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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Am I more likely to make sexual misconduct accusations at any given level of sexual pestiness? That’s news to me.

One of Feminism's main pushes 2014-2020 was explicitly to make sexual misconduct allegations require less proof and to have more consequences, and to increase the rate of report generally while explicitly arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed. Notable early examples included Atheism+, #ListenAndBelieve, Jackie's story, #TeamHarpies, We Need to Talk About Jian, along with too many smaller ones to name; on a policy level, we had the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter implementing these as policies in the university system, and "affirmative consent" laws in California. This led to #MeToo, which culminated with the farce of the Kavanaugh accusations. This is a very abbreviated list, and this particular set of demands has been at least arguably the dominant one within Feminism over the last decade.

Maybe you are an atypical feminist, but to the degree that Feminism is a coherent category that can be analyzed, "dramatically lower threshold for sexual assault accusations" seems very clearly to be one of its most prominent characteristics.

And what is a “non-feminist” woman, according to you?

I would define it as a woman who does not identify with the presently-dominant ideological form of Feminism. This would describe my wife, sister and mother, as well as a number of other women in my life.

farce of the Kavanaugh accusations

I'm tempted to claim that the Kavanaugh accusations were the tragedy and E Jean Carroll's allegations against Trump were the farce.

Even if you want to set the threshold of tragedy at Blasey Ford, which I'd consider rather inflammatory, we went from tragedy to farce by Julie Swetnick.

“Sexual misconduct allegations requiring less proof”, “increasing the rate of reports” and “arguing that safeguards against false accusations must be systematically removed” all, to me, run afoul of the definition of feminism, which is “a social movement that advocates for equality between men and women in all aspects of life”, so that’s not feminist.

Well, except things are what they do, and feminists consistently advocate for these things, therefore they are feminist.

There’s nothing inherently Republican about driving a pickup truck. But, uh.

You can have ridiculous no true Scotsman definitions that exclude any bad behavior from your own side. They’re just wrong.

But uh what? I don’t think there’s something inherently Republican about driving a pickup truck.

As a feminist myself, I'd agree that that's not the type of stuff that I support as a feminist (in fact, I've spoken out against other feminists who espouse them). Unfortunately, feminists like you or me tend to be either rare or quiet (for me, personally, I chose to be the latter due to noticing that speaking out in the way you did in this comment tended to be met with extremely harsh abuse from other feminists), so I have to admit that comments like Quantumfreakonomics's or FCfromSSC's in this thread are entirely accurate when describing the general group of people who both call themselves feminists and who other people recognize as feminists. I've just had to learn to leave my ego at the door and not feel attacked when people talk about "feminists" supporting [thing I, as a feminist, oppose]. I think having relatively unpopular or at least less-loud (we could be a silent majority among feminists, and I actually suspect that that's the case!) perspective within a particular ideological group unfortunately tends to require this kind of thinking, and this forum in particular tends to have a high proportion of people with fairly idiosyncratic opinions that make them relatively unpopular or, again, less loud compared to the common, mainstream ones within any given ideology.

I think feminists “like” you and me are quite loud and common. They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars. That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition. If that group makes noise and mainstream news outlets pay attention to it, that still makes them not feminist, and if some Congress people call them feminists that’s a lot of wrong Congressmen and a very wrong mainstream that is using the wrong word. It’s Pharisees all the way up and down, in my opinion.

They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars.

Well, besides online flame wars, these self-described "feminists" also tend to run actual policy and companies and write essays in mainstream publications and books. These are the people that the layman picture when they hear the word "feminist," even if they don't meet your or my personal standard for what constitutes a "feminist." And they are certainly far more influential in modern USA politics than feminists of your or my sort (though the recent election might be evidence that that is changing).

That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition.

I disagree, but our disagreement here doesn't matter. God didn't hand us a tablet that says "the English word that starts with 'f,' ends with 't,' and has 'eminis' in between shall forever be defined as XYZ." If enough people use a word to mean something, and they all agree with how it's used, then people like you or me with unpopular definitions don't get to walk in and demand that they submit to our own idiosyncratic definition of the term.

