This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 7, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
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Notes -
Re Dean’s highlighted comment for
Just for the record, @Dean was never able to provide any evidence that Hamas uses pre-teen child soldiers. In fact he refused to even supply a link. You can read the follow up exchange here where he writes —
— after someone noted that he refused to post a source. He actually made me go looking for his own unevidenced allegation, yet I could find zero evidence from any organization that Hamas utilized pre-teen child soldiers in the past decade. The closest was:
So I’m still waiting on Hamas’ “sordid history of child soldiers”. I’m surprised you can get a quality contribution for an empirical claim that you flatly refuse to supply evidence for.
which steps you have taken in this?
I looked for UN / amnesty / HRW reports and whether there were reputable new reports on it. If Hamas were employing non-teenage children in a military capacity, it would be publicized widely and talked about regularly. It would be a huge deal and an important propaganda coup for Israel/America. It would also be Israel’s #1 talking point whenever the subject of casualties come up. Not even crazed academics would be able to defend Hamas at that point.
Are you aware that people defended what Hamas did on 7th October?
And that their main tactic is randomly firing rockets into general area and suicide bombings?
Why you think that pre-teen child soldiers would phase them of all things?
Why using children as soldiers would be treated as worse than murdering children and celebrating it?
You think Hamas’ main tactic is suicide bombings? Not sure if I should even request a source at this point.
First, there is zero evidence that they are employing them (lol), and no one can find evidence of it stretching back one to two decades. Second, because of a mix of norms and international pressure. Employing your own children as child soldiers is much different than a bomb exploding which impacts a child.
You have to look at the number of children killed on Oct 7 and then determine whether they died because of a conscious decision of a Hamas soldier or because Israel enacted a military protocol of blowing up every car and building if it contained a Hamas soldier and hostage.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/israels-leading-paper-says-its-own-army-deliberately-killed-israelis-on-october-7-but-in-the-u-s-media-silence/
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/a-growing-number-of-reports-indicate-israeli-forces-responsible-for-israeli-civilian-and-military-deaths-following-october-7-attack/
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You are welcome to respond to AAQCs, here or elsewhere, but grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best.
This is a mod-hatted warning, and we generally don't dip into substance on that, but Google gave me this (PDF warning) pretty readily, and it was far from the only thing Google gave me on Hamas child soldiers. I have no particular opinion on the reliability of the sources etc. and I'm not going to get into it with you, but 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.
You are uncharitably characterizing my comment here. What I have asserted is that Dean refused to provide a source for his claim, the very claim that is quoted in the quality contribution, when pressed on the claim and asked to provide a source (both of which I linked). There’s a rule that someone should “proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be”. The claim or implication that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers is partisan, and he didn’t even provide it when asked. Yet this earned him a quality contribution, which is surprising to me. (All of this you write off as “grumping because it doesn’t reinforce my preferred narrative”. Brother, I am writing on themotte in critique of Israel in the war, I am well aware that I won’t be finding much agreement. I have never cared about agreement here, but I do care if the standards for quality are reduced to rubble.)
You need to understand the context of the original thread in order to understand this qualification. The NYT specifies pre-teen children being shot in their reporting, so we were never concerned with teen soldiers. Teen soldiers were never part of the conversation. Our only interest is pre-teen child soldiers because the children who were shot were all in that age cohort. This is obvious in the original back and forth which is quoted in the beginning of Dean’s reply
That is the beginning of Dean’s comment. Now, it’s possible Dean simply misunderstood here, but 15-and-younger isn’t preteen. That would be 12 and under. The conflict may see 16yo plant IEDS, which is an example and not a limit case. In other words, because it may be that a 16yo plants IEDS, we look only total preteen dead. And it may even be that a 15yo plants an IED, or 14yo. Etc.
Dean goes on to make clear he really believes that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers in his original reply:
Dean implies two claims here: Hamas is employing those under the age of 10 to lob grenades; and Hamas is employing pre-teens as young as 6 in militarily-useful tasks. This is how it is read, surely, because Dean says the article doesn’t go into Hamas’ history of child soldiers. Now, the only reason to go into Hamas’ history of child soldiers is if there is some reason to believe they are currently in their employ, or recently in their employ. (Certainly, “Hamas used a child soldier once in 1988” would be an insane way to explain away why doctors in Gaza see dead preteen children daily). That is because we are talking about current dead preteen children, not any from decades ago.
— — —
Replying to the rest of your comment:
Again, we are focusing on preteen soldiers, the original subject matter. The only real evidence from this pdf is in the 2021 UN address where it is quoted
And if you read the 2021 report (pdf) it identifies only one “child” (that is, under 18 with no specification of preteen) being “recruited”. This appears to be in reference to their summer camps and not a military use (?), so in other words training, but I’m not entirely sure because it doesn’t specify. This does not provide evidence of preteen soldiers, indeed the age isn’t mentioned, neither is the role of the recruit mentioned.
Lmao of course. Well look, Dean provided an empirical claim, for which he received a quality contribution, which does not appear to be evidenced, which he flatly refused to provide evidence of. So, okay, don’t get into sources with me, but is this really the standard you want on themotte? You yourself googled it, and there’s no reference in it to preteen soldier in recent employ by Hamas, at least from my reading. So… yeah.
Hilarious. The heart of Dean’s claim is that there is reason to believe Hamas is employing preteen soldiers. It actually matters if the evidence is from this decade or two decades ago. Is there any evidence from this decade? Or even since 2005?
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation. Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user. (I could expound at length why I would consider him to be a single-issue poster - as I see it, he is here to produce impassioned defenses of US neoconservatism with the same single-minded determination, attention to detail and absolute lack of interest in countervailing evidence as our most notorious JQ posters - but you have made it clear that you would not want to hear) Personal antipathy and feuds between users are a pretty normal sight here, though. Normally one would expect mods to act as a, well, moderating force on them - yet this sort of statement fills me (and presumably anyone else who would disagree with him) with negative levels of confidence that in the event of an interaction gone sour I would get a fair hearing. That is only moderating in the way Putin's rule is moderating opposition in Russia, which is to say it channels resentment into other outlets rather than reducing it.
