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Oh, great.
I just gave Capital a slap on the wrist for his near-identical response. For consistency’s sake, you can have one, too.
What a joke
You've been asked to not do this in the most clear way possible.
Not any other critics of modding have been asked to stop. Just you, and just these kinds of dumb comments.
I am tempted to take your advice and give you a permaban:
After all these sorts of comments you make are obvious trolling.
Community sentiment is generally against perma-bans these days. 30-days for you
Um, no they're not. Trolling is deceptive posting in order to bait a response; Steve clearly does think that netstack's action was "a joke". I do not get "troll" vibes from him in general; he appears to be a sincere, very angry, very radical rightist.
Steve is a frequent flamer (i.e. someone who insults others). That is itself against the rules, but it's not the same thing as trolling.
Isn’t “baiting a response” the important bit? It’s the main reason I was ignoring Steve.
I wouldn't consider it so. Also, my read on Steve is that he's not even trying to bait a response, just lash out at people he gets mad at. Could you maybe link me some examples of Steve trying to bait people?
@SteveAgain, to be clear, I don't actually hate you. I see too much of myself in you to hate you. With that said, "you must learn control". I'd suggest putting some kind of spacer into your post routine so that you have time to calm down before a post goes live, because it's specifically your angry snarling at people that's causing the problems.
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This is a terrible ban and using his comment about the obvious troll poster troll posting and getting away with it because charity is endless to new posters who pretend not to know anything is ridiculous.
But the reason this is a terrible ban is because WhiningCoil's ban was a joke on several levels of both being bad and lazy and sets an assuming the worst kind of rule to the forum as a whole that I'm sure will go well.
But the bad moderating here seems to be here to stay if you can't just admit that you made a mistake and should actually be as charitable to the people you mod as they are supposed to be to you.
We've extended a great deal of charity to Steve. We've asked him to stop making these sorts of comments. He chose not to.
He has also been warned many times for antagonistic behavior, both on this account and the previous account. He was very close to earning a permanent ban with his previous account's behavior. We made a note to ourselves to not completely ignore his previous account's bad behavior, but we mostly did and proceeded to be lenient with him as if he was a newish user.
Other people's bad behavior, even if it is a mod's bad behavior, is not an excuse for bad behavior.
If we specifically ask any user not to do a specific thing. We mean it and we will take note of it. If Netstack had broken every rule we have and gotten de-modded for his comment I still would have banned Steve for his comment. This is a 'fuck around and find out" moment. We literally only have two punishments in our toolbox, the first is asking people to stop doing a thing, and the second is bans.
I clearly said in my comment that no one else has been asked to not provide feedback. Only Steve, and only those types of comments.
I personally think netstack's ban of @WhiningCoil was fine. Its only that he should have been harsher with @Capital_Room. 5 days at least for capital room for clear fedposting. And just one day for whining coil cuz it sorta looked like fedposting.
As far as I am concerned fedposting is one of the few existential threats that this board faces. The other two are zorba kicking the bucket and a democrat party crackdown on free speech on the web.
One day bans are minor and basically nothing. That is us saying "yes really, this is a rule we will enforce, don't do it". For anything resembling fed posting I'm also willing to hand out bans like candy. Don't fucking do it. We can choose to be lenient when it is just the rules we care about enforcing. But this is a rule that the world will enforce upon us if we don't self police. Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it. We still might ban you, because again we aren't really the ones making the rule on this. Sorry it sucks, I don't like it anymore than you do.
The charity I was referring to was to WhiningCoil. But I can see, as usual, you guys can never, ever admit you were wrong or made any kind of mistake in moderation. It's not a small ban that is basically nothing because it's the reason why Steve was just banned. Every modhat is one step closer to a permaban unless you are a mod or someone like Dase who gets to show up like TrannyPorno every month and insult a bunch of people and get a warning for one of the five insults and the others are ignored and each one of those ignored posts and the warning would be a ban for someone like Steve or WhiningCoil because even if you guys can't see it it's pretty obvious to me there is a bias against a certain type of poster that comes down to not liking how they post and never the actual content because I've seen "fedposting" like WhiningCoils about once a week here without any even warning. But the point is Steve just got banned for thirty days for an accumulation, if this ban means nothing about WhiningCoil then it surely wouldn't be used against him in the future for a 30 day ban, right? I've never seen that to be true.