In any case, again, this disagreement doesn't matter. You are free to believe in a prescriptive model of word definitions rather than a descriptive one. But what should be understood is that other people, including likely most on this website, see the word "feminist" as meaning something different from you, and they have zero problems communicating with each other this way. If this semantics issue is too much of a hump for you, I wonder if a mental trick of replacing "feminist" with a new made-up word "pheminist," where it's prescriptively defined as something like "person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist.'" would be helpful. At the very least, that'd be a way to escape from feeling like you yourself are being scrutinized or discussed.

Gonna have to agree to disagree for sure. To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them, and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple. God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian. That sexist people go into governmental work and try to enact sexist policies while calling it feminism still doesn’t make them feminists. And if people want to talk about sexism on this site and call it feminism that still doesn’t change the definition of it. “A person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist’” would be, to me, a sexist.

To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple.

He actually did submit to the judgement of the Pharisees. Also, he didn't call them un-Christian, he called them un-jewish, and "we" certainly dont all universally agree with that assessment; I'd imagine the Jews here beg to differ, and the argument that Christianity is innately left-wing is a common one among our right-leaning atheists. There are a number of posters here whose ideology disagrees strongly with a plain reading of Jesus' teaching.

God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian.

If people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. The Rationalists had a whole thing about this: tabooing words. Just pick a different word, even a random word, to denote that the concept's proper label is disputed, and move on to talking about the contents instead. Or if you insist on your label, just understand that you're pretty much the only one using it that way here, because you're one of a vanishing few using the word that way anywhere. So when people don't instinctively use the word the way you prefer, have a little charity.

A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian.

...My parents tried to raise me in a God-approved fashion, and they definitely used spankings with a belt or a wooden spoon, particularly when I refused to submit. Would you say they "beat me into submission", and was their purported Christianity false?

The way you are using language is doomed. Assumptions, axioms, are necessary to think, let alone communicate. But you need to be conscious of the fact that the map is not the territory; axioms can be wrong, and if you're going to adopt them, you need to have a clear view as to why, and what they are costing you specifically. If you treat them as a brute fact of reality, then it becomes difficult to impossible to communicate with others who don't share them. Like above: I am now doubtful that you and I share a common understanding of "beating children" or of "Christianity".

I respond to you for the same reason I respond to most other people: I want to understand how you, an individual human, thinks. This is valuable to me because I want to understand and be understood by others. What else would the point of any of this be?

I absolutely agree with you that if people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. I believe one of the greatest disconnects in the USA is that a vocal group of people have started to try to change the definitions of words which is destroying the national conversation, but then again, I don't think the national conversation is happening between online reactionaries. I think real feminists are quite boring; hence you don't heard about them on reactionary websites. I also think the way to stop the misappropriation of words is by ignoring it. I frame it something like: If a group of adults are talking about horses and a kid comes over, points to a mule, and calls it a horse, you don't suddenly debate the definition of a horse. You tell the kid that's not a horse, and if he insists, you ignore him. If he wants to go find others who want to call a mule a horse and make a group, then you have a weird bunch of people who don't know what the hell a horse is.

In my opinion, yes, they did beat you into submission, and therefore weren't very good Christians. My parents did the same. I remember the paddle. And I also remember the Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. I highly doubt my parents would want to be hit with an object over and over again to the point of causing them tears when someone disagrees with them, therefore, they're violating the first rule of the whole religion. And I'd disagree we don't have a common understanding of beating children and Christianity; I don't assume you are malicious, and if we broke things down into a "yes" or "no", I think we'd find a lot of shared yeses. But, as you said, when words lose their meanings, communication becomes hard, much less breaking things down into a yes or no.

I absolutely agree with you that if people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. I believe one of the greatest disconnects in the USA is that a vocal group of people have started to try to change the definitions of words which is destroying the national conversation

Presuming that this group of people is more or less Red Tribe, this seems like a statement that should be testable by objective evidence. Woman, Rape, Racism, Sexism, Feminism, Child Abuse all seem like words whose definitions have been radically altered, where it is a matter of objective fact who is doing the altering.