And yet, has Motte moderating not moderated feuding in this very thread?
This thread has not, in fact, devolved into a personal antipathy feud despite the instigating callout via @username to ensure notification, the attempt to litigate new arguments not even raised in response to the original AAQC while using pejorative framings, and aggressive follow-ups trying to re-argue the topic with multiple people. The instigator of this round did not face punishment for disagreeing or disliking the person they were trying to incense.
Neither will you, despite adding yet another item to my list of memorable pejorative characterizations as a american-jewish-polish-anglo-slavic neocon-fascist-zionist-neoliberal man-bitch. (Yes, this is humorous to me. No, I am not insulted. I have not / do not / would not support any report against you for it.)
Instead, the mod-hat was invoked on grounds of... characterization of evidence (such as the ease of finding), and characterization of opposing arguments (whether a single opening paragraph in the opening of a three-phase argument is the core argument), and eventually moderation practice (when the instigator chose to escalate a minor pushback), rather than the characterization of character.
And this was in no small part because I was considering the moderation team's response when I declined to take the bait / rise to the offer.
It was certainly tempting to indulge- it was a quiet weekend, it would have been easy to play to a crowd, I even had a much longer post lined up and everything- but I declined and deleted a non-trivial amount of time's work and limited myself to a minor riposte and explicit disengagement because of the moderation team's past efforts to cultivate a climate where feuding is discouraged. Further, the restrained response came before moderator involvement occurred, and was maintained afterwards despite apparent moderator sympathy increasing the freedom to action in what one could get away with without significant censure.
Because it was discouraged, I declined. Because I declined, there was no back and forth between users. Because there was no back and forth between users, there was no mutual feuding. Because there was no mutual feuding, moderation could occur on content-neutral ground of how the feud attempt was approached rather than cleaning up the aftermath of one.
To reframe- a user credited even by a self-identified critic for single-minded determination and attention to detail restrained themselves from engaging in impassioned defense. The absolute level of feuding was visibly lowered by the absence of what easily could have been indulged in with those very traits. The user who invited feud was neither punished or threatened with punishment for character criticism, but the content-neutral approach they took to it and their response to that.
This should be what success in moderating feuding looks like. We are seeing the absence of feuding- twice even, thanks to you and I- between people are known to strongly disagree.
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I think what you're saying here is that my explicit endorsement of Dean is a bad look and makes you feel like you might not get a fair shake at some future point should you disagree with the wrong person. If I have understood you correctly, then you have failed to understand the foundation, or the moderation system, or maybe both.
I am not an impartial arbiter tasked with tone-policing the forum. My task is to cultivate "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." To that end, I wield exactly one carrot: AAQCs. I have two sticks: warnings and bans. Community sentiment (via reports) drives both. The community also has a small carrot (upvotes) and a small stick (downvotes).
This is a reputation economy: the more carrots you have, the less likely you are to get the stick. As we often remind people: that does not mean carrots are a perfect defense against sticks! But for example a user with many carrots might get a warning where a user with no carrots would get a ban. People who contribute to the good of the community are deliberately favored. We have never made the slightest secret of this, but everyone has to learn it for the first time sometime, so maybe today is your day.
I appreciate the candor, so in turn I will freely admit that your comparing moderation here to Putin's Russia gave me a good laugh. It also helped me to calibrate on your sense of proportionality, in a way that was probably not beneficial to your aims.
I'll take the point that I was being overly dramatic with the comparison, and that this did not help my case. I got somewhat drunk on spite there. However, I stand by the intended point, stripped of the drama: if you make it so that certain users or viewpoints can't be attacked, you might get some more people to like those users and viewpoints, but you'll make others quietly hate and resent you and the organisation that gave you the power.
I've been following the discussions about the moderation system for long enough that I'm quite familiar with these principles you explained; I just think they are bad and have done a lot of damage to the discourse, which you only don't see because you keep grading yourself on a curve and by deferring to the sentiment of the very community that you create by following this approach. If you drive away most people who disagree, you will naturally see agreement up until the point where you have evaporated down to a size such that sentiment shifts to "we have a great community, but somehow nobody wants to join and listen to our great points". /r/CWR, in its own "community sentiment", felt that it was doing great right down to the point of maybe getting 100 posts a week. If you were serious about wanting a space in which people with different politics talk to each other, you should if anything have done the opposite, and treated any tendency in "community sentiment" as indicative of a growth that needs to be pruned.
Either way, being this explicit about protecting a user from criticism on the basis of a long record of AAQCs is a new extreme for this system; we seem to be evolving from a soft loop along the lines of "n% of the community like this user -> user gets upvotes and AAQCs -> user gets away with more extreme posts -> some people who dislike this leave -> m% (m>n) of the community like this user" to a harder loop where the penultimate step is "some people who dislike this get banned". In some alternative timeline that might have only differed from the current one by a handful of votes here and there at first, coffee_enjoyer would have been the "excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history", and Dean would be the one getting called a single-issue poster and told that he narrowly avoided a ban. I don't want to hide the bias that stems from the circumstance that I would mildly prefer that timeline over the current one (very mildly, though), but that callouts based on substance and discussion discipline get treated this way at all is bad, and that you have set up a system that amplifies small differences in initial conditions in such a fashion makes it seem unlikely that this was an intentional act of "gardening" as opposed to excuses being made for a yard full of weeds.
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. His interpretation of Dean's post was bad on a rule-breaking level, and additionally I was annoyed that he had brought that obnoxiousness to the AAQC thread, specifically. If anything, it is coffee_enjoyer whose AAQCs were operating to protect him, here.
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.