And I'm not advocating for banning Dase (I don't even think TrannyPorno should have been banned) but I do think direct insults toward other users is actually the worst thing to allow to slide in a forum. But even moreso than not giving charity to WhiningCoil, that maybe he didn't actually fedpost because you have to assume things to make that true, but that absence of charity becomes even more absent when this will get used as a accumulation of infractions that gets him further banned for an increasing amount of time. I've said it before but if you want people to not actually post something then actually make the consequences matter because saying "this doesn't really matter but don't do it, 1 day ban" is always going to lead a permaban and at this point that pretty much feels like its the point because I've been pointing this out for years and years.
Here it is, an amazing moment for you:
I am not perfect. I have definitely made mistakes in moderation. Based on what the other mods say and what users say I am often too harsh in my moderation. I have in fact been overridden on my moderation decisions and have had them scaled back before. If self_made_human, amadan, and netstack (or just zorba) say I have been too harsh I trust their judgement and I'm willing to say I was wrong. This has happened a few times. There have also been times where any of them have realized they are too close to an issue and have stepped back and asked other mods to step in and make a ruling. This is basically what I consider a normal process of modding here on themotte. If some mod was totally unwilling to admit fault and completely bull headed they would not last long as a mod.
Generally these moments are not highly publicized and catalogued. If that bothers you, then tough shit. Welcome to the world we live in. I'm not gonna ask any user to make a public flogging tour for every minor mistake they make. Consider any politician or public figure that you like and respect. Should they be forced to go on a public apology tour for every mistake they make? Or would you look at such a request through obvious culture war eyes and realize that your enemies are just trying to get one over on you?
You probably don't get dinged much because you don't post much. This is a problem we are aware of. For highly prolific users we are aware that there is a numbers issue, speak up too much and eventually you might run afoul of the rules. But we are also super forgiving of highly prolific users. As long as they don't violate very specific and enumerated requests we will let a lot of shit go. This is the case with steve, we had a very specific request that he not make these shitty "mods suck" type comments, and we tried to be as clear as possible that he needs to stop them, immediately.
He didn't.
So tell me, what the hell are we supposed to do when a user violates a clear, specific, minor, and reasonable request we have for them?
Common suggestions:
Steve has vocally been in favor of option 3 before.
I don't want to multiquote because that's usually the failure mode of long discussions here that are contentious but there are a lot of questions here which I'll assume are not rhetorical. I want to make clear that I've mostly been talking about WhiningCoil and Steve just stems from that. This is a thing I've seen many times and it's probably why I've come to believe that the mods can never admit they're wrong and it's that someone new or unknown to me insults an active poster and they completely get away with, no warning, no ban nothing. The active poster insults them back and they get banned. And If I argue that this is unfair the mods will come out and tell me that I am wrong, and stupid. Both of which I accept and know but I also feel it's kind of a bad look to just break the rules in this way but I'm actually not in favor of banning anyone for anything except spammers and trolls who are specifically trying to disrupt conversations so I think it's just something I need to get used to or along with.
I don't know why you think I am your enemy or am acting as such but my disagreement does not represent that nor is my idea that you should admit that WhiningCoil's ban was made in haste and basically guilt by association with a post that shaped its meaning showing up after and appearing next to it related to owning the mods or anything like that. I think it's incredibly bad moderation to do something like this because it changes the rules to be more than they are stated. If you want the rules to be different there's a sidebar, I mean there's no explicit rule about calls to violence at all or "fedposting" if that's what rule Capital Room and WhiningCoil were banned for. But there's certainly no rule that says even if not explicitly stating a call for violence if it looks adjacent to it then you will also be banned. As I've said in another comment I believe that he was actually controlling his rage and bile when making that comment and if you wanted to ding it for being low-effort, sure, but somehow it's about breaking a rule that doesn't exist if you interpret what was written uncharitably. And if the end result was simply this single day ban I would not care because I generally don't care about bans that happen that aren't about users personally insulting other users. But I meant what I said that this ban will be used as reasoning for a longer ban in the future, so it absolutely does matter because long bans are one of the big reasons why people choose to never come back. The "never admitting wrong" is about this.
