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If the plebes want noblesse oblige they better start showing some obeiscence. The UMC class is already funding your continued existence, start showing some gratitude instead of "Eat the rich" (sidenote: it's much more efficient to eat the poor instead, but that's a
digestiondigression for a different day) and then we can talk.Too much boo-outgroup. Too close to waging the culture war rather than discussing it.
You've had 9 Mod actions against you, and have been a consistently bad poster. I'm not sure there is any point in trying to "reform" your posting habits at this point. I'm gonna start with a perma ban, but if some quality posters or mods want to speak up on your behalf then I'm open to just making this a temp ban.
Edit: bolido_sentimental Spoke up in favor, changing to a twenty day ban.
I will also come down asking for a temp ban - Count often toes the line but I think he adds a quite unique perspective here. I would hate to see him perma-banned.
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I do not like the poster you banned, in fact I have him blocked. But from my logged-out browsing, his values are less inimical to the existence of themotte than many posters with cleaner records. Perhaps he is sometimes too blunt in expressing his views, but they are unique and according to Toltecs vs Olmecs doctrine deserve special protection.
I also realize that my reputation isn't strong enough for my words to count.
I guess I didn't make that part clear. I didn't want other troublemakers speaking up. But someone like you that has ~300 comments and no mod notes is someone with a good reputation in my mind. Having quality contributions is great, but not at all required for a good reputation. Contributing and not getting much mod attention is enough to make someone a net-positive in my book.
I also wasn't going to give my opinion on this ban because I don't consider myself a high-quality contributor. But if no mod notes is indeed the bar, I'll chime in (I have 842 comments here and on the subreddit with no warnings/bans and, to my knowledge, no mod notes).
I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.
I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.
This is pretty close to my views on the subject. Out of all the active moderators I think I am usually the one that is most in favor of more bans, longer bans, and fewer warnings.
There are some people that try to follow the rules, if they get a warning they will correct and be more careful in the future. We have plenty of accounts with just one or two warnings, and then otherwise great behavior.
There are others that seem closer to what you describe, they will happily pay the ban tax (or evade it altogether through alts), and then come back and make trouble again. For all I know I might've been banning the same 5-10 people for my last decade of moderation.
When I see accounts with nine mod notes about bad behavior I feel like I know which category they fall into.
This part I disagree with, from experience what happens is those people become crusaders for "the mods are terrible/evil oppressors". They just turn most of their rudeness on us, and put us in the position of having to ban people for attacking the moderators. Making us look like petty dictators.
Speaking of consequences, I am curious if the people against a ban would be willing to suffer any consequences for the behavior of BurdensomeCount. @TheDag @some @bolido_sentimental
Treat this fully as a hypothetical, but what if the next time BurdensomeCount got banned, you also received a one day ban? Would it still be worth it to keep them around?
I ask, because for the moderators there are consequences to keeping around troublesome users. This interaction takes up my time and energy. And for every mod action on a user, there are usually about 5 posts from that same user that were on the edge and we let slide. When I go through the mod queue I usually try and carefully read posts and their context. This is all work I've volunteered for, but I also don't have unlimited time in my day.
What if the next time the police searched a home without a warrant, and caught a criminal who they sent to jail, you got sent to jail too? Would it still be worth it to insist that the police need warrants to do a search?
(I don't actually think a ban for BurdensomeCount is a bad idea. But I'm very leery of the general principle that you're expressing here.)
For them it would just be imagine that you paid their salary, and you already do. The cost of the police wasting time and money is partly accounted for. Also if you make a false police call they can fine you. There are lots of consequences for wasting police time. There are no consequences for wasting volunteer mod time.
The cost of not allowing warrantless searches is that sometimes you fail to catch a criminal that you might have caught with a warrantless search, not just that you might have to waste the police's time getting a warrant.
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I would be totally fine with this. Heck, even a one-week ban I'd be okay with. Part of that though is my personal feeling that I spend a bit too much time here, and could stand to bow out a bit more so take it with a grain of salt.
