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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Well, that's not how it works. First of all, very few comments lead to "mass rule-breaking or other problems." If someone posts flaming hot bait that violates multiple rules, and it happens to spawn an interesting thread, that's nice, but you don't get amnesty for breaking the rules because it started a decent discussion, and this poster in particular has a very bad track record and was explicitly told that if he did what he just did again he'd be banned.

Can you articulate what rules this broke?

Everything about the way his "thought experiment" (which in itself would have been fine) was presented was culture warring. "Leftists want more gays, they favor homosexuals in every arena, and will happily wipe out civilization in order to get more of them" is, as I said, a continuation of his past pattern in which everything is written as a maximally uncharitable boo outgroup. As is usually the case with such strawmanning, the core of his argument ("This is how I think leftists and rightists would react to a 'homosexual pill'") could have been made in a thoughtful manner that doesn't project purely evil and bad faith motivations onto his outgroup, but he made it clear that projecting purely evil and bad faith motivations onto his outgroup was the point of the post. This is what he has done for a long time. It describes pretty much everything he has ever posted, and he was told to stop it, and rather than showing the slightest willingness to adjust to the environment we're trying to create here, he made it clear he's just here to culture war and only to culture war. (I will further note he had other very bad posts in the thread, which were also reported, but we only responded to this one.)

It's no different than the drive-bys we get fairly frequently by a "new" poster with a flaming hot take on HBD: "Hey, since HBD is true, why do you think leftists pretend it isn't?" We do not prohibit HBD discussions; we don't even prohibit spicy HBD takes. We do prohibit people using HBD, or trans issues, or Holocaust denial, just to start threads about how malicious and dishonest their enemies are.

Some people can actually discuss the topic, even if they do actually believe their enemies are malicious and dishonest. @pointsandcorsi has never shown any interest in doing anything but starting a circlejerk about how malicious and dishonest his enemies are, and he was given repeated warnings to stop trying to do that.

Everything about the way his "thought experiment" (which in itself would have been fine)

This is the most annoying part and why I would support a ban. It poisons what would otherwise have been an interesting hypothetical with some promise to shed actual light on things. Worse, it poisons coming up with even more interesting hypotheticals that even lightly pattern match this sort of thing.

This person proposed a pretty interesting thought experiment which has spurred interesting discussion. It seems foolish to ban them for this.

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