I get that you feel that Steve needs to be banned for breaking that command. But when a ban like this happens it's like something designed to get Steve banned. Like how apparently, I, because I don't post enough, am allowed to insult other people, but if someone insulted me back they'd get banned and I would not even get a warning. If what I'm doing right now would get me banned save for the fact that I mostly lurk then by all means ban me, I actually am extremely uncomfortable making posts in the first place and would prefer to be warned off or sever the possibility. I end up making comments like this because I am incensed and severely wish that I hadn't in the ensuing replies.
What are you supposed to do when people violate rules over and over? It depends on a lot of things. I think letting it go is the most optimal situation since I generally don't care if someone violates rules that do not impact the level of discourse here. At the end of a comment chain when people get jokey, no I don't think they should all be banned for low effort, but if they start conversations that way it needs to be curbed. Steve being mean to you guys may affect how other users respect you, sure, and you've gave him a specific rule about it. But to me the context actually matters. Just like you give lurkers or newbies leeway that you don't for regular users it might make sense to give leeway based on the context of the situation. You banned someone for a rule that doesn't exist which they may or may not have violated depending on how uncharitably you take their post. Steve breaks his rule. I get it you have to punish him because you've tied your hands but 30 days when I've seen nothing to suggest from any mod that WhiningCoil actually broke a rule except for the initial ban post that just seems to say "well, i feel like i should ban you too because this is a little too close to the other post that actually broke the rules," which again I'll point out that this annoys me but wouldn't get me out of scrolling if it didn't mean that it's another step toward that user being gone forever because in a year this will be part of an incompletely cited list of situations in which WhiningCoil has broken rules in a specific direction leading to a long ban. And that's why I think it's not a 1 day ban that doesn't matter. If this place operated differently then I would believe differently and not respond like this.
I don't think that you should ban people forever because you hate their opinions but luckily, I'm not Steve so I don't have to pretend that this should reflect on what I think. And I should make clear again as well because of the implications in your post you're not my enemy. My opinions are not really that aligned with Steve or WhiningCoil or the people that think you mainly target right wing posters and are trying to get them off the site. I think that it's more reflective of the fact that Steve and WhiningCoil (or from the other side who just got banned token_progressive) are very emotional about their beliefs and for some reason being emotional about beliefs gets you banned. I hate to use Dase again but if he unemotionally calls a poster an idiot or despicable, or Trump a retard, it barely registers amongst the other AI content because he genuinely seems to not care about whether he's insulted you or broken any other rules. But if you care and say the same things, god help you. How do you deal with it? Just moderate with the same charity and context you're apparently giving me because I don't post often enough. Or with the same leniency and blind eye given if someone isn't that invested in the rule they've broken. I can't ask you to be anything more than fair and I don't want you to be harsher and I'm not going to change the system or rules so that's where we are.
Or simply do what you're going to do anyway, my incensed reaction is completely impotent. It's easy to comment from the sideline, I know, but that's the only view I have and like your tough shit comment about me not seeing the sausage getting made for a myriad of reasons, I think it goes the other way as well, if you're reversing bans or removing things from people's record and not telling people then you can't expect them to take that into account when judging the situation.
To clear up some things:
You are not getting any form of special leniency.
What I was trying to say is that there is a law of large numbers effect going on. If user A and user B both have about a 1% rate of a rule breaking post. But user A writes 1000 posts and user B only writes 10 posts then user A is way more likely to get in trouble and get banned. We don't want this outcome, so we will try and get a sense of the rate of violation (that 1% number).
Having upsetting beliefs is allowed, because to do otherwise creates a failure mode for all discussions.
