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I'm open to sincere suggestions about how to improve moderation. So is @ZorbaTHut. But I do not think what you are asking for is reasonable. I am not going to issue warnings every time someone says something mean about a politician. Our norms have developed over time, and they are always evolving, and if you think they are going in the wrong direction, or are failing to maintain the sort of discourse we want, you can make that case, but so far I find your case unpersuasive. You seem to just want me to mod people who insult Kamala Harris. There is a threshold at which I probably would mod a comment. E.g., if someone said "Kamala Harris is a whore" - that's actually a falsifiable statement that would require some evidence, or "Anyone who votes for Kamala Harris is a weak air-head" - that's a very broad boo-outgroup. But calling Kamala Harris a weak, air-headed candidate who has no hope of winning the nomination? It's not kind, but it's an allowable opinion.
I don't know what I've said to imply that Kamala Harris is special at all. I don't want people insulting Trump or Bill Gates or Elon Musk either. It does nothing but lower the quality of discourse here.
Saying Kamala Harris has no hope of winning the nomination is fine (preferably justified with evidence, but I have low standards). "Weak air-headed" seems to contribute nothing but heat.
In any case @ZorbaTHut could you please update the rules to say make it clear that the mods don't mind comments like "Trump is a venal, fascist clown" and "Kamala Harris is an airhead"?
Now you've lost the benefit of the doubt I gave you that you were complaining in good faith.
You said
and
Despite the fact the rules clearly say that you will. Pointing out that inconsistency is not a lack of good faith.
A lack of good faith is when I say I take issue with "Kamala is an air-head" and you say "You seem to just want me to mod people who insult Kamala Harris" (a person, incidentally, that I don't admire).
The rules explicitly ask that you mod comments like this and you're refusing to. I don't think asking for a rule update to make it clear that insulting public figures is tolerated is bad faith on my part. I'm asking for consistency between the rules of this site and what the mods actually enforce.
Alternatively, you're welcome to argue that the rules don't demand that you mod that comment.
Alright, I went looking for a post I had in mind, possibly written by Scott, and totally couldn't find it. Sorry. You're getting a crappy cliff-notes version of it.
The cliff-notes version is that you shouldn't always need to prefix things with "I think". That it is, sometimes, pretty obvious that you're referring to an opinion. If I say "anchovies are tasty" then I am probably not suggesting that anchovies are objectively tasty; it's a phrase that maps to "I think anchovies are tasty".
This is, to some extent, how I think about statements like "Kamala is an air-head".
At the same time, I don't think we want to go full force on that. The bigger your claim is, the more wide-reaching, the more antagonistic, the more it's aimed at a person in the community, the more I want people to couch things carefully. In this case it's a single target who isn't in the community. Is that good? No, not really, I wish they'd stop. But it's maybe not lethal to the community we're trying to build.
I don't really know how to phrase this in the rules, and I'll admit that a perfectly strict reading of the rules probably wouldn't allow that. We've always allowed a bit of flex, and part of me has always been unsatisfied by this just because it makes moderation a lot more subjective. But the alternative is, I think, worse, and the flex will continue until I figure out a way to formalize it.
tl;dr:
The rule technically doesn't allow it, practically we kinda allow it as one of many ways that people can flex the rules a little if they've built up cred, I'm not totally happy with this, I'm not convinced there's a better alternative, it is definitely not true that "insulting public figures is tolerated, full stop" because I don't want people to just start flaming public figures; the rules, as always, cannot be fully complete because humans are kinda dicks.
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