With regards to Count, not sure how to articulate my feelings but I much prefer his sort of snobby disdain to other posters here who I won't name. I don't see the mod queue and I get that if someone is a repeat offender it's problematic, but I am far, far more concerned by all the people here who regularly call for violence and talk about how violence is the only true right man has and how the only method for change is to purge your enemies with a sword. That's the most concerning rhetoric to me, even if they say it nicely.
I know this goes against the whole ethos of the Motte in that you can say anything as long as you say it the right way and play nice, so perhaps I'm biased and don't necessarily agree with the rules 100%. I'm glad I'm not a mod - I doubt I could be impartial enough.
Anyway, not sure if this adds much to the discussion and I generally support the mods so if you think he deserves a permaban, I won't go on an anti-mod crusade. Just figured I would weigh in.
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I find this a fascinating question. It represents a very different cost for each of us. For me, even though I've been around since the original SSC CW thread, I've always been a very low-volume poster. As a result, I'd barely notice being banned, whereas it would probably be significantly impactful for the people you mentioned. Such a system wouldn't bother me. I'd eat a life ban for Ilforte or @TheDag or somebody, honestly, if it worked like that.
I recognize what you're saying, though, and I don't mean to minimize the costs imposed by misbehavior. Certainly repeat offenders should be penalized, and I don't disagree with your decision to ban BC for a while. From my perspective, though, as someone who is usually here with the intention of reading The Motte rather than digging in to the Culture War with my own hands, it's better to have someone like BurdensomeCount around rather than not. This is because while he does break the rules, I admit that, he also has a reasonably good chance of saying something that makes me think about things differently. That's what I'm here for, and that's why I felt like standing up for him. But of course - it's not all about me, by any means. Indeed I think it's probably more important to make mod decisions with the contributors in mind, not the readers. So I get it.
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I agree to this.
Its even crazier to me that you would say this, you've blocked them for crying out loud. That is the biggest acknowledgement I can think of that someone is not worth dealing with. If everyone did what you did towards BurdensomeCount it would be the same as me banning them.
If everyone blocked him, he could still reply and if other posters sometimes browsed while logged out, his opinions would still be noted.
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I would advocate for a temp ban here. I agree that he goes too far sometimes, but BC often posts well-considered or interesting/unusual takes. In general, I feel like the benefits from his posts outweigh the demerits of his occasional blow-up.
This is just my opinion.
Done, I've changed the ban length.
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If truck drivers stop working it's all over by the end of the week. If soldiers refuse to join/fight in the US military, then the Pentagon and State Department are irrelevant nobodies. If port workers down tools, good luck importing food. That's where your trade argument breaks down. Without these people, there is no trade, no transport, no nothing.
Consider 'essential workers' in COVID. Now there are some PMCs that were essential - judges for instance. But the vast vast majority are working class or poorly paid. And even judges are not nearly as essential as truck drivers. You can have a long backlog of cases but a backlog of food supply is called a famine. This will change with automation but I'm just concerned with the present.
They're not merely privileged, they have the power to vaporize the whole system instantly, even though they're not organized or motivated to wield that power. The top of a pyramid can't exist without a sturdy foundation.
If this happens we import new people over from the third world who're going to do this cheaper and won't stop working because they know what is good for them and know the meaning of being thankful. Trade doesn't just apply to goods, it also applies to humans. Your statement is no different from saying water should be the most valuable thing in the world because without it we die in 3 days. I'm going to make a top level on this soon where I delve deeper.
You assume those third worlders already have trucks, know road rules, know standards for cargo loading and unloading, know how to read a GPS... Last but not least do you want to spend your time in a retirement home being looked after by some Haitian migrant who wants to do the absolute minimum to get paid and couldn't care less about your welfare because you're totally foreign to her? The quality of work is not identical.
