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Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. Banned for 3 days. The rest is details.
Yes, this is explicitly a token banning. For all your complaining, you do mostly stick to our discussion norms, minus some name calling and weak manning. At least one moderator prefers to not moderate people when they are clearly asking for it. At least one moderator is sympathetic to the point and points out that we do allow the argument to be made that argument is useless. I've had this conversation with other users in the past: sometimes it seems like conflict theory is actually right, and that's something we have to consider if we claim to be open to considering all arguments.
I have a different approach: moderation is driven by user sentiment, you've accumulated many reports, and I try to give people (including you) what they want. As this is a mod message, I set aside the substance of your post without comment, except those portions in which you directly criticize this space:
This raises a question: why are you commenting on this forum now? You have a history of doing it well, and then doing it poorly, and then mostly stopping. Why are you back? Welcome back! Would you be willing to post some good stuff again?
You're mistaken, though it is an easy mistake to make. Let me ask you something silly--do you dance? Specifically, are you a classically trained ballerina, or do you know any? If you spend much time around ballet studios, you will see an interesting phenomenon where little girls (and, occasionally, boys) show up with a dream. They love to dance, because they saw a ballerina do something amazing and beautiful. But real, recognizable ballet is pretty tough, on par with very high level gymnastics, and most people aren't really cut out for it. From ten classes of fifty toddlers in tutus a school might hope to produce one girl capable of dancing corps in a national production. And so along the way each aspiring ballerina reaches a point where she realizes that no matter how much she might enjoy dancing, this is not the dancing for her. This is hard on the ego, so a very common way of stopping ballet is to join a different dance club--pop dance, modern dance, stuff people will say they "prefer" when really what they prefer is not needing 40+ hours per week of effort to excel in their particular sphere.
Suppose one of these girls switches to a "contemporary dance" studio. She generates an argument--"ballet is so hidebound and pedigree-obsessed! It's stupid. In contemporary dance I can express myself without all these hurdles, all these rules and traditions and obstacles."
"Okay," replies the ballet world. "That was always allowed."
But then the girl shows up at a production of the Nutcracker and demands equal time on stage with the ballerinas. She will not be dancing ballet, but she is tired of all the attention ballerinas get for this stupid annual tradition of dancing to a nonsensical Christmas plot.
What should the ballet company say to her?
Kulak, the point of the Motte is not to change the world, or to change politics, or even to change anyone's mind. It's performance art: we're here to dance ballet. If you do not wish to dance ballet, then you may dance other dances in other places. The dance of this space is not, and has never been, truth; it is 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. Truth is an interesting and important part of that, but so are norms of politeness and, yes, inclusion. Our most vocal critics insist that we are already where you want us to be--that we are a hive of scum and wrongthink, several zillion witches in sheep's clothing. You seem to think the opposite, that we are are a hive of... priss and wrongthink, I guess?
But we deserve neither such praise nor such censure (as Jane Austen once put it).
It is my hope that the world be more like the Motte: more open to the truth, and more able to discuss ideas openly, however so much people may disagree. I cannot force people to be better, smarter, or less evil. I usually cannot even persuade them to be so. Barely am I able to even change the minds of my own children, now that they are adults.
But I know the rules to this particular dance, and I can still dance it.
People once thought that all light was fire--that all light consumed. But my house today is brighter than any pharaoh's court, and it burns not. What we do here is performative art, but art is an act of hope, and hope can, sometimes, change the world. Slowly, as they say--then all at once. The Motte is not supposed to change the world, except to the extent that it serves as a model for what the world could be.
I am sympathetic to your conflict-theory takes. I worry that what we do here will not--maybe cannot--be enough. But it is all I can actually do. I am neither soldier nor politician nor billionaire nor celebrity. The people who come here to do what we do, come here because it is what we want to do. It is the dance we wish to dance, however so hidebound it may be. We who maintain this space--this studio--this garden--are doing what we can do.
Go thou and do likewise.
I dont know what youll do with my opinion these days, but I note that I disagree. "I dare you punish me" (which, Im not sure thats what hes doing, but assuming it is) should be punished even if there is no underlying offense. That posture is part of the instinctive ape power toolset and gauges your capability. To ban him is to tell the truth to him and onlookers.
PS: What is up with the top-level post here (I am unable to get a direct link)? It says "Removed" but no modhat comment.
fwiw, my general posture is not "Don't moderate people who are asking for it." Quite the opposite. In this particular case, I thought @KulakRevolt's post was borderline and was not inclined to give him the "bravely speaking the TRUTH YOU CAN'T HANDLE!!!!" persecution cred he was jonesing for.
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He'd deleted all his comments before according to one of the mods, then showed up, did some trolling, and deleted them all again.
Or maybe that was another one. There were an awful lot of oddly reactivating accounts last week...
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It looks like that user went through and deleted all their own comments.
Ah, I was just confused because its the same wording then.
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Kulak is themottes greatest son. How dare you ban him
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The steady pressure of cold electrons coming out of your wall outlet is a neat trick of civilisation, like cut and packaged meat without fur or claws or eyes, but something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.
...except when it comes from falling water or splitting atoms.
If we accept a broad enough definition of burning (I'm for the usable-energy-converted-to-entropy one here) - something burned to get the water up first, and to fuse the atoms we proceed to split.
But was that the definition @naraburns was using?
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How did the water rise to begin with? Where did those larger atoms come from? Burning.
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I weep for those hydrogen atoms that were forced to combine into helium, probably without their consent, and for that mass that were converted to energy to provide me with my civilized existence. Let this be an acknowledgment we all live from the energy that once was the mass belonging to those native hydrogen atoms.
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Yes, it's a metaphor, metaphors are like that. But it seems pretty clear to me that the closer the asymptote of consumption efficiency approaches the hard limits of entropy, the better off we are.
Likewise: it's easy to notice (or Notice) that there are a host of fairly serious problems that civilized discourse has (at least so far) failed to solve. It's harder to notice the ones it has solved, as they are by definition solved and, so, rarely even enter into our consciousness. "Burn it to the ground" is not a solution; at best, it may result in a different set of problems. At worst, well, it potentially only makes things worse.
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Oh come on. I post 10x milder takes from the other side and get banned for 90 days instead.
Kulak drives by and throws out hot takes. You get in the muck with people to spit hot takes. Very different.
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Indeed. And should Kulak post such hot takes as frequently and fervently as you, the bans will escalate in similar fashion. However, given his history and the content of this post, I do not expect him to come right back with another.
We'll see!
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Considering this response totally separately from the inciting post above, I found it beautiful. The framing is thought-provoking and the prose glitters. I'm definitely going to steal that line about "my house vs pharaoh's court" for my own vocabulary.
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