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You're getting responses like that because you're talking to a group that is notorious for screaming at people who are driving the direction they want, but at the speed limit rather than smashing the accelerator. See the current redditrage blaming Harris' loss on not Centering trans persxns in her campaign.
Eventually it always converges on the rationalist "well they won 70% of this fight by calling us cis-demons enough times, you need to follow their rules now"
I'd actually be curious if you'd ban gwern for his 2012 comments linked in that thread, btw. It'd be a good demonstration of how far the Overton window has shifted left even in a place dedicated to resisting forcible shifts.
Maybe! But Gwern seems pretty cognizant of context in those comments:
Gwern perceived IRC as a sort of "locker room," speech-wise, while Startling disagreed. I wasn't there so I have no opinion as to who was right, beyond a tendency to suspect that it's always a bad idea to bet against Gwern. My guess is that a hypothetical Motte-posting Gwern would express himself a little differently, when posting here.
The SSC subreddit and the Motte are different contexts, too. Has the Motte shifted left? I don't think so, but then I am pretty regularly accused of bearing some personal responsibility for this place shifting right. We're not explicitly conservative, so Conquest's Laws say we will eventually become progressive. But maybe the foundation counts as an explicitly conservative alignment, for such purposes? We've definitely had more mods bail because they found this space insufficiently progressive, than because they found this space insufficiently conservative. On balance, I remain pretty satisfied with this space (when I'm not feeling surprised that it has managed to continue existing for as long as it has!).
But like... if you don't like entryists, you really should stop giving the mod team shit over moderation decisions, ever. We're not perfect, we make mistakes. But even our most progressive moderators are much more committed to the foundation than they are to advancing any particular political narrative.
Yes, we are; that's what the rules of this place do. "Conservative" is far too overloaded a word to really be useful ('progressive' is the same but a bit less so, and I find 'traditionalist' much more useful).
I think progressivism and traditionalism are the same thing when stated this way. Of course, because the original design of this place has so far been conserved, the traditionalists haven't taken over the forum (and the traditionalists that are moderators, and there's at least one of these, have yet [as far as I'm aware] to act in a way that privileges traditionalism over those principles).
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