There are often times where someone comes in and makes a post with clearly upsetting beliefs. Sometimes that person is a Nazi, one time that person was someone that believed child molestation should be allowed, most times it's just a belief that your political opponents should suffer (and some of those political opponents are on this discussion board).
What then happens is someone makes it personal or attacks them "you are a Nazi scumbag" or "you should be castrated". They then get banned. It looks like we allowed trolls to bait a response and get someone kicked out.
The simple alternative to this is topic bans of anything that might upset a bunch of users. This is the alternative that most of the leftist web embraced in the mid 2010's. The leftists then weaponized this, and got most topics that they didn't like banned from their spaces.
We don't do topic bans. We've tried to find another approach where we don't ban any topics but we try to find etiquette rules where people don't write the original post in the most inflammatory way possible.
We do not like permabans. They are an option of last resort.
I think we average like one, maybe two permabans a year for power users. They are rare. They are often proceeded by a dozen or more warnings and tempbans and usually a complete lack of quality contributions. The mods usually have multi day long discussions and usually we have full consensus before we carry it out.
A one day ban like this would not sway anything in regards to a permaban decision.
You are not my enemy, and neither are most users. Some users choose to be our enemies.
They mostly are not a good fit for this forum and they want us to do things differently. Usually not enforce rules against them or their allies, or enforce extra rules against their other enemies. Their method to get changes to happen is often to badger us and annoy us anytime we do our standard duties. And undermine anything we do. Their feedback is always "this ban is bad", and thus their feedback is useless as a comparative barometer.
The most mature of users who don't fit do not become our enemies, instead they voluntarily leave. Sometimes they will ask us for a permaban that we will grant to them.
Those that stay and cause trouble like to be rules lawyers and twist everything we say against us. It's exhausting and annoying, which is their exact goal. The more annoying it is for us to conduct moderation the less we will do of it. I have no doubt that I will regret writing some part of this open view into moderation here. Maybe I'll tag you when it happens to show you what I mean.
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Is there evidence for this?
Isn't it more likely the FBI creates dozens of sock puppets to help the fedposters planning or present them with lady governor kidnapping plans?
If there was press coverage wouldn't lots of new users be likely?
Zorba has expressed a lack of interest in sacrificing his life and well-being for this place.
Personally, a media shitstorm, police investigation, etc would be enough for me to drop this place like a hot potato.
This place might continue to exist, but it will be different enough that it will be dead for many of the people that call it home.
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To join the choir, initially I read the comment as being about culture, not violence. Entirely undeserved, in my opinion. It's not a quality comment as it doesn't speak plainly, but you inferred the worst possible meaning from it.
There is a soft rule to speak plainly, for this reason...
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FWIW I got this comment to rate and marked it as "neutral". You can read the suggestion of violence into it if you want but I think you have to bring that in yourself; there are other things that could just as well be referred to (culture, exit, self-segregation, etc)
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Is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions without being modded for fedposting?
Lean heavily into is rather than ought. Describe the specific mechanisms that you see driving people away from political solutions, how this driving works, how you see this process evolving over time. Analyze how it might be prevented, and why you think those efforts to prevent it are likely to fail, if that's your conclusion. Make rational predictions on the expectation you'll be held to them.
And if you really want to do it well, do what I do and before you start, take a couple minutes and contemplate your closest loved ones burned to charcoal, flesh shredded by bullets and shrapnel, their skulls shattered and evacuated brain matter fly-blown in the afternoon sun. Meditate on it, try to capture the sensory details, the texture and smell. Imagine yourself poor, hungry, maybe homeless, in a world that cares nothing for you, scrounging for food while your children sit starving and hollow-eyed at whatever itinerant shelter you're squatting at presently. Imagine fear, bone deep and omnipresent, defining every moment of the remainder of your life. That's what "no satisfactory political solutions" very likely looks like in reality: the rule of hatred, terror, malice and immiseration on a scale unprecedented in the experience of you or anyone you know, and the permanent end of every good thing you have ever known.
This still seems to me to be the most likely outcome, given our present trajectory, but I for one am in no hurry to reach the end of this particular rainbow.
This seems exaggerated. You had a literal civil war and it wasn’t this bad AFAIK. Obviously quite a lot of people died but ‘the end of all good things and a life of permanent misery and terror’ doesn’t seem like a good way of describing post-civil-war America.
We had a civil war back when "States" actually meant "independently governed polities", not "administrative prefectures of the single government", and people were pretty loyal to their states, and so despite some exceptions like West Virginia, the "War Between the States" was actually a war between (collections of) states. The front line was a mostly well-defined, somewhat-stable thing.
The most exceptional change to the geometry of the combat was probably Sherman's march to the sea, and it's not a coincidence that that's the main US Civil War example on Wikipedia's Scorched Earth page. If you're in a position where you have a locally small value of territory occupied relative to the length of frontage needed to defend it, then you don't want to sit on it and defend it. The best thing you can do defensively is to keep maneuvering until you're somewhere less dangerous, and the best thing you can do offensively is reduce the value of territory you maneuver through before the enemy takes it back. Scorch the earth.
What would the front line look like in a US Civil War II? Something roughly like the old maps of the "Hillary Archipelago" and "Trump's Ocean", to begin with. And that looks like an astonishingly high ratio of boundary to territory, doesn't it? That's not going to be what a somewhat-stable front line looks like. That's what the battle lines of a guerrilla war look like. If the war goes on a long time, those fractal boundaries are going to change into something more connected, and a lot of people in both the red areas being seized for connections and the blue areas that are too isolated to connect are going to be unhappy about the process.
For that matter, a lot of people in the "red" (actually reddish-purple) and "blue" (actually bluish-purple) areas aren't going to be happy no matter what happens. Being so ideologically divided in a way that's so geographically diffuse makes it less likely for another civil war to happen, but also makes the consequences if one does happen much more dire.
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War (sigh) has changed.
Motorization. Improvised explosives. Handheld automatic weapons. Radio. A small number of motivated individuals can deal a lot more damage today than they could during the March to the Sea.
Personally, I think a hypothetical U.S. balkanization would look more like the Troubles than the American Civil War. It’d be high-variance: some regions would see a bombing every week, and others would be left untouched up until the point a militia rolled into town. Even the best-off, though, would suffer compared to the globalist, interconnected society we have today.
Not everyone would see the outcomes FC described. But enough of them would, and then they’d take up arms and gouge back. And your children would never expect to have it as good as we did.
Right, this I think is mostly a reasonable prediction. Perhaps I’m wrong but I think that @FCfromSSC pushed a valid point a little too hard and made it look silly.
On a lighter note, your post reminds me of a scene from Black Books:
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I observe a lot of civil wars do and have had these results. I note that more mild civil wars, like the English one and our own, happened a long time ago and under very different conditions.
If you think serious violence cannot happen here, I think you are badly mistaken. If you think that such violence can't get bad enough to kill the American economy or seriously compromise our national security, and possibly both, and possibly for the foreseeable future, well, you're much more optimistic than I am. It seems to me that there is a tipping point, past which gravity takes over and we are all along for the ride. Violence causes political instability, political instability crashes markets, market crashes create mass dysfunction, mass dysfunction begets more violence. Maybe I'm overestimating the feedback effect, but I observe that a lot of people are vocally enthusiastic about violence, and that this enthusiasm appears to directly result in actual violence being inflicted. I think it is the sort of thing people are really going to regret having not taken seriously when they had the chance.
I do appreciate the reality check, truly. But I just don’t see Europeans and Americans acting like Congolese warlords, or permanently destroying their country’s economics. There would be a significant amount of short term suffering, yes, but not as much as you are proposing and I don’t think the long-term effects would be so bad. Look at Spain, which had a reasonably modern Civil War and was basically okay.
Then it seems to me that you lack the necessary imagination and perspective.
The best estimate I've seen is that BLM killed ~8.5k black people, in addition to thousands more non-black people, in roughly four years. No one involved intended for that to happen, but it happened all the same. Most of the people involved will not be aiming to become Congolese warlords. I'm skeptical that their intentions will prevent the formation of lasting conditions where Congolese warlordism is an adaptive behavior.