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. In your little chart:
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. Some of our best users, along with our worst, have, eventually, eaten bans--always, after deciding that they no longer wished to follow the rules, even perfunctorily. That's genuinely a problem for us! It's something the mod team talks about with alarming regularity. It's really, really frustrating to take someone with years of quality contributions, including former community moderators, and hand them a 366 or a perma or whatever. We don't want to do that! If this was about picking favorites or even picking preferred positions, Hlynka wouldn't be banned. Certain alts still kicking around here probably would be banned. But ultimately, no matter what percentage of the community is on "your side," if you're not going to follow the rules, you're going to get banned.
I can see why you might think that; it's not entirely wrong. But we do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action." We cut people some slack when they get dogpiled and lash out. We try to give sufficient breathing room to heterodox views. Moderation is adaptive and qualitative. But like AAQCs, just having a minority view is not a perfect shield. The rules will still apply, if less quickly or harshly.
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." One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth. I've been moderating the Motte for more than five years, and I honestly never believed it would last as long as it already has. So I'm afraid I find myself entirely unmoved by your concerns. My goal is not to build this space into anything in particular. I have no KPIs. I just serve the foundation to the best of my ability, until the time comes when that's no longer needed, or wanted, or necessary.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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?
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Except for some times, when they don't even lash out, they just reply to many of the people who dogpiled them, then you ban them. Even acknowledging that one can't point to anything specific that was actually against the rules.
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How do you get anything about proportionality out of that comparison? Isn't it common to use extreme examples in comparisons because extreme examples are usually more black and white and thus illustrate the point the comparison is trying to make more clearly rather than to imply they are proportionate?
In theory that is possible, but in practice it's imo almost always an attempt to smuggle in the vibes and assumptions you prefer.
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The OP is aware of this because the OP was told so at the time, in the response to the response to the AAQC.
To quote myself-
The issue of child soldiers was raised as was a definitional dispute, and as an omission not addressed by the NYT editorial that served as the OP's basis of posting. Moreover, child soldiers had nothing to do with the majority of arguments in the post nominated for the AAQC, and it was only one of three opening arguments of omissions from the first third of that argument's post. The concluding arguments didn't even raise child soldiers as a basis for the children being shot when listing a half dozen competing hypothesis.
Since this clarifying argument was not disputed, challenged, or otherwise responded to, and the entire subject of child soldiers was only used in the AAQC as the introductory lead-in / hook and to establish a relevant topic missing from the NYT editorial, it is possible that the clarification has simply been ignored to further advance criticism of the position, just as the sources discussing to the Hamas youth wing child soldier activity within the last decade that was referenced within your article was also ignored.
For those who haven't read the article...
Nara's article was "Child soldiers in Palestinian groups: forced recruitment and use of minors as a violation of International Humanitarian Law". A Hamas/Gaza relevant section after a global islamic review is the pg. 28 section.
Truzman, 2021 is in turn referring to "Hamas defends its military summer camps for children and teenagers" By Joe Truzman | July 1, 2021 | FDD's Long War Journal, which covers Hamas's military wing's own self-coverage of their camps for children and teenagers. (Notably, these videos may include children younger than 14, though I'm personally uninterested in quibbling over exact frames or individual child assessments.)
From the link in the article, you can in turn watch footage of the camps, originally published by relevant organizations. Here are two videos that were posted on X (formally twitter).
A Hamas al-Qassam Brigade video self-dated from 2021 shows children being trained with weapons for actions from marksmanship, maneuver, and room clearning.
A separate children camp video, this one from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (which is another major Gaza-based group that coordinates with but is not formally part of Hamas, but which is a part of the Oct 7 war) shows children training on hostage taking.
In both of these cases, not only was the material from within the last decade, but the video footage shows the watermarks of organizational channels producing / distributing these videos. These were, in short, self-publicized propaganda pieces, though not intended for an English-speaking audience.
An expressed inability to find these videos is not evidence of absence.
...and this is just on the 'yes, they are training children for combat activities,' by relatively uncontestable sources (i.e. derived from the Gazan groups themselves self-publishing). There are certainly semantic quibbles I'd expect on 'well, that's just training, that's not proof of intent to use them while they're children,' which certainly a take for an ongoing practice in the current war.
A practice that coincidentally aligns with the 2020s intifada-era reporting that was disqualified by the time bounding. A time bounding which also establishes a limit of over a half-decade of Hamas having centralized control over the gaza strip and asserting increasing influence over the gazan media sphere. A media influence done following the late-2000s drubbings the Palestinians received for their use of child soldiers during the Intifada. Media efforts demonstrated in the Hamas 2014 media policy to shape coverage and thus foreign perception of how Hamas conducts attacks, including by limiting showing the preparations of attacks. Policies that have largely remained in effect for non-Isaeli-backed media working from Hamas-controlled territory.
But such takes occurring is the reason that child soldier conventions are very, very clear on military training as the form of induction, indoctrination, and preparation for having trained children on hand able to fight as children. There is no military necessity argument for training children instead of adults if you want adult soldiers.
This is not covering other militarily-relevant roles for children in war, which can include use as observers, couriers, workers, or other forms of aid that remove forms of protection, including the long-recognized Hamas practice of children amongst the human shields. (I particularly appreciate the photo on the bottom of page 9.)
It is also not covering easily-findable but also easily-dismissed-on-account-of-(Israeli-)sourcing from the current war, which includes reports of children-sized explosive belts, children carrying explosives in vegetable bags to hamas ambush points, and of course the role of the child hostages taken in Oct 7 as bait to lead Israelis into ambushes.
(Yes, the last one is complicated. Yes, it also counts. Using children as bait to lure or help trigger ambushes is a form of child warfare. No, the child does not need to be willing, or even there. Child warfare is what children are used in warfare for.)