We are the ones who should be thankful for the food, goods and security that they provide. Society works smoothly when classes work together, not when they are divided. The elite can replace workers by mass immigration. The workers can also replace the elite by massacre. What you're advocating is top-tier fragilista stuff, reneging on the social contract, the equivalent of proposing to replace the citizen-soldiers with foreign mercenaries. Do you not see any flaws in this proposal? What if we suddenly need the whole population to do important war work - and you just spent decades demeaning, undermining and threatening to replace them? What if we need the consent of the masses to govern? What if we don't want electric substations being blown up, cities paralyzed by riots... Majorities can oppress minorities but it's very hard for a minority to oppress a majority.
It is the most important thing in the world, perhaps behind oxygen. The supply is very high though, reducing its value. But that doesn't mean we can scorn the suppliers!
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Is it? What real work are they doing to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered? I don't see them working on farms or getting involved in the actual distribution of tangible and meaningful resources. In actuality they're simply skimming off the top, and providing anti-services in the form of hostile doctrines and policies which make life worse for the people underneath them. The people in charge of Goldman Sachs while it looted and torched the societal commons deserve a guillotine more than they do any kind of respect, and I don't think they'd like what would happen if they tried to force the issue on the rest of the populace.
Just because the UMC class don't physically partake in creating food, clothes and shelter doesn't mean they aren't integral to it's production at the levels we have today. Norman Borlaug's invention of more hardy wheat strains etc. led to a massive increase in the capacity of the world to reliably feed itself, he has done far more for the world's net food production than any random two bit farmer in a tractor (which I must add was envisaged, designed and continues to be iteratively improved on by UMC level engineers).
I work in finance (though not in IB) I assure you your food in the shop where you buy it from would be 20+% more expensive if investment bankers who broker deals in the background didn't exist, as well as your life being generally shittier, no different to it being shittier if you had to live with the computing power we had in the 1990s, which is yet another thing the PMC provides (technological progress).
But all this is moot, I was talking about their net tax contributions that end up getting spent by the lower classes. It doesn't matter one whit whether the UMC produces a single grain of wheat, a single strand of silk or a single beam of lumber if they can trade their money (which they by and large got because someone was willing to give it to them for something in exchange) for it. On a countrywide level that's no different to producing the item indigenously, the end result in both cases is you got yourself some grain, cloth or shelter that wasn't present before in your borders, and they can do this trade easily with a farmer in Ukraine or a grower in China. The terminal problem is not with the worldwide lower classes who by and large know their place, it's with the western lower classes who think that being born on a specific piece of rock grants them privileges denied to other humans with a greater capacity to contribute to the world whose only crime is being born somewhere without a sizable highly earning UMC they can extort money from.
Oh, my apologies! I thought you'd just made a typo while referring to the PMC. I'm actually legitimately unsure what you are referring to when you say UMC class - Upper middle class class? I wasn't thinking of people like Norman Borlaug, but people like Robin DiAngelo, Sheryl Sandberg or Ibram Kendi who largely produce nothing but toxic culture war effluvia. I have some more substantive things I want to say in response to your other points, but I'd rather clear this up first because I'm not sure I ultimately disagree with you.
Oh I absolutely agree people like Kendi are a net negative. I was meaning UMC to refer to roughly people in the top 4-5% of the income distribution. Yeah I agree I was basically using UMC and PMC interchangeably here, should have been more precise. This group probably does include some unsavory characters like Kendi, especially those who can set themselves up a good grift to extract resources from their followers but I would say the lower classes who net consume government spending have an even higher proportion of unsavory characters relative to those who do productive work like making food or clothes.
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It's a prisoner's dilemma. Both sides are currently caught in a defect-defect equilibrium, in which case it's in the interest of neither side to unilaterally start cooperating. In cases where there is sustained contact between the same individuals, ie a repeated prisoner's dilemma, there is some hope. But in cases where everyone just hops from job to job, town to town, country to country, there's little reward for an individual who sacrifices their own interests for the sake of an employer/employee only to be shown no gratitude because their next interaction will be with a completely different individual of that class who is used to defect-defect.
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