From observation, violence > chaos > poverty > more violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, especially when the good people die or leave until those who remain are some form of bad person.
I am not arguing that American civil war means inevitable and eternal hell on earth. I am arguing that if you are contemplating a potential war, you are probably underweighting the likelihood and severity of the bad consequences, and you are probably not thinking about what it means if those bad consequences arrive for you, personally.
Perhaps I misread you but it seemed like you were arguing exactly that:
Thus some level of shock and bemusement. In The Black Swan Taleb describes his experience in the Lebanese Civil War and it wasn’t like that. Most people adapt to most things.
Only if you use a very non-standard definition of ‘kill’. BLM killed perhaps 30 people: the CHAZ murders, that poor old man who got his head cracked open. Maybe the 2 people who Rittenhouse shot.
But ‘assisted in the death of, via second order effects on murder rates’ is a rather different phenomenon.
Message received, and I will think about it carefully.
I don't know if I agree with that. If law and order collapses as a result of civil war, it's not going to be much comfort to me that technically the mob burning down my house is a second order effect.
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Rdrama mocks us for words, words, words, but it do be like that though, and it's a good thing.
Explain why a political solution won't work, explain what might work instead, try to keep a relatively morally neutral tone. It's not that hard, you can literally boogaloopost if you put enough effort.
You belive that had @Capital_Room explained his literal bullet solution or @WhiningCoil his outside the law and politics solution in a morally neutral tone they'd be grand?
Maybe one of them will edit their posts with your suggestions.
Yes, I've seen it done, and I've seen prominent posters (who used to be mods) clutching their pearls over it, and leaving in a huff about it, and no disciplinary action being taken.
You were a part of the discussion that happened two months ago that pointed out that the post cited in TW's Schism reasoning post which did not call for violence. And even the spicier FC post cited by others doesn't seem to be calling for violence either unless you interpret people saying that they hate and want others to die as being actual calls to violence which is not how I understand the term/phrase. I'm guessing you disagree or maybe didn't see the posts Nybbler made.
For me, saying you think that the only solution is killing people and saying that you hate these people and if they tried to destroy your home/city that you'd kill them is a far cry from the same thing. But no amount of words, words, words is going to make it acceptable for FC to have said that the right should just start shooting leftists because they are evil and not because they should defend their lives and property with violence and that they're indifferent to their own destruction because they believe they are evil.
I just want to make it clear that I really don't think calls of violence are allowed or tolerated,even if worded eloquently or verbosely. In fact, for the most part tiny posts like capital's or whining's are let slide far more often and mostly because it's assumed that we give charity to other posts. Capital's is pretty impossible to afford charity to but Whining's post is pretty easy to do so.
AvocadoPanic was asking "is there a way to express that some issues may not have satisfactory political solutions?", not "is there a way to directly call for violence?". The answer to the latter is obviously "no".
Well, then I'm not sure what your response is supposed to mean. FC didn't call for violence, neither did WhiningCoil. How do you get around this unwritten rule that means if you post something short you will be interpreted as uncharitably as possible? I guess words, words, words works in the way it always does for every rule here but WhiningCoil didn't break the rule, at least not the one they're blaming him for. And your suggestion seems more like a "how do you get away with writing bullshit on your homework? just write nonsense for a few pages they never actually read it." than a real suggestion of how someone should conduct themselves.
And I should note that FC was warned for that post, just not banned. So, even your acceptable version of how to express oneself in that situation is not a pure example of the right way to post.
Correctly caveat your writing. Be aware of how it may be read and misread, and write appropriately.
This will not save you from sufficiently aggressive I-don’t-care-what-you-say-I-know-what-you-mean persecution, of course, which is why many rationalists split off from woke in the first place. But I don’t remember ever seeing a carefully worded piece get modded here.
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What Montgomery County did was pretty classically tyranny (remove the safety valve from a policy when it exposed the unpopularity of the policy) it shouldn't be a surprise that some people respond with the correct response to tyranny. Sic semper...
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