The definition of “child soldier” is <18, agreed. Ages lower than 18 do not preclude one from classification as a child soldier, agreed. But the NYT focuses on <13 children, and my original post specifies <13. This means we are not talking about legal definitions, but a specific cohort of <13 children. If Hamas is not employing <13 children, then the IDF is not expected to be killing <13 child soldiers. If the IDF is not expected to be killing <13 child soldiers, then we shouldn’t have loads of dead <13 children. Yet there’s evidence that we do have these dead <13 children (NYT+Guardian). So Hamas’ hypothetical employment of teenagers is an immaterial red herring to this topic.
I don’t see why a definitional dispute would be raised at all.
They did not need to address it, because it’s immaterial to their reporting.
It was the quoted line and it was included in your post as an argument. It is what I find most disagreeable, and I don’t have to post everything I find disagreeable.
Right but you included it and it was quoted in the award. Perhaps some other time we can discuss your other arguments if I don’t get banned for doing that.
This is too opaque for me to decipher exactly what you mean.
It was an assertion, and you didn’t prove it was a relevant topic to their reporting.
Not sure what you mean.
Now we are getting close to something. “Hamas youth wing child soldier activity within the last decade”. Wonderful. Is it <13 children and what’s the evidence?
Truzman 2021 is supposed to be evidence that Hamas employs pre-teen child soldiers. Rather, it’s evidence that there is a military summer camp for teenagers run by Hamas. America also has military summer camps for teenagers. JROTC begins as young as 15, and there are military camps that begin as young as 8. “Hanover and the surrounding districts combine for Young Marines meetings, with a total of around 40 students. Nationwide, the youth group has around 300 clubs. The ages range from 8-18.” They do gymnastics, drills, maybe some shooting practice. Do the tens of thousands of children at American military summer camps constitute clear evidence that America employs child soldiers? No. Of course not. And that’s the same for Hamas. A Hamas summer camp is not the same as employing child soldiers, any more than an American military summer camp is the same as employing child soldiers. Israel has similar summer programs.
Why do both America and Israel do the same thing? From the New York Times
Now you claim that at these camps the “children” (teens) are taught to take hostages. But when Israel takes back PoWs they also put cloth over their head, so you can’t allege allege from this they are being trained in atypical terrorism or something.
This article specifically says that “as young as 14” are attending training, not that they are being employed by Hamas. If I attend JROTC, am I being employed as an American child soldier?
Correct, Israeli wartime propaganda can be dismissed in the same breath as Hamas wartime propaganda. We have third party observers: UN, Amnesty, journalists, doctors. Israel is trying to eradicate third party observers from Palestine, of course. Something Israel can do is take their abundant drone recordings and share to the world examples of child soldiers, right?
I know it's orthogonal, but that NYT piece is pretty thorough. Let me yap about it.
The NYT piece ultimately doesn't really investigate the why schools are mandating enrollment-- and why those schools are often majority minority. It kinda does the journalist thing and quietly alludes to Big Army being behind it, but doesn't provide any evidence for this.
From experience, lots of admin and parental decisions send troublemakers into JROTC with the mistaken belief it will straighten them out. Which I guess is how a school decides to make a program 100% mandatory. Almost universally, troublemakers figure out that JROTC instructors have the same authority and tools as a teacher. Whose authority they have already beaten or frustrated. Some instructors have more talent at discipline having had more practice, but a 100% mandatory enrollment program must be a nightmare. Miserable for any kids with a genuine interest.
Except for a few the program is already perceived by the kids as geeky and uncool enough as is. For those who actually want to be there and those who enjoy it, but won't say as much, it's demoralizing and embarrassing. (There are inter-school events & competitions to be embarrassed at.)
For school admins that have run out of ideas applying the "straighten them out" theory of the unwilling at scale makes sense. So, less about recruitment. I would be interested to see if the mandated JROTC participation has any effect on discipline. I would suspect not. There are definitely some success stories. Some kids do get straightened out or distracted enough to graduate -- enlisting or not. Maybe they would have done the same learning to play an instrument, but the structure does provide some different things than marching band.
A lot of kids that never encounter concepts found in a JROTC program in a more positive light: discipline, self-respect, pride, accountability and so on outside of their urban contexts. Many have a warped view on what respect actually means. Traveling and outdoorsing for kids that had never left the city, or never stepped foot into a forest before.
A good program will offer volunteer opportunities and college admissions bait. Even if you've not an interest in going to an academy/ROTC or enlisting it's a plus for admissions. Giving teens an opportunity to manage large budgets, plan and coordinate trips involving 50+ kids across the country, and possibly fuck it up to learn a lesson is generally good. Active duty folks encountered on trips, mostly enlisted, tend to do a decent job counter-weighting any idealized versions of military life.
Recruiters are never going to be hard to find. You want to volunteer to take the ASVAB? That's gonna be a clear opportunity at least once a year. It's fucking obviously used as a recruitment pipeline. However, for a lot of kids and their families enlistment is seen as an increase in station and a direct path out of the hood. Some moms don't like they babies wearing a uniform, but many others insist that they do. I think it's trivially true that, for a lot of kids at the dysfunctional schools from dysfunctional homes, some years of active duty service are probably their easiest, most direct path to a more stable, functional life. Plenty of them enlist, remain fuck ups, and make the military more frustrating for those around them. Oh well.
Maybe a PIJ camp is the same thing, but it looks pretty different from my experience. JROTC camps are more like "Leadership Course Summer Camp." PIJ camp does look like more fun than the actual military for the most part. They all have that in common I imagine. I don't know anything about the America/Israel, Fuck Yeah, Patriotism Camp. That may be closer to PIJ camp than a huge national program like JROTC. Which has expended a fair amount of effort justifying itself, so it's seen as not-just-a-recruitment pipeline, while remaining a recruitment pipeline.
Sounds like there's a story there. What sort of competitions embarrassed you?
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It’s a general article about all kinds of child soldiers in the history of Palestine, so naturally.
The article you cite has a paragraph on page 8 which mentions historic practices, linking to a publication from 2001 for the alleged recruitment of someone under 15. Then there’s reference to an Amnesty article from 2004. The amnesty article from 2004 does in fact mention an 11yo who regularly carried bags across the border and once carried a bag that had an explosive, but 2004 is in fact two decades ago. Do you believe that Amnesty has recently published findings about child soldier use by Hamas? Where can I read this?
