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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.

First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.

Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.

I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).

But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.

You know who drove him away?

Me.

The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.

Guess what he did?

Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."

But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.

Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.

(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)

Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."

@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.

You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").

The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.

You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.

But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.

@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

But this is madness, and I do not believe that you would ever accept the framework off aggregating assholes by ideology, and deploying moderatory actions adjusted for that

I'm not asking for that. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to it for genuinely woke people as a form of affirmative action for opposing views, and it should be noted that I wouldn't see myself as being a beneficiary of that if it were implemented since I'm not woke myself.

What I'd like as a baseline is consistent enforcement across ideologies where things like personal attacks get a warning or a ban no matter who they're coming from. As it stands right now, we're in a regime where right-leaning people freely make personal attacks and only rarely get modded even if they're reported, while left-leaning people get banned off of vibes and convoluted notions that they're being "manipulative".

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

This seems like a ban based on vibes alone.

Another way of saying vibes" is "tone." Yes, we moderate based on vibes. It's not quite that fuzzy- we try to follow the rubrics we've developed over the years- but yes, when someone is being an obnoxious trolling shitstirrer, and has been posting obnoxious trolling shitstirring threads for a while that so far have been just barely this side of acceptable discourse, eventually we're going to say "Enough, knock it off." @AlexanderTurok has been there for a while, and he's been warned repeatedly. He just got a 1-day slap on the wrist, and so promptly writes a post absolutely dripping with sneering condescension.

Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!

You know what my least favorite category of bitching about modding is?

"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"

Playing this kind of game is never productive. Every one of us mods has explained, many times, that while we try to be more or less consistent, we do indeed mod based on "vibes" to some extent, and a lot of those vibes are "How obnoxious is this particular person being right now?" "How annoying has this particular person been recently?" and "Does this particular person have a long record of AAQCs, or a long record of being warned to knock it off?" There is also a lot of subjectivity in whether a particular word or phrase strikes this mod on this day as being over the line.

(Also worth noting that sometimes someone is filling the mod queue with reports, and he'll eventually get banned for one of them. Unless you're absolutely sure that the person you're complaining about didn't get a ban around the same time for some other post, don't assume that whatever post you're linking to is an example of "Mods thoughts this was okay.")

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.

If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like

darwin had AAQC's. But just presenting a somewhat uncommon, solid argument is high quality in my book, and he did that often, because by virtue of his politics, most of his arguments were uncommon here. We banned the only progressive voices we had, all to maximize the content-free comments complaining about the enlightenment, modernity and the sexual revolution - the motte equivalent of complaining about boomers, or neoliberalism.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue,

I get why it feels like that from the perspective of someone who disagrees with the majority of the forum. People start blