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Do you have a source for themotte being conservative?
That behavior is obnoxious. Don’t ask for sources. If you disagree, provide your own. Rebuttals should involve the same amount of effort as that which they wish to rebut.
No I don't think that behavior is obnoxious. I think it's obnoxious to mock someone for requesting somebody else to substantiate their claims. Actually, if you have just posted this second paragraph initially, I would not have commented, even if I disagree with it.
I don't think the request to substantiate one's claims count as a rebuttal, and the question basically involve the same amount of effort as the initial claim.
Yes, it is obnoxious to demand "Source?" when someone states an opinion. If you think they're wrong, argue the point. If someone makes a factual claim, you can politely ask for evidence, but "Democrats are corrupt" is such a general statement, anyone can throw links arguing for or against the proposition and you know it. Stop this petty sniping.
Time to return to the scheduled programming in which I complain about moderation! I believe the tropey term for statements that are impossible to corroborate or refute is "not even wrong". Either @2rafa's statement was in that category, in which case she should not have made it to begin with; or @sockpuppet2's request for evidence was in principle reasonable, in which case he shouldn't have been mocked for it, nor implicitly unilaterally dinged by the modhat. Even if the request was in fact unreasonable, a mocking one-liner is certainly not mending any broken windows in the neighbourhood.
You looked at an escalation spiral that started with 2rafa's low-quality post (red valence), which invited a low-quality reply (blue valence) by sockpuppet2, which invited an even lower-quality response (red) by jeroboam, which in turn invited an equally lower-quality response (blue) by UwU, which then invited a mercifully higher-quality meta-discussion by the last two, and modhatted it casting blame on the blue-coloured entries in the chain only. Is this not a clear case of selective enforcement (more colourfully, "anarcho-tyranny")? And then you go and act like the community's rightward shift is an unfortunate natural phenomenon that you have nothing to do with and can't do anything about.
Why do you default to ‚admonish everyone‘ when ‚no one‚ is the much more logical choice? Moderation is more likely to hit the left-wing minority. Not because of mod bias, but because the mob will :
pick dozens of high hostility fights
report any opposing comment when the fight inevitably devolves
mass complain and argue against mod action against their side, and for banning the other guy
Then they both get banned, fair enough. So no more left-wingers left, but for the mob, plenty more where their guy came from.
As to the original beef, „Source?“ demands should be protected as always legitimate. „Source?“ is what keeps discussions casual and factual. Without „Source?“, we‘d have to provide sources all the time for everything.
I'm taking into account that Amadan's reaction here was to issue a warning, not to ban anyone. I do think there was room for sockpuppet2's request for a source to be worded in a more diplomatic way, and ultimately left-wingers being also forced to maintain decorum would indirectly encourage right-wingers to do so as well in a way that will have effects beyond what even a hypothetical even-handed and strict mod team could possibly enforce. Either way, left-wingers have no shortage of alternative places to go to - whether they will leave, as they do, because the community sasses them with impunity, or they will leave because the mods chew them out, the outcome in terms of number of left-wingers present will be the same, but in the latter case at least the forum was cleared of some boring zingers. If not all of them leave under either regime, the "chew both out" strategy is more likely to select for left-wingers that are happy to not be allowed hot takes, while the "leave both alone" strategy is more likely to select for left-wingers that are ok with an environment where everyone is just tweeting at each other.
Besides, even if I am more sympathetic to the "source?" demand here, last time I complained about moderation and actually went as far as suggesting an inversion of the verdict, I was just flat out dismissed as, quote, "engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: 'why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?'". It's fairly disheartening to learn that merely suggesting more even-handed moderation is also sufficient to earn a lazy dismissal.
I continue having a fairly straightforward prescription to put mobs in their place, which is to apply progressively higher standards to posts in proportion to the number of upvotes and approval they get, up to "it better be an effortpost that could stand up to adversarial lawyering of all the rules" at +40 or so. Circlejerks would quickly get the air taken out of them if any attempts to boost a take you like are tantamount to condemning it to have to live up to a less attainable standard, and you could only really feel like you are helping your team if you are upvoting takes that will actually live up to it. I was thinking of pitching a meta discussion about this at some point, if I can muster the time and energy.
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What outcome are you hoping for?
That in similar cases, going forward, you either admonish/moderate everyone involved, or nobody (in this particular case, "everyone" seems to me like it would have been the most reasonable choice) - and perhaps more generally that you adjust the perception you seemingly have that there's nothing you can do to make this forum less hostile to non-right-wing posters without either putting in a lot more work, compromising on fairness or changing the rules.
edit: It might be a relevant piece of context that I actually wound up in this subthread because I was looking for the very same evidence that sockpuppet2 asked for. A normieleft friend asserted to me that the quid-pro-quo of judicial relief for political favours is norm-breaking for the US; I had a nebulous feeling that it's in line with how corrupt US politics always had been, but couldn't think of a concrete example, so I went looking in the bowels of the thread figuring that if some comparable action by Democrats had happened, someone would have posted about it.
So I disagree with you so vastly,.and have so little interest in arguing the point with you, that I struggle to formulate a response that you would not, with some justification, perceive as dismissive and condescending. Not wanting to do that, all I can I can say is that we do not see eye to eye and that's unfortunately where we are.
Fair, sort of. I'll settle for the public signal that having my objection sit there sends as a lesser desirable outcome, and hope you can tolerate that I will continue bringing this point up when it applies. I do want to force an argument on this topic - if not with you, then with others.
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