This is a mediocre excuse. You have Amnesty, HRW, and the UN who have specific divisions involved in monitoring use of child soldiers in Palestine, and all over the world. Your paper just doesn’t seem to actually say that, except for an event two decades ago.
Just say “fine, there is no evidence of Hamas employing preteen soldiers in recent years. Dean lied.”
I am under an obligation to accept your and Dean’s evidence. That evidence has not appeared on this forum, but I’m definitely obliged to accept it. To think that 10yos are lobbing grenades at the IDF and everyone is in a conspiracy to hide it…
According to the NYT Opinion team, recently republished by those antisemites over at Haaretz, and reinforced by separate journalism at the Guardian, there’s compelling evidence that Israeli soldiers are shooting children in the head too much. This is generally considered to be a bad thing.
There’s no easy way for me to check but I think my last top-level post on Israel was about a year ago. Just make a special rule on TheMotte that posters aren’t allowed to criticize Israel too much.
There is no evidence of Hamas not employing preteen soldiers in recent years. Does that mean you are lying?
As far as I can see, Dean never specifically claimed that Hamas "definitely employed specifically preteen soldiers within the last X years," where X is whatever you want it to be. At most, Dean made general comments about the fact of Hamas employing child soldiers in the past (which they clearly have) being meaningful to Israel's military reaction (which is plausible, whether or not you would prefer they act differently). You are setting up your own goalposts (not unlike a statistician only writing about terrorism in America beginning January 2002) and then getting annoyed that Dean repeatedly declined to play your game. "Dean won't play on my terms" is not logically equivalent to "Dean lied," and to assert it that way is obnoxious and antagonistic.
That is not a trustworthy source, on my read. See? Two can play this stupid game. It's better if they don't, so that is why I'm telling you to knock it off. If you don't like the evidence provided to you, you can say, "well I'd prefer to see something clearer/stronger/whatever," but you cannot follow the comment to an AAQC roundup and start shitting on the process. It's obnoxious.
I'm not getting after you for criticizing Israel. I'm getting after you because you are grousing about someone else getting an AAQC, and you're doing it by breaking rules about charitable reading, responding to what people have actually written, etc. You're also attempting to rules-lawyer both that post and my moderation, which is obnoxious. That it also happens to be your hobby-horse topic is simply context. You even pulled the stupid language games trick here--"my last top-level post" throws in a completely unnecessary qualifier to determining whether you're a little too focused on something for the community's comfort. It attempts to set the goalposts in the place most beneficial to your preferred outcome. I'm not stupid; I can see what you're still doing, even after I've told you to knock it off.
I understand that it would not be a pleasant experience to put effort into making a top level post trashing Israel, only to have someone with a long history of excellent posts on military matters come along and utterly eviscerate your work--and furthermore, to do it to the overwhelming approval of the audience. So I'm actually gritting my teeth and being extra patient with you about this: stop it.
The only way that “Hamas has a sordid history of [preteen] child soldiers [including 10yo grenade lobbers]” has relevance to the topic is if it’s understood that Hamas is employing them today, or is probably employing them today. Because if Hamas employed them and then stopped, and there hasn’t been evidence of it for more than a decade (despite the eager wishes of Israel apologists), in fact possibly two decades, and the cases of their employ in the early 00s and earlier are sporadic and unusual, then their “sordid history” is immaterial. The normal way of reading Dean’s statement is that Hamas continues to employ these child soldiers, because otherwise there’s no reason to bring it up. Surely no one would allege that, because Israelis assassinated the UN security member Folke Bernadotte in 1948, that it’s now likely they are continuing to assassinate UN security members, and that every article about Israel must include their “sordid history of assassinating UN representatives”. Or because Israel assassinated European scientists in 1962 under Project Damocles, that Israel has a “sordid history of assassinating European civilians” that must be brought up in every news article. “NYT ought to report on Hamas’ history of child soldiers” only makes sense if child soldiers are employed today, because the article is about the killed kids of Gaza, and if they aren’t employed today then IDF units aren’t justified in killing kids under the assumption that they are child soldiers.
If that’s how you interpret criticism I don’t know what to say.
Wow, so the ban on talking about Israel even includes sub-comments?
That’s an excellent idea actually, put it to the community in a poll — should we ban people who discuss Israel too much and what qualifies as too much. Or do you mean the mods?
The threats or whatever are so lame.
You haven't been banned from talking about Israel. It was just something you are pushing me toward contemplating.
The rest of your comment is sufficiently repetitious, uncharitable, etc. that I can see it was a mistake to attempt to have a productive dialogue with you concerning your bad behavior.
My apologies. I will just go straight to a ban next time. Cheers.
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By my count, out of his last 100 comments, 23 were about Israel. I think that's a reasonable level of engagement with one topic.
I mean, if community comfort is the issue - not a single one of @coffee_enjoyer's posts has ever made me uncomfortable, and in fact I value his presence here highly.
His own AAQC record suggests that you are not the only one! Which is why I would like him to not decide to get himself banned by pulling this shit.
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You are saying it as if it were preposterous, but yes, Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken has a long history of hating IDF, wide sectors of Israel society (basically anybody outside far left), supporting BDS and Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. He personally called Israel an "apartheid regime" and Hamas "freedom fighters" as recently as this year, so he may not be the most objective party here and certainly not one that being mentioned in the context of criticizing Israel reinforces the critique. I'm not sure if he qualifies as an "antisemite" - maybe yes, maybe not - but he would certainly support and endorse any libel and any fabrication that makes Israel look bad. It's basically not just "dog bites man", but "dog that is known for bitting men and having bitten men today, bites man again".
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Well, that's one way to argue off you own limitations, I suppose. I appreciate the simultaneous temporal qualifier to dismiss any older findings from the multiple international observers mentioned, and the qualifier of your own search efforts when you weren't aware of those older reports in the first place.
