This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
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Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat. Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
This post is actually a pretty clean example of exactly what we don't want people posting, here. I am familiar with the evidence I would expect you to provide in support of each of your claims, but you didn't actually do so. And even if you had, your rhetoric simply comes in too sweeping and too hot. The tone is all wrong; you're not discussing a culture war topic, you're waging culture war.
You've stacked some AAQCs which have somewhat shielded you, but the number of warnings for low effort booing on your account is getting cumbersome. This time it's a three day ban.
“I am familiar with the evidence”
As am I and a fully fleshed out argument would probably start with the raping of the Sabine then cite historical examples elsewhere (Tribes in Brazilian rain forest, probably Aztecs), cite serial killers getting young hot wives in prison, a little 50 Shades of Grey plus polling on women sexual fantasies and porn watching habits.
Is the goal to write comments that a thorough blue triber who mostly hangs out in places like neoliberal Reddit stumbles into this place and gets the full arguments (leader to long comments) or that 80-90% of the people know the references for the frame a person is citing?
Long form and relitigating every frame hinders the ability to develop models to apply to new situations. My support for your position in this specific comment would basically come down to I haven’t seen anyone argue about female attraction to violence lately. The only incident lately I believe Ymeskhout linked to a Scott Alexander post talking about a client who constantly goes to jail for beating his wives and constantly has a new wife or the wife he previously went to jail for beating is sleeping with him again.
Inflammatory comments and shorthand integration-by-reference hinder the ability to create 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.
That's the goal--it's right there at the top of the page! Of course, the community is what it is; personalities and culture and such are bound to develop and play a part. The goal of moderation is to do what we can to preserve the foundation in the face of that.
Absolutely! Ban everyone (other than the Nazi-hobbyists with the time on their hands to couch their points in interminable gish-gallops) and you will not have anymore inflammatory comments to deal with! (tappinghead.gif)
Keep up the good work guys.
The mods were just following orders. Is it really anybody's fault that no one but Nazis can seem to follow pretty simple rules?
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Do you think @JTarrou should not have been banned?
If you think the modding was correct, then what is your complaint?
If you think the modding was incorrect, then explain why.
I think that @JTarrou's comment made a valid well articulated point relevant to the discussion -- my point to you is that if you continue nannying people's speech patterns you will soon enough be moderating a forum mainly consisting of polite and long-winded Nazis, because (for whatever reason) they seem to be the only ones currently willing to put in the effort to self-police their speech to the extent that they aren't catching regular bans.
If this is what you and @naraburns feel 'the foundation' of the place is (and Zorba presumably agrees) then so be it -- but it seems to me that things have drifted very far from what it was, and I think it has accelerated lately in large part due to an increase in the specific form of moderation that you are engaging in at the moment.
I don't think our moderation has changed, I know our rules haven't, and clearly it is not just Nazis who are able to write effortful posts without catching bans.
We've been hearing "You guys are ruining this place with your nannying speech patterns" since before we left reddit.
Not from me you haven't -- the frequency of it has markedly increased lately, whether due to the additional manpower on the mod squad or a shift in tolerance IDK, but the place is changing under our feet and not for the better.
Anyways look at the results and ask yourself the question about your rules bringing you to this -- what good did this ban do the forum?
We always ask that question. This is not the first time a well-liked and generally positive contributor has been (temporarily) banned. This is also not the first time that @JTarrou, specifically, has been banned. At one point he even wrote a long post about how he expected to get permabanned, no hard feelings, because he just couldn't comply with the rules about not shitting on his outgroup.
I realize there is a substantial contingent here who would like people to be allowed to post freely about how women are hypergamous bots, blacks are low IQ crime-monsters, Jews are invidious parasites, libtards should all be given helicopter rides, etc. etc. If that is the forum you would like, advocate for that but be clear about it. Maybe if that's what everyone wants, we will change our moderation and let the shit fly. But until now, the consensus has been that that is not what (most) people want, and hence that's why we mod people who cannot keep their seething hatred in check when posting. It's not like you aren't allowed to talk about women, blacks, Jews, liberals, etc., in a negative fashion. @JTarrou wasn't confused or caught unawares at crossing some invisible line he didn't understand. He knew what he was doing because he's done it (and been warned about it) before. So have 90% of our regulars who get rapped for breaking the rules, no matter how much they complain about it.
That said, sometimes there are phases where the mods all happen to be moderating more strictly or less strictly for a while. It's usually not an intentional or coordinated thing (we have not had a "reign of terror" recently, and no plans to do so). Remember those? When the forum would get so heated and antagonistic that we had to start issuing bans even for small infractions to get people to chill out? Some people thought that was necessary and some people hated it. Usually the people who hated it were the ones who wanted to shit on others. If you think we've been stricter lately, maybe it's because people have been shittier lately.
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But, as I've argued before, there is no neutral definition of what constitutes an "inflammatory" claim. The claims that count as inflammatory for you depend on the particular ideological viewpoint you've adopted. So it would at least be good to specify the viewpoint from which you're judging a particular claim as inflammatory.
I personally don't think there's anything inflammatory at all about "women love a killer". Regardless of whether the claim is true or false, I don't view it as a slight against women, or a failing on their part. Plausibly it could be taken as a relatively natural corollary of a Darwinian/Hobbesian view of life.
I'm aware that my view on this particular question may be unusual, and in the framing of say, polite upper middle class Western society, most people would view this as an inflammatory claim. But if "polite upper middle class Western society" is going to be the frame of reference that we use for judging claims as inflammatory on TheMotte, shouldn't we be modding a lot more posts than we already are? Every time HBD comes up for example, a number of posters write under the assumption that HBD is true. But HBD would be considered to be an extremely inflammatory complex of claims by most people in the West today. Is no one allowed to post under the assumption that HBD is true unless they include a link to a list of HBD 101 resources laying out the supporting evidence?
As with all rules, it's the viewpoint of the best judgment of the moderators.
That's why I referenced the specific/general rule there, rather than the inflammatory one.
That depends largely on the tone of the post. A factual and charitable but non-inflammatory post that leads a person toward uncomfortable conclusions is a very different thing than a meticulously-researched-and-linked post that paints whole groups of people in demeaning or derogatory ways using needlessly hostile language.
In this particular case, I would point out for example that while drawing comparisons between urban crime today and literally barbaric behavior in the ancient world is different in tone than straight up referring to a group as "barbarians." The objection might be--"well yeah, but if it quacks like a duck..." and I am totally sympathetic to wanting to resist the pejorative treadmill. Fortunately, the rules are not self-enforcing, and the mod team is comprised of reasonable individuals doing their best to prevent this from becoming a community where one particular sort of person just comes to vent their spleen.
The most we can do is our best.
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