...but then again, I don't think the national conversation is happening between online reactionaries.

This seems wrong in two ways: first, because the conversations here have had a direct relation to the conversations happening nationally, and second, because a number of the views we've been discussing here have just been championed by the victorious candidate in a national election as well as a number of lesser cultural arenas. The online reactionaries are engaging with the national conversation, and what's more they're currently conducting a wildly successful offensive.

I think real feminists are quite boring; hence you don't heard about them on reactionary websites.

The Motte might be described as a "reactionary website". I don't think that's a fair description of either Vox or the state of California, or the Biden administration. Vox and the State of California and the Biden administration are the ones claiming what you (and I!) call sexism is actually "Feminism". And you still seem to side with them, so apparently this isn't a deal-breaker for you.

If a group of adults are talking about horses and a kid comes over, points to a mule, and calls it a horse, you don't suddenly debate the definition of a horse. If he wants to go find others who want to call a mule a horse and make a group, then you have a weird bunch of people who don't know what the hell a horse is.

Alternatively, if this weird bunch of people declare that a mule is a horse, and organize and swing elections for the "mules are horses" party, and write and pass laws that mules shall be considered horses, and then enforce those laws with the power of the state, you don't get to pretend that everyone knows mules aren't horses and it's silly to even discuss the subject. Clearly, they don't know that mules aren't horses, and enough of them don't know it that they'll send the police to arrest you if you disagree too strenuously. Nor is it silly in such a situation to point out the difference between your claimed principles and observable social and political reality, most especially if you are voting for the "mules are horses" party and urging others to do likewise and sharply disapproving of the "mules are not horses" party.

In my opinion, yes, they did beat you into submission, and therefore weren't very good Christians.

I disagree. "Pain" and "Harm" are not synonyms. Pain can in fact be harmless. It can even be beneficial, when necessary to achieve a greater good. A spanking hurts, but so does exercise. So does play; I loved playing paintball as a kid, and getting hit by a paintball was way, way more painful than a swat with a belt. Sword fighting with boffers also involved inflicting pain for idle amusement, and it was totally worth it. Blocking a soccer ball with my calf once left me with a huge purple bruise six inches wide, and right when it was fading blocking another soccer ball left a new six-inch bruise inside it, like a bullseye; it made walking notably painful all week, and the week involved a ton of walking. By contrast, no spanking I received ever left bruises, or even lasting pain at all.

Having been a child, I observe that children are foolish and selfish by default, and their reasoning is remarkably deficient; this is often true even of adults. Pain cuts through all of that; children fear pain unreasoningly, instinctively, even when the pain is actually not all that bad. Eventually they learn that the anticipation and fear are actually worse than the sensation itself, and this level of mental maturation is the point at which corporal punishment stops being effective; in my case, it was the point at which I toughed out a spanking with only minimal distress, at which point my parents transitioned to other methods of discipline.

And discipline is, in fact, the point. Spankings weren't done out of anger, and they weren't done arbitrarily. Sure, they secured my submission. My submission needed to be secured, because I was a foolish child who did not understand the value of discipline, and so had to have it imposed on me until I could learn to value it through experience. Learning discipline is obviously good for any child, and the fact that the child does not recognize this in the moment is easily explained by the fact that they are a child, hence of extremely limited understanding and perspective. In hindsight, I recognize that spankings were very good for me, and wish that my parents had used more discipline, not less. I do not think this is any form of false consciousness, but is a rational assessment of my own experience. Maybe it was different for you and your parents; all I can judge is my own experience and the experience of those I observe around me. And as you say, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". When I was a kid, I wanted unlimited chocolate and Nintendo and no school. Now I recognize that these desires were immature, and I had to be taught that by parents who loved me, wanted the best for me, and prioritized my long-term welfare and flourishing over my desires for immediate gratification. How could it be otherwise?

