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Where inflammatory is best understood as "in violation of implicitly leftist values".
Implicitly leftist in the same way as tankies regard "having stuff" as an implicitly bourgeois value, maybe.
When you filter against abrasive personalities, you are filtering for leftists, who are on the whole higher in agreeableness.
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I doubt that.
Anecdotally, for all the complaints about moderation targeting the right, the sort of "libertarians or lost channers" who make those sorts of complaints seem to have an even rougher time in explicitly conservative/right-wing spaces.
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For this community, that’s a bit complicated, given the more classically-liberal principles involved.
This community descends from a cult of personality based around a neurotic progressive who disliked a bit of the left's excesses (as they threatened him personally and he's highly neurotic), but outside of those personal threats was enthusiastically on board with the entire far-left culture.
So much so he deliberately invested the whole of his private and personal life into those far-left environments!
Of course the values this community enshrines are implicitly leftist. They're less left than they could maximally be, but nevertheless still enshrine leftist ideas.
How would this community look and even work if it adopted different values? Are you implying there is a workable and desirable alternative, and one that has no taint of leftism? Or are you merely issuing a complaint with no further implications?
It'd look very similar, of course, much like how The Schism and Culture War Roundup largely look identical despite being polar opposites. There'd be different participants and opinions being discussed, but it'd work fine.
If you want my ideal forum, it's a place where all the banned effortposters from yesteryear are given free reign. All the best writers in The Motte's history got banned and the community has forever been lesser for it.
So the difference would be that making effortposts grants you protection from bans? Is that the Motte minus its leftist values?
I'd remove bans for everything except illegal content, actually. The ability to block others or simply ignore them is perfectly serviceable, and there's really no need of moderators beyond that.
So banning is left-wing and that's all there is to it?
Banning interesting posters in the name of civility is a failure mode more common to the left, yes. Why that is surely has many reasons, but I'm not here to diagnose leftists, just to share my ideal forum.
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Perhaps you ought to clarify what you mean by "leftist" and "rightist" then.
I'm using standard definitions of left and right here.
The rules here have always been designed to promote the kind of discussions the modteam wants. We should, then, rightly conclude that the rules, the justifications for the rules, and the endurance of the rules serve to support the vision of this community('s leadership).
Why has this community always prioritized tone policing over anything else?
Why has this community had an HBD moratorium?
Why has this community schismed and broke apart multiple times over 'witches', which are only ever right-wingers? The immediate prior incarnation had two entirely separate schisms over it: most of the right-wingers left because the mods were silencing them (or got banned, same thing), and the left-wingers left because a mod was angry they didn't get enough of them -- and then he stayed as a mod! Incredible.
Why does this community have essentially no one we'd acknowledge as bona fide Red Tribe?
The values of this community have always been the values of Scott Alexander last decade. Scott Alexander is unambiguously a leftist. Furthermore, he is even a progressive, in openly progressive-coded relationships, supporting openly progressive groups and organizations, in an openly progressive neighborhood in an openly progressive city in an openly progressive state.
What Scott considers "good, healthy discussion" is discussion not too upsetting to his progressive sensibilities. What this community considers good, healthy discussion is what Scott (before he went full greengrocer) did. It's "sane progressivism", but it's progressivism all the same.
You should understand at least a little. For all your frequent talks on honor cultures, I'd expect you to recognize that a mandate to "be kind" even when kindness is not deserved (for instance, someone is trolling in bad faith, but skirting by a banning) is anathema. It's also a prog staple.
I know you recognize it, because you frequently cop time-outs and naughty no-no's over it.
Because "multi-polar internet politics forum" is like one of those exotic nitro-saturated compounds that really, really don't want to exist. It takes considerable effort to keep it from blowing itself apart, or even to slow the fatal reaction down. Tone policing moderates runaway exothermic reactions to a level that is theoretically survivable. It still doesn't quite well enough in practice, but it works well enough that considerable value can be extracted before the probably-inevitable collapse.
Because specific users were flooding the threads with non-stop arguments about HBD, with a great deal of repetition and very little useful result. I'm not convinced the Moratorium was actually a good way to handle things, but I see little evidence that there was a better way. People do the best they can.
I think the problem you're pointing to is real, and I have an effort-post I've been trying to finish for years on the subject. Again, this forum is aiming to be something that does not want to exist, and that fact has regrettable and unavoidable consequences. Where I don't agree is the claim that there's anything approaching a better way. It's this or nothing, and it's questionable how long even this can be maintained.