As such, I still stand by the post I left off with when I departed that topic.
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Aw, I specifically wrote up Wise To The World because it wasn't about the Presidential election or national politics. Guess I could see it being read through that lens, though.
Fixed!
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Squeaking in on the last day with a post that I would personally not categorize as "quality" is kind of interesting. We talked about this before, that certain sorts of highly partisan speech get lots of upvoting and AAQC reports, and I think it's probably not very healthy for the ecosystem. This isn't to say that I think my post is bad or that I don't stand by the position, but I really don't think it's particularly insightful.
Yeah, I feel like I am in the same boat as you. I think the only mercy there is that AAQCed rants with the right political valence, like the one I produced, often wind up stringing along more deserving posts like Primaprimaprima's (who was my interlocutor in that exchange, frankly produced much better and more interesting points, and would probably still have been sitting at negative upvotes if it weren't for the AAQC-induced attention). Perhaps someone with a more optimistic outlook could say that inspiring actually good responses is a quality all its own.
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I’m sort of disagreeing here. The point of a debate forum is to debate in good faith. And quite often political debates are capable of being good faith debates.
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That can't be fixed. There is literally no way mechanically to prevent people from treating the AAQC report as a super-upvote. You would have to address it at a cultural level, but that would also be impossible without removing a big chunk of the people who come here in the first place.
That's a drop in the water though. This place hasn't been healthy for a long time, and arguably wasn't even at its conception. Then again, one community's illness is another community's peak condition, so maybe I'm wrong and this place is good precisely for why I think it's ill.
I don't think it can be, nobody just stumbles into these offshoot communities, so they tend to degenerate into a very base form of whatever birthed them into existence.
If anything, I'm kind of impressed at how similar this place seems to the subreddit from two years ago, although values-level disagreement is obviously lower.
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Are the AAQC's not reviewed? I assumed mods looked at the reports and used discretion to make a cut. Which I guess means the janitor duty thing goes all the way and the AAQCs are only reviewed by the handful of people as temp jannies. But @naraburns is still (thankfully) editing these lists so I imagine they are glancing?
AAQC inflation makes sense in a period of decreased activity, decreased quality, or both. If
jannieswe want to encourage Good Posts to keep coming the gold star is all we have besides uptokes. Which can include bread-and-butter top level posts without big surprises, such as mine there, if the place is lacking them. But to compare my submission to a contribution like Dean's series of comments-- these are in a different weight class with regards to quality, insight, and effort.Yes. Eternal struggle doomed to failure. It's fine.
In defense of everyone else, I was on bed rest for about half of those, which explains both the availability of time.
I also highly appreciate the inputs that everyone makes that make it into the AAQC list. Don't underestimate yourself and what might strike a chord.
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Yes, something like 200-300 comments are nominated each month. Most of them are plausibly "quality." I read all of them, but the curation process is primarily driver by user sentiment--nominations are the number one thing, nobody gets an AAQC without at least one other user nominating them (and the mods rarely nominate anyone).
After user sentiment has been accounted for, the selection involves a lot of throwing stuff out before opting stuff in; I toss out obviously rule-breaking posts, or stuff that was clearly nominated as a joke. Eventually I get down to a reasonable number of posts to read them over again and think about what each one does. I try to get through the queue weekly but realistically I end up doing most of the work at the end of each month.
I have always regarded the AAQC process as a very important "carrot" for the community, and one of the best things to come out of the old SSC subreddit. I don't do nearly as much content moderation or community participation as I used to, for what are probably pretty predictable life-related reasons. But it's important to me that the AAQCs get done, which I suppose is why I have now been curating them for almost four years. (For contrast: when I took over, counting the AAQC reports from the SSC subreddit, the AAQC report had existed for about 3.5 years.)
But I would not be able to curate them at all if Zorba hadn't created a bespoke queuing system for the process. I think people underestimate just how much our little community depends on the technical prowess of a few key, committed individuals. The work I do, could be done by just about anyone; what makes me useful is that I am willing to actually and consistently do it. The work Zorba does, I wouldn't even know how to begin doing.
And, sincerely, thank you for doing so. It sounds like a lot of work, and it provides a lot of value.
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For the sake of positive reinforcement- I appreciate them, I welcome the chance to read them, and I hope they continue for some time to come, by you or otherwise.
Thank you and the team for maintaining the system that lets this happen.
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Maybe? It's not like you can tell if you get
blocked andreported outside of what comes back every month, and most of the AAQCs tend to have high positive scores anyway. There's only one exception this month with [currently] a score of 0, and it is definitely not something that's ideologically aligned with most of its replies given all the others are [organically] pushing +20 - which then raises the question as to who nominated it (I'm pretty sure you can't nominate yourself).I think a lot of the problem is that, for the moment, [the average poster] is in fact correct about their political outgroup being in the wrong/their desired self-enrichment is more destructive than their political ingroup- that's a consequence of having a community made up of people who get objectively right answers more often than not. The anti-boo-outgroup[ers] rule exists partially to protect the members of the outgroup that are not holding those beliefs just to be selfish, after all (outside of "the selfish answer and the right answer are the same picture", which brings the people who can't get power from being correct into inherent conflict with people that are more correct than average). And it's inherently harder to defend those beliefs, because there's never any constructive plan to address the failures other than double down, because having power means you don't need to think about constructive plans. But this is the just the thesis of "right is the new left".
And a second-order effect of this tension is that it naturally causes flame-outs after a while, especially among people whose political sympathies lie more with the collective outgroup, because that's the problem when you apply 'anti-wrong-answer, not anti-wrong-person' over a collective of people whose replies might be permissible to the forum at large, but not be beneficial towards that goal. And that line is a lie anyway because a wrong answer from a person actually does give you valuable information about them ['blameless culture' management styles, and 'all men are equal', also suffer from this tension], so being wrong about something puts you in a position of weakness, and people instinctively hate feeling weak, because weakness is death.
