Hi, I'm a long time reader of Slate Star Codex and I used to post on the Reddit forum until I got banned. There are a few reasons that I believe I got banned.
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Uncharitably claiming that Leftist censorship was a threat to the rationalist community
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Advocating for violence
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Not being kind
I understand why all of these things could have been a problem on the Reddit community, but I would like to know if they're still going to be a problem here, since I don't want to invest a lot of time creating a profile and having good-faith discussions with people if I'm only going to be banned again. Here are the reasons that I think these three issues shouldn't be a problem anymore.
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I was right, and everybody who disagreed with me was wrong. The fact that the community had to move here proves it. I'm not expecting an apology but I think that time has proven me correct on that score.
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Violence is a completely justifiable response to tyranny. While calls to violence may be against Reddit rules (and the community was right to ban me from Reddit because my rhetoric could have caused problems for the mods) there are no such rules here. In fact, rdrama (which helped set up this offsite community, and whom you should all be grateful to) actively encourages calls to violence. If a rational and logical case can be made for violence then I think there is no good reason not to hear that case out. If you're forced to censor people you disagree with because you're unable to make a stronger case for pacifism over violence in the open marketplace of ideas, then you should question whether your pacifism is actually a worthwhile philosophy.
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Kindness and truth are different terminal values. If you optimize for kindness then it is self-evident that you will have to sacrifice truth at some point. Obviously the Reddit community has chosen kindness as its terminal value, but I'm hoping that this offsite community is enlightened enough to choose truth.
I'm linking to a few articles from my Substack here so you have a few examples of my style of writing and can make a better judgement about whether I would be a good fit for the offsite community. I'm also on rdrama where my username is sirpingsalot. If you think I'm not a good fit for the offsite either, then no hard feelings - I'm happy to take my ideas to more sympathetic communities instead. I just don't want to put in the effort of investing time and energy here if I'm only going to get banned again for the same reasons.
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Notes -
Well, I'd like @ZorbaTHut to weigh in on this one, but here are my three cents:
I am not sure who you were on /r/TheMotte, but I frankly do not believe you were banned for "uncharitably claiming that Leftist censorship was a threat to the rationalist community," unless "uncharitably" is doing a lot of work here. (E.g., if what you actually said was something like "Leftists are a bunch of lying liars who lie and we should treat them as the lying filth they are.") People argued then and now that leftist censorship is a threat to the rationalist community, and everyone else, all the time. So your claim that this particular position got you banned is not credible.
Yes, advocating violence is still prohibited. We are a little looser here about allowing people to discuss their accelerationist fantasies, and we're less worried about hypothetical discussions or predictions of political violence, but fedposting or explicitly threatening (or wishing) to harm others is still not allowed.
Be kind is still a rule. It's probably our most frequently broken and least enforced rule, but yes, you are still required to at least pretend to be making an effort at kindness even if your terminal goal is truth. So if what you're really asking is "Can I say things like 'You're an ignorant crazy retard' because it's true?", no, you cannot. "Can I say things like, leftists are vile lying scum because it's true?" No, you cannot. Can you give me some other example of a "true" statement you are afraid would get you banned because it's unkind?
Is @ZorbaTHut the moderator who would make a ruling here? If so, then yes, I would appreciate if he could weigh in.
So (ping @Amadan, obviously) I think this is one of those complicated bits where you may not like the outcome.
I think having an official rule for "no calls to violence" is perhaps obsolete. We don't need it, we're not on Reddit anymore. New world! Everything has changed!
But that doesn't mean calls to violence are okay. They've just moved from being "not OK because our hosting site says so" to "mostly not okay as an offshoot of the rest of the rules".
For example, we have
and
and
A lot of calls-to-violence are going to break one or more of these, and a lot of the calls-to-violence that don't break those are going to end up hitting Egregiously Obnoxious ("no, we are not okay using this as an admitted recruiting ground for terrorists, knock it off".)
So if you want to say "well, in my opinion, the best way to solve this issue is actually some level of violence, in this specific way", then okay, maybe I side-eye you a bit but let it pass. But if you're going with something more like "we should kill all the [outgroup], who's with me" then that's a quick trip to bantown.
And given that you quoted three reasons you got banned, one of which isn't even a thing that we'd ban for so you're probably doing the arrested-for-wearing-a-baseball-cap thing, and clearly have absolutely no plans to change for two of them, I admit I'm more than a bit skeptical that you're going to be providing the carefully-measured "call to violence" that we'd allow.
tl;dr:
Taking your post literally, you're fine and won't be banned! Also, I give it around ten-to-one odds that you'll end up banned.
I guess my summary is:
that you've misunderstood things. We've chosen discussion as our terminal value. This requires some level of kindness in that people a strata that they can disagree on. This does not require kindness in the sense that entire concepts are banned, because then they couldn't be discussed. However, that does not mean truth wins; you can always come up with a sufficiently antagonistic way to say something true so that you'll end up banned.
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Well, no, any one of us mods can make a ruling about whether a post breaks the rules. And there is no "ruling" to be made about whether you can post here. You are welcome to post; whether you think it's worth your time is up to you. If you're hoping Zorba will contradict me and say "No, actually, we'll change the rules just for you," I suppose that's possible, but I doubt it.
I asked him to weigh in because he's better at explaining his intentions for the sub and why the rules are the way they are.
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Maybe this rule has more nuance? If I wrote something to the effect of: "Murderers should be arrested, even if they resist arrest.", I am advocating violence, but I don't think I'd be scolded on this forum for that expression.
Well, yes, I'm not going to spell out every possible interpretation of "advocating violence" because we use a reasonable standard with our human judgment, we don't try to anticipate every loophole a pedantic rules lawyer might try to exploit.
Most people know what we mean when we say "You may not advocate violence," and if someone is unclear, we'll explain it to them.
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Advocating that the state use its monopoly on violence against those who are the reason for that monopoly in the first place? Sounds like a rational position to me.
Calling for crimes to be committed (which inherently includes asking for consensus) is bad, prohibited, and different from the former.
Rather than having this glaring asymmetry (it's okay to cheer for violence sanctioned by our current rulers, but not for violence not sanctioned by them), it would be better if we could (follow/go back to) the interpretation that you shouldn't call to any action at all. Argue the consequences of depersonalised actions ("if the state arrests all the murderers, things happen and then utopia", "if every responsible citizen went and beat their local CoD player half-dead, things happen and then utopia"), sure, but no deontological prescriptions ("the state ought to arrest all the murderers", "you should go and beat up a CoD player").
This makes sense to me.
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