In that case, it seems that TheMotte - and, honestly, most of America - is a place where they speak a different version of English from you, where "feminist" refers to a certain strand of "sexist." As such, when you see "feminist" being analyzed, it should be clear that it's not referring to the same thing you are when you use "feminist." As long as everyone involved can communicate to each other using words that each other recognize and agree on the meaning of, I don't see any problem.

God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves.

I don't want to argue this, but I'm curious who is "we" here, though? In my own descriptive model of word definitions, the "we" would be referring to just the sum total of how people, throughout their everyday lives, make noises (and write scribbles on paper or screen, etc.) at each other by flapping their mouths in order to convey things to each other, through which the noises become associated with meanings. You seem to believe in some sort of authority that gets to override this sort of emergence of meaning through behavior, and I'm not sure who specifically that authority is.

The "we" is, uh, I guess Charles Fourier and/or the Oxford English Dictionary in 1852. The word was invented, given a definition, and then people took that definition as a label. I disagree "most of America" speak a different version of English from you; the part of America that's wrong about feminism does, and good thing I don't speak to them outside this site. That people take a word and try to convince others that the word means something else is the neverending creep of stupidity that, as you pointed out, interrupts the flow of communication between people.

The "we" is, uh, I guess Charles Fourier and/or the Oxford English Dictionary in 1852. The word was invented, given a definition, and then people took that definition as a label.

Fair enough, so it seems to me that, to you, the original person who wrote the first entry of a word into some particular dictionary (OED in this case) is the ultimate authority of the word's definition, and no matter how people "in the wild," so to speak, use the word to communicate to each other doesn't affect it. It's essentially the equivalent of a tablet handed down from God at that point and forevermore.

There's nothing wrong with this perspective, even if I disagree. But much like how there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the 10 Commandments when it comes to how they live their lives, I hope you understand that there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the OED or any similar authority when it comes to how they communicate with others.

I disagree "most of America" speak a different version of English from you; the part of America that's wrong about feminism does, and good thing I don't speak to them outside this site.

Given how general polling about people identifying as "feminists" in America goes - IIRC, every poll indicates that a majority of American women don't identify with the term, and the proportion of people who agree with some statement about men and women deserving equality or being equal is always far greater than the proportion of people who identify as feminists - I think you're likely living in a bubble.

That people take a word and try to convince others that the word means something else is the neverending creep of stupidity that, as you pointed out, interrupts the flow of communication between people.

I mean, that's precisely what you're doing in this thread though, right? You're the one trying to convince others that the word that they use to communicate to basically everyone else clearly is actually being used wrong.

I wish more feminists were more like you, then. But I think it would be hard to argue that the things FC listed weren't advocated by feminists as feminism, and you were cleared out of the room.

I'm sympathetic to people like you who may have been boxed out by a wayward media machine - in much the same way I think many reasonable LGBTQ voices got boxed out by the strident 'blockers before 18' movement sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I can't help but be suspicious that both groups suppressed their misgivings due to outgroup fear, the want to not be a 'bad ally', or were content to soak up the secondary benefits up until it looked like they might be drying up.

I think most feminists are like me, because a feminist promotes equality between men and women, the end. If a bunch of misandrist Pharisees wanna call themselves feminists, and some news outlets call them feminists, and outraged people call them feminists, I could care less than Jesus, and, like his Holy Word, the principle of feminism still stands.

Leaving aside that I think "equality between men and women" is a fairly empty balloon with a lot of details to be filled in - you must appreciate that the kind of feminism promoted in the meanstream are the materials we have to work with.

I respect your position on an interpersonal basis. But it doesn't really mean much outside of that. I think my disposition is still fairly liberal in the 90s/00s sense of the term. And I can fully see the argument that 'liberalism' today is far more authoritarian and fails to live up to its own namesake. But at a certain point, I am wasting everybody's time if I insist that wokescolds aren't 'liberal'.

Maybe that could change, and it will fold back on itself and meet me where I planted my feet a decade ago. I will have reclaimed 'liberalism'. But in the meantime, I'm not going to fight how the term is used in most conversations. I might put down an asterisk, but the conversation must proceed.

a feminist promotes equality between men and women, the end.