Then, the only thing that will prevent you from quitting a competition you're losing [and the disgust reaction/emotion is partially designed to reinforce your body's definition of 'losing'] is a devotion to some other goal. It's the emotional equivalent to seeing a 100 dollar bill on the street [in the economist's sense], but it's got a bunch of dogshit all over it and people are watching you; are you going to pick the bill up anyway, or is the dogshit going to 'win' and prevent you from doing so? And then, what are you going to say about the dirty money when others ask you about it- you're going to say that investigating it would have given the dogshit power, because you had to overcome it to get that money.
After a while, people get devotion fatigue and quit (loudly, quietly, doesn't matter). This place grows or dies based on the rate of old contributors are flaming out- growing if new contributors are 'joining' faster than the old ones are quitting, and dying if the reverse is true. (Which is why one of the suggestions is 'make it harder for them to flame out by slackening the rules', and balancing to what extent that would be destroying the community's goals to preserve the community itself.)
"Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe!" say all the YouTubers. The existence of upvotes doesn't negate my point.
Even if this was true, you should never buy into your own hype.
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It's an interesting question. It's not exactly healthy, in that it's not what I'd want to see in a community like this, but I think it's as good as it's going to get, given the circumstances. This may all be projection, but a part of the issue seems to be us accumulating cynicism as we grow older - I don't know how much I can play "steelman the opponent" post- gamergate, BLM, metoo, BLM2, COVID, and "WPATH to hell" - but more importantly I think it's less of a local culture problem, than a global culture problem. The culture of discourse that the rat-sphere sprang from is dead and buried. Personally I think it's because discourse is an existential threat to our ruling regime, and so people need to retreat to echo-chambers just to maintain society. From there, it's not exactly surprising that this place has become rather skewed in one direction, but the depressing thing is it's still better than the majority of alternatives.
It never had or has to be that way.
Why on earth is that your conclusion when the far simpler one is that people don't remain in spaces they find uncomfortable?
Sure, it doesn't have to, but surely you see how maintaining the levels of open-mindedness one had when they were 20, is fighting an uphill battle?
The question is why are they finding those spaces uncomfortable? We've had several high-profile flameouts stemming from tolerating too much Actual Nazism, racism and sexism, but basically none stemming from tolerating Actual Communism, CRT, and patriarchy theory.
When one holds views that are unpopular with the establishment, one has no choice but to develop a tolerance for pro-establishment views as they're being expressed everywhere, but there is no need to develop such tolerance when you're holding prop establishment views to begin with. You can always go somewhere where opposition to your ideas is not allowed to be questioned.
As to why I think open discourse is an existential threat to the regime, it's because they tell us so! Western governments are quite open about their need to control the kinds of views that are allowed to be spread on social media.
The other reason I usually hear for posters feeling uncomfortable boils down to being piled on. I have a lot of sympathy for this, but attempts to find solutions haven't really gone anywhere. I always suggest turning off the voting system, and rate-limiting responses to minority-view posters. Do you think that would help? Do you have any ideas on what could be done to alleviate feeling piled on?
Other than that have I missed something? Are there reasons for discomfort that don't boil down to tolerance for repugnant views, or being piled on?
Likely a good suggestion here, but I do not think doing so improved Scott's substacks comments or anyone's substack comments. Not having a voting system does not seem to make DSL any more peaceful or open, but there's other structural barriers there.
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Voting is literally the only way the community can respond to a persistent troll the mods have decided to enable. They can ban people for criticizing the troll, they can ban people for reporting the troll, but as far as I know they can't ban them for downvoting the troll.
I don't know why anyone would want to take that one recourse away from the users.
There was only one instance that I recall where this was an actual issue, and it was Darwin, and by the time we moved here, even the mods were tired of his schtick.
Because for every person that gets downvoted for being a troll, there are scores that get downvoted for having an unpopular opinion.
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TheMotte does seem to have homogenised somewhat faster than DSL, and this is an obvious potential cause.
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I'm the wrong person to ask this because I was constantly fighting against uncharitable depictions of wokeness even when I believed many of the same things the more prominent people here believe. Whether it's because I have more quokka in me or I am simply better at decoupling my anger at wokeness from the argument I'm willing to believe about it, I've always tried to muster the energy to take people to task for uncharitable arguments which are directionally correct.
I've never struggled in this regard. Not since day one. I can charitably describe the views of 2020 election truthers even when I vehemently disagree with them.
Oh, then sure, I agree - people who can easily spaces to share their politics won't develop resistance to opposing views, and the left has this in spades online. I think your framing denies the majority the right to express discomfort with views without it being a stain on their character.
I think the first definitely would, I've never seen the second proposed. I was and still am an advocate for the first, I suggested it a long time back as well. I think the second has some issues, though, because you'd have to control for the quality of the responses. It doesn't help if a bunch of incendiary and uncharitable commenters get there first. Or perhaps the people who get there first don't make good arguments?
It's a fundamentally difficult problem to solve, as I think you are aware. I suggested to Zorba that this space lacked left-wing chatter i.e comments which made it clear that any left-wingers/wokes/pro-establishment types were not without reinforcements. It's not rationally honest, but it's psychologically helpful.
Edit: Another idea would be to pressure people away from exo-sadism (the belief that your enemies only act they way they do to always hurt you no matter what). I believe this is a serious impediment to getting anyone who isn't already anti-woke to come here and possibly defend their ideas or critique yours. Just as anti-abortion advocates would not remain in spaces where they are presumed to just hate women, your opponents are not going to show up if they are presumed to be evil, monstrous, inhuman, etc.
Yes, there are people who, if accurately described, would fit that description. But in consequentialist terms, it would have greater value for the plurality of views if half the political spectrum wasn't treated as if it were the sworn descendant of Stalin himself.