As regulars? I put forward both myself and HlynkaCG, at absolute minimum. If neither of us satisfies this requirement in your view, I think you need to provide a more detailed definition of Red Tribe.
The values this community started with were those of Scott Alexander from last decade. The values of Scott and this community have both drifted considerably since then, and pointed criticism of Scott and his arguments has not been rare.
What this community aims for is conversations across the tribal divide. That can't happen if one tribe or the other simply leaves. That reality necessarily shapes the way this place works, and not always for the better. Still, the fact remains that conversation is the point, and other approaches work a whole lot worse. I'm posting here and not on CWR because there is pretty much no conversation on CWR. I'm posting here and not on The Schism because I have no confidence I'll be allowed to prosecute a conversation worth having on The Schism, whereas those conversations are still possible here.
It's not ideal, but useful information can still be extracted from it, particularly when the masks come off.
Speaking of you and the schism, any thoughts about what can or should be done about this troll?
It looks like you're beating him without even participating, which is pretty impressive. But he can still pull the "Choose carefully; wrong answers merit a ban" card in the end, with trace's blessing apparently.
Is it best to just leave the place as an example of what happens if you let that kind of thing take over a discussion forum, or so you think there's something worth salvaging there?
Yeah, I got a notification for this one. It's somewhat bittersweet to be infamous.
The Schism is TW's garden, so obviously whatever he says goes. I dropped by there once and had a brief, pleasant conversation with one of the people from the old country, and then abruptly found myself being lectured about the efficacy of Gulags as a social policy by an apparent Gulag enthusiast. Combined with TW's statements about his forum's founding and his own modding philosophy, I decided the neighborly thing would be to find somewhere else to be on a fairly permanent basis.
I've always been a big fan of holding people accountable for their previous statements, and believe that tracking conversations long-term is a good and necessary part of these forums. Of course, it helps if you can actually understand what you're reading. @Iconochasm was gracious enough to hit the high points in his own reply, for what little good it did.
this post was not a call for violence. The point was that norms against political violence only apply to Reds, that Blues have been calling for and encouraging political violence for years if not decades, and that the country cannot survive this hypocrisy long-term. Given the ubiquitous Blue Tribe arguments in favor of political violence, it was no longer possible to make a general argument against Red Tribe political violence, and this fact was likely to result in disastrous outcomes no matter what myself or anyone else in the Motte did or said.
"Numbers" states that the people I was arguing against "weren't in the room", but he is dead wrong. Here's Darwin being Darwin, arguing that rioting and arson are useful tools for progressive politics, and responding to pushback with his usual Who, Whom. Here's @Ymeshkhout, one of the Motte's own mods, arguing at length that rioting and arson are flatly preferable to the status quo. Here's @ThirteenValleys responding to a now-deleted post that argued that rioting and arson were necessary, and that the Motte's general condemnation of the riots demonstrated a "lack of empathy". These are all from the first night or two, but there were plenty more where they came from; further elaboration will unfortunately have to wait for the long-delayed Riot Thread Retrospective megapost. Maybe TW and "Numbers" never saw these or any of the many other similar arguments endemic to the Riot threads. Alternatively, maybe they just didn't care, because it's only bad when Reds do it. All I can say is that support for the rioters was not hard to find, a lot of the old-timer Blues participated, and I note that none of their arguments made it onto the Schism's benchmarks of the unacceptable. Only when such arguments were made from a Red framework did the monocles begin to pop.
this post, which I'm amused to see is apparently now one of TW's top-three examples for speech he considers unacceptable, was likewise not advocating violence. The first two paragraphs are a Modest Proposal, applying the logic of the endemic pro-riot arguments employed by Blues to a Red Tribe issue. The "one" who was "absolutely fucking brain damaged" refered to in the third paragraph was of course myself: I was an idiot to have spent years arguing against political violence and in favor of the possability of understanding and reconciliation, because such arguments utterly failed. Political violence has, in fact, been normalized, and there's no plausible way I can see to unscramble that egg. The final paragraphs are a bitter note of the DARVO applied to my sub-tribe by Blue society at large, and the resentment engendered when I contemplate that even within the Motte, it will never, ever stop.