If that's the entirety of the definition, why aren't we calling them masculinists instead? It would be same difference.

I don’t know, I don’t make up the rules lol. The whole thing falls under egalitarianism of which feminism is a subset of it. I’m sure if you want to call yourself a “masculinist” you can, you just might have to re-explain the definition a lot.

A text that was popular when you were still in high school, so you might have not encountered it:

So what you're saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists... they are not "real feminists".

That's not just "no true Scotsman". That's delusional self deception.

Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don't care. I've been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they've done under the banner of feminism, maybe you'd stop calling yourself one.

But I want you to know. You don't matter. You're not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: "Well, that's just a clean-up word for wife-beating," and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, "we know it's not girls beating up boys, it's boys beating up girls."

You're not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta's Network of Women's Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.

You're not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were "ambivalent about their sexual desires" (if you don't know what that means, it's that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC's research because it's inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.

You're not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.

You're not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.

You're not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.

You're not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.

You're not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.

You're not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman's history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it's "part of her sexual history."

You're not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman's mouth is "not a crime" in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You're not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there's a "legal" way to rape them.

And you're none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.

You're the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.

That a bunch of people are wrong about feminism and a bunch of other people agree with them does not change the definition of a feminist or feminism for me nor does it make them less wrong. I don’t pay those people mind, because they’re not talking about feminism. If I knew half of what you know about the things non-feminists done under the banner of feminism, which I do, because I was once a self-described anti-feminist MAGA Republican who agreed with everything you just reposted, I still wouldn’t calling myself one any more than Jesus would rescind his message because a bunch of hypocritical Pharisees told him they knew God better than he did.

Has the real communism have ever been tried?

I don’t think so, no. I read somewhere the theory of communism operated under the assumption there was no competition capitalistic nation on the planet and everyone was on the same page. Since that had yet to happen, I can’t think that true communism has been practiced, much less that it can be.

I don't think I can make a better argument against the omnicause than letting a comment by a believer in it stand by itself.

For a more recent example, if lower-stakes, I'll point to Julia Serano. She was, for quite a long period of time, the go-to example in the ratsphere of a Real Feminist who Cared About Everyone. And then it turned out that her work about not dismissing the perspectives of other people was really about not "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups".

Why is the post you're replying to "Filtered"?

Argh.

Because there's a "new user filter" baked into the codebase that we can't remove, and it auto-filters posters who haven't gotten above a certain threshold of cumulative upvotes, and because other then a very small greyed-out icon, the only way for mods to see which posts are filtered is to check a separate page.

@justawoman has been posting here for years, why would she get caught by the new user filter?

It’s the leftist plot to cancel me, they’re coming for my progressive card lol.

Because it's not a "new user filter" it's a net-upvote filter. The mods have no tools for whitelisting a specific poster, though it is possible to give it to them.

That's... odd. I've never had issues seeing her posts.

People have issues seeing my posts?? How am I supposed to get those sweet sweet downvotes now D:

I think you are finally out of the new user filter now.

Bring on the downvotes ╰(´︶`)╯♡

More comments

Letting obvious trolling go on this long is a bad look, but the mods are such easy marks for it.

Enough of this.

The fact that someone is a lefty feminist does not make them a troll.

If you have a specific, articulable reason to believe that @justawoman is a troll (meaning not "someone with opinions I don't like" but an actual sockpuppet, or someone roleplaying a lefty feminist for the lols), then tell us what it is when you report her.

Otherwise, you will stop calling people trolls just because you don't like their presence here and you will stop slinging shit at us because we won't ban the people whose presence you don't like here.

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The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.

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Do it again. That one felt good.

I would put an /s, but that’s just not my style of humor. I’m a sucker for the deadpan.

  • -11

When a post gets filtered, moderators can manually approve them on a per-post basis, which they get to sooner or later. The only way you can notice there's something off, is when a moderator responds to someone who's filtered, before approving their post, which happens occasionally.