisan thinktank, not whatever I thought TheMotte was supposed to be; and either way without real opposition the quality of the monoculture is bound to decline eventually. Ideally, this would involve subjecting posts that exhibit the pattern of being highly-upvoted while no post disagreeing manages to breach positive double digits to an extremely stringent interpretation of the rules ("moderate more"); but at the very least, being extremely lenient with anyone willing to oppose them and argue back ("moderate less") seems like a step that you can take notwithstanding the usual "well, we can't moderate posts nobody reports!" excuse. (I have reported a fair number of posts throughout the years, but it seems like only a small fraction of those elicited any visible mod reaction.)
Therefore, "moderate people who get lots of upvotes more, and those who get fewer upvotes less" is more like it. 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. I have no idea where coffee_destroyer stands on other topics, and even on Israel/Palestine he is only directionally on my side since my position is closer to "they both deserve each other, and I resent being asked to help either". I would also like tankies, SJWs, actual neonazis and actual "white genocide now"ers to be given much more leeway to nitpick and be obnoxious towards popular positions, even though I dislike all of these groups.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
12d ago
I feel like you are confusing several separate issues. Nothing I've done in this thread is aimed at "protecting a user from criticism." Coffee_enjoyer was breaking the rules and obnoxiously axe-grinding
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. It's fine to have a wildcard rule that essentially says "don't do things we don't like", but to then try to pin the "breaking the rules" label on someone who only ran afoul of that rule is somewhere between a case of the noncentral fallacy and plain self-aggrandizement, where you expect other people to treat your taste with the same reverence as a written rule.
Your complaints are not at that level, but your candor over your distaste for Dean suggests to me that you are making a similar mistake: allowing animus toward a user to blind you to the fact that this is not ultimately about the user, but about the rules.
I think hounding other posters for evidence and forcing them to produce more evidence in a more legible way is an unalloyed good, actually. I'd love for you to prove me wrong, and show me an instance where someone is doing the same thing for a position that I agree with or user that I like where I think that it would be appropriate to moderate the pursuers. The closest example I can remember is where back in the Reddit era, people were piling up on darwin2000 (might have gotten the number part wrong) over not taking responsibility for boldly wrong predictions (in contexts such as the Smollett case). I was rather fond of him as a user and thought that he was an asset by virtue of putting out some overly welcoming hearths by merely existing, but was absolutely in favour of him being held accountable in the way he was.
I initially didn't want to make an argument based on accusations of bias, but looking through your posting history it seems plainly evident that you are deeply aligned with Dean on the Israel/Palestine question, and back the Israeli side in a way that can't be described as dispassionate. Are you sure that you are not letting your animus towards a side blind you to the fact that you are just using the rule that basically says "excuse to be deployed in edge cases" as an excuse in a case that is not particularly on edge? It's not like not being candid about this, or mostly avoiding engagement on substance (easy when an "excellent poster" is around to make your case for you anyway), magically makes you neutral. The least you could have done to not make this look as bad would have been to recuse yourself and let this be handled by another moderator who can express his views of the object-level issue with fewer expletives than this.
Separately, everything I said about Dean being a good poster was in direct response to coffee-enjoyer's obnoxious, overwrought, and rhetorical "is this the kind of posting you want!?" The answer was "yes, that's the point of the AAQCs, these are the kinds of posts we want." I was trying to find a way to help coffee_enjoyer understand why he was being moderated. Ultimately, I seem to have failed to find such a way; coffee_enjoyer seems to me far more interested in being angry about the disagreement between him and Dean (and, by extension, my moderating him over his approach), than in understanding that the problem is not the substance, but in the uncharitable and antagonistic nature of his engagement.
Well, forget about him. Can you explain to me, or anyone else, why he was being moderated? My current understanding is that you like Dean's posts in general and are moreover extremely unsympathetic to the anti-Israel position, and therefore perceive any persistent attempt to impose a tax on Dean's pro-Israel posting in its present shape as something that needs to be suppressed using the wildcard rule. Is this accurate?
You've left out my quite explicit point that AAQCs are not a bar to banning. Users cannot get away with "more extreme posts" indefinitely.
The clause doesn't have to be parsed as "(more extreme) posts" for the cycle to hold; it is absolutely sufficient for it to be "more (extreme posts)". Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago - and the way in which they are bad was originally trailblazed by "quality posters" who evidently were so favoured that unless someone took one for the team and raised a stink out in the open, you wouldn't even know that reports were just being redirected into the trash due to their standing, as opposed to nobody seeing a problem at all to begin with. Once the prolific and beloved posters all do it, the nobodies are free to follow suit.
In the end, we can't maintain this space at all if we worry too much about what might or might not "drive users away."
Is this a belief that's based on a concrete observation of bad things that happened when you "worried too much", or just rationalising the easy option of going with your gut?
One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth.
One does not make up for the other. People can still make good posts and interesting conversation away from a welcoming hearth, but by definition they won't after they had to bear their final straw. You can run a good version of this forum while being a welcoming hearth to nobody, but you can't run one while putting the final straw on too many, especially if you selectively do so on just about everyone except those having a particular gamut of opinion.
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?
Blech, I was half asleep when writing that post. I did indeed mean the Polish gap as the one they would ram through, but you are totally right about the Cold War one.
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