"The argument I'm willing to believe about it" might be the crux of the issue here. Like you, I can charitably describe almost any view, but I'm having real trouble believing these views are held honestly. What good is my Charitable Steelman about accommodations for trans people being about alleviating the suffering of people afflicted with a rare condition called gender dysphoria, when people spearheading gender affirming care are putting up conferences where they say you don't need dysphoria to be trans, that schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder shouldn't disqualify you from transitioning, and for that matter maybe we should dispense with that pesky binariness, and start affirming eunuchs as an identity? At some point it's the steelman that caricatures actually held views, rather than the supposed strawman.
That depends on what you mean by "expressing discomfort". I think we all agree that FCFromSSC improved when he abandoned the firebrand speeches about not wanting to share a country with the other tribe, and embraced exactly the kind of decoupling you were advocating for earlier. I wouldn't call it a stain on someone's character if they can't do that, it's far too human of a flaw, I can't pull it off myself most of the time, but it seems it's something necessary for both sides to do in order to create the kind of space you'd prefer.
I agree, but the advantage is that it's a structural, rather than a cultural measure. The latter, like your "no exo-sadism" suggestion has the issue of needing buy-in from the majority of participants. If the problem is the current culture, you're going to have a hard time convincing people who maintain it to do a 180.
I'm not sure what you mean by "rationally dishonest". I agree that something that would signal "there are other people like me here" would help in drawing more left-wingers, but tribal chatter usually boils down to shitting on the outgroup, which is exactly what you want to avoid, from what I understand. Even if we found a way around that, is the idea here that the regulars here would perform such chatter to attract new left-wing users? Won't that fall apart rather quickly, the moment we discuss any issue of importance (and maybe that's what you meant by "rationally dishonest")?
I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Back when we had a much more of a 50-50 split, we regularly had to field accusations of racism / sexism / xeno-islamo-trans-phobia, and we kind of had to take that on the chin. In fact, I kinda think that to the extent you're right, it's more of a product of Current Year culture than being some iron law of human behavior. I distinctly recall Christians, creationists, etc., showing up on atheist forums of yore, trying to convert us, no matter how much they got shat on.
This goes back to the earlier point about cynicism. I have no issues taking someone at their word when they say "I believe in X, but I don't want any of that crazy Y and Z stuff", the problem we're having is that for a while we've been seeing the "Y and Z are not happening, and it's a good thing that they are" pattern unfold several times. When we start discussing issues X', Y', and Z', I can take a specific supporter of X' at his word, but it's going to be hard to believe that the movement he's a part of is not going to push for Y' and Z' in short order. If specific charity is not enough, and group-charity is necessary... that's going to be a tall order.
I think it's good because it reminds people what the better position is. Not just oppositional, but actually taking a stance which doesn't amount to rejecting one side or the other by embracing the opposite totally. But I acknowledge that it's hard to say something like "you're saying the truth, but you should be more sensitive to presentation" when the issue might be so lopsided.
But we don't expect people to be just human. We expect a level of rationality and reason.
I'm staring any my own response and trying to determine the same thing. How did I forget what I meant in ~24 hours? If I think of it, I'll let you know.
Right, but we're talking about people who don't have that thick skin. The asymmetry means that if you want to hear their ideas, you'd have to "take it", as it were, when they say uncharitable and unkind things.
That's a tall ask, and I recognize that. I can't say I'd tolerate it if I was treated that way. So maybe this whole thing is doomed from the start.
I think that often comes down to the vast inferential distance between the two sides. One man's hypocrisy is another's "clear distinct situations".
I suppose you're more right than I initially thought - this space probably is as good as it could be for what it's aiming at.
Well, the latter has the issue that sometimes one might hold a strong opinion, and feigning neutrality would be hard to pull off, and come off us dishonest anyway, but on the former I guess you're right, and I'll try to keep that in mind. I think I even managed to pull it off one time with words to the effect of "I do have my doubts sometimes, and if I'm wrong the opposing view that I find most likely to be true is...", followed by an expose on a group that holds a completely different view, which I disagree on the level of fundamental values. If that fits with what you had in mind, I guess it's something worth going for.
Funnily enough, that's something I'm willing to concede immediately. My tendency to sperg on some issues will probably get in the way of living up to this standard, but it's a standard worth aiming for.
I may have lost the track of the conversation somewhat, but I think that was my point. This is why I'm salty at all the people that outright flamed out - I thought we all signed up on for some baseline level of decoupling. But yeah, in the end we're all only human.
To be fair, I see how the roles are reversed now. It takes a different form, but between the downvotes on unpopular views, and the constant background hostility to progressivism, it must take a pretty thick skin to post here, if someone is leaning left. The only thing I'll say in our defense is that it's still better than most mainstream forums, as we don't ban for disagreement, and are at least theoretically aware of the value of having dissenting opinions. But in any case, my hat is off for the lefties that still hang out here.
Sometimes, maybe even often as you say, but there are cases where it's really pants-down "you literally said this never happens" type stuff. "No one is doing surgeries on minors" is something still being repeated by people who haven't caught up with what's actually happening.
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Is that even good enough? My experience increasingly is that any place not straight-up banning people in accordance with progressive views will bleed away all the progressives posters, who'll explicitly state that they're leaving since they're not willing to share a space with -ists. And it's obvious why, given that they can always go to reddit or similar where they can and do get anyone banned when they're losing an argument. The SSC subreddit, while still better than reddit overall, is a prime example of this dynamic.
I don't even completely disagree with you, this place is clearly populated by a very stable niche at this point, even if it's a very different one than what some on the left allege. But I also don't know any place more tolerant of differing viewpoints, and at this point I'm at a loss how you even can get progressives to join a not-progressive space.
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This is a social club for people who largely share at least a few political beliefs. I think there’s still a lot of spirited debate and disagreement, though.
I agree, but the political lean has it's issues. For example I'm a big fan of the "post something wrong and wait until someone smugly corrects you" method of truth seeking, and it can't work if your wrongposting feeds into the bias of the community.
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