In any case, the mods gave me a reasonable tap with the hammer, and while it was annoying to see an obvious point be missed so thoroughly, lack of clarity is the author's responsability, I have a strict policy of never arguing with mods, it was probably a good and necessary move for the long-term survival of the forum, and in any case I was furious enough that I needed a break. Happily, the mods provided, and that mod note was a pivotal turn in my own personal journey here.
On the other hand, I actually do believe that serious political violence is a likely outcome of our current trajectory. I actually do deeply hate Blues as a group, a fact that I've admitted on a number of occasions, agree is not a good thing, and am making some effort to manage. I do believe that large-scale political violence is, from a generalized perspective, likely preferable to an uncontested Blue victory in the culture war, as I believe that an uncontested victory is likely to result in large-scale misery as people like me are abused without consequence or recourse. All the arguments I can actually make against such violence presuppose Christian faith, which most people on either side here aren't really interested in, and which I often find myself wishing I could find a way around. I am a right-wing extremist, and while I put effort into keeping it on a leash, I can entirely agree that I have little constructive to contribute to TW's project, given their preferences. Our last several conversations were not cordial ones, and while one of those was my own fault for failing to remember their preferences, the rest were not. In particular, this conversation made it pretty clear that our values were fundamentally incompatible.
I don't expect any of the above to be even slightly persuasive to TW or "Numbers"; I imagine the later will be quite certain that I'm trying to weasel-word out of his accusations. I do not think setting off truck bombs is a good idea. I intend to enjoy what peace my family and I can find, and will continue to pray for the miraculous doom-bypass none of us actually deserves.
For what it’s worth, I expect you and I can or could still have plenty of good conversations—but when people tell me they don’t want to share a society with me, I take seriously the need to build alternate spaces alongside those who do.
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FWIW, I think 895158 is being extremely dishonest in that thread and this isn't the first time I've found @TracingWoodgrains judgment to be questionable, for all that I think he is a very smart and sincere guy with noble intentions.
That said, he's not wrong that you are pretty explicitly on the accelerationist side of things. The difference between you and some of the other accelerationists is that you seem sad that it will come to that, whereas the people I think of as genuine bad actors are cheering for it. I suspect 895158 doesn't make such distinctions, so to him, someone like you who very carefully lays out your principles and why you think it's going to come to violence and why you think it's the only pragmatic solution for your side, even though you might wish it were otherwise, is no different from the people who just can't wait to start murdering their enemies.
You and I have had, as you put it, "very frank" differences of opinion. So I'm going to say that two years ago, you were clearly in a very bad headspace and a lot of what you were posting really did read like someone who was one push away from getting behind the wheel of a truck bomb. You seem to have calmed down a bit since then, or maybe you're just better at moderating how you express yourself.
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This inevitably devolves into the norms catering to the biggest crybaby, which in practice again means the norms of the community are implicitly leftist.
You don't seem to disagree with me, you just think it's good and necessary. I firmly disagree, but that's a value judgment we all have to make for ourselves.
edit: also I'd recognize you and Hylnka both as fellow Reds, but you are an extreme minority. I maintain this place is overwhelmingly Blue, for the reason that blue norms are friendlier to leftists, and it's a leftist space.
If it meant that, the results would be all the Red Tribers getting banned and this place turning into a generic Blue forum. What is actually happening is that this place slowly bleeds to death as blues find it net-inhospitable and leave. The norms are designed to make that process as slow as possible, with the forlorn hope that it will be slower than the intake of new quality contributors.
I want what this place offers. I value being able to have conversations like this one. I value the opportunity to sharpen my mind against the best the other side has to offer. I want to learn as much as I possibly can, and I can't do that effectively on CWR or the Schism.
Sure, it's down to values at the end. I think we have a fairly large difference of opinion on what those values actually are and what they imply, though. Again, CWR seems as though it provides exactly what you want, yet you are posting here and not there. Why would this be the case, if this place did not provide something CWR lacks?
Indeed. If it meant that, we'd see things like rule changes to make proggy blues more comfortable; maybe we'd even see topic bans to slow the reds down; we'd see notorious blue-aligned posters get away with nearly anything, consistently (it'd be quite a.. Darwinian environment); we'd see bans consistently hitting one side of the political divide harder than the other. We'd see moves to enshrine blue values like pathological civility and gullibility into the very DNA of the forum.
In other words, we'd be where we are.
CWR's main issue is that it's on Reddit. I loathe Reddit. If they migrated to their own site, I'd be there.
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