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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   25852 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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I think this is very bad moderation and the equivalence between the GP and the post you are responding to is false. This is already the case on a purely syntactic level: the OP makes an assertion, while the response asks the OP for his opinion (even if you could argue that the question is more of a "have you considered this" type than of the "I want to know the answer" one). Moreover, OP uses wording with insulting baggage ("sore loser") while the response is more neutral ("good", as opposed to bad, loser).

More generally, as I see it, prompting culture warriors who ascribe bad qualities to their outgroup to ask themselves if their ingroup is actually different in that regard is an important technique for keeping the heat of the discussion low: it promotes empathy, as one is encouraged to wonder why both sides act the same if one of them is so right while the other is so wrong, and prevents the "deathballing" dynamic where one tribe reaches a critical mass of common knowledge that everyone agrees their outgroup is worse than them and starts feeling more confident about coordinating meanness.

Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there. I don't know if it was intentional, and might well be a consequence of OP having been a singleton in your eyes while you spent hours dealing with separate anti-OP posts, but the way it winds up looking to anyone reading the thread top-to-bottom is blatant favouritism. The result of moderation leaning one way is that besides making some more people check out altogether, everyone who still cares about the balance of the community will try to counterbalance - i.e. go out of their way to make those perceived as receiving the moderators' favour feel a little less welcome. This means more antagonism going around. I'm trying to be charitable of your perspective here, but choosing which patterns/bandwagons to ignore and which ones not to is also a way of expressing favouritism: a moderator with opposite biases could have considered the responses to OP in isolation, while moderating OP (or any of the recurring posts in the same spirit!) with something to the effect of "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).

Normally, yes I like when people flip the script. But the original post had generated a lot of heat already and I was in more of a damage control mode. And OP is not republican, so it wasn't really a flip the script type moment. It was sort of just an opportunity for OP to trash another group as well.

I didn't make it explicit, but yeah if someone did a flip the script and just rewrote the OP from another perspective and posted it top level they might also eat a ban.

We do allow for mistakes here. I don't think the OP was originally intending to be as antagonistic as some of their language suggests, they just weren't being careful. Once moderators have come by and said "hey you messed up and this is too antagonistic" it is not ok for someone to then pull a "flip the script" move. Because its basically flaunting the rules and the enforcement of those rules.

Three things that make me a little more cautious to endorse your moderation here:

First, regarding your last point about ignoring moderators, I don't know that I can see it now, but how much time had elapsed between you saying that it's too antagonistic and KnotGodel's comment? Since they're right next to each other, there's probably a good chance that he didn't see, because the page wouldn't update until he reloaded? I do understand that it was not just that that resulted in the warning, though.

Second, I don't actually know whether KnotGodel was trying to be antagonistic; while it comes off a little harshly to me, that might not be intentional. I don't know.

Third, while I definitely wouldn't trust popular opinion on all moderation, in this case the vote count on your warning is genuinely pretty low.

I think some of us are confused by you using “antagonistic” to refer to the loaded language of “boo outgroup” from the “sore losers” and not the response itself being antagonistic against the OP himself.

(Also, a lot of us probably comment in a way we don’t necessarily see mod action trying to reset a tone shift before we pile on.)

I know you wrote elsewhere in the subthread that "some questions are inherently antagonistic", but this makes it seem like you consider any instance of what you call "flipping the script" to fall under that category. I think that that is wrongheaded, and in particular I really don't think that this question was "inherently antagonistic" - if it were, then surely basically every interaction here where people talk about each other's opinions rather than those of abstract people who are not part of the conversations would be inherently antagonistic, and everyone is posting on borrowed time while moderator goodwill lasts. If you want to retain that level of potential for anarcho-tyranny, you ought to put some thought into it before threatening its application.

Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there.

if "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).

What open egregiousness? I admitted I probably could have phrased some things better, but "leftist whiny bitches" is clearly not the sum totality of my post, and I was honestly not trying to be provocative. I actually want to discuss whether the currents/counter-currents situation leaves any actual options for non-leftists, and I think that merits discussion.

FWIW, I agree that it doesn't make sense to mod @KnotGodel's question.

The "with" in that sentence was intentional - I'd say there is ample evidence that the post contains a sentiment that could be summarised in that way, not that the sentiment is all there is to it (though I would go as far as saying that it's a central component of it). As for that ample evidence, just excerpting the sentimental terminology,

incessant leftist whining
infantile tactic
"we win (...) or we whine and complain"
sore losers
scream bloody murder
infantile
still salty (...) and act like he was the worst

Apart from the literal references to "whining", there are also two mentions of "infantile" and ascriptions of bad sportsmanship and emotional deregulation (scream, salty, act, the babytalk in "he was the worst"), which I think is a picture it's appropriate enough to gloss as "bitchy". I don't think this is cherry-picked from a longer post describing the behaviour of leftists, either; apart maybe from the much more indirect statement you ascribe to your "workplace and all local institutions", this seems to be the totality of behaviours you ascribe to leftists in your post, and there are quotes in the collection from every longer paragraph in it.

The "with" in that sentence was intentional - I'd say there is ample evidence that the post contains a sentiment that could be summarized in that way, not that the sentiment is all there is to it

This seems to me that you're backpedalling. Your original phrasing was

with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?'

To "amount to" something means:

to add up to, be in total, be equal to, or be the same as

Therefore, by saying my post had sentiment amounting to "DAE leftists are whiny bitches?" you were not saying that my original post had that tone. You were saying that my original post was entirely equal to "DAE leftists are whiny bitches?". As I said verbatim above, that was "not the sum totality" of my post.

Furthermore, I think that saying things like:

It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic

is actually a very gentle way of putting it, and I was attempting to convey my point while still maintaining detachment. If I wanted to be less, detached, I would have phrased it as "they're being crybabies", or if I wanted to be "egregiously" inflammatory I could have even said things that were far worse.

I really don't think so - if I wanted to say that was the whole post, I would have gone for the shorter "post amounting to 'DAE(...)'".

I also really don't think that "I could've done much worse" is an argument for what you did being particularly good. That being said, I perhaps should remind you that I put the accusation in the mouth of a putative moderator who I took to be taking cjet's action with inverted polarity - given that I was against what cjet did here, it should stand to reason that I'm equally against what Bizarro cjet would have done... (not because it'd be a wrong claim about your post, but because I think that the implied collective punishment is not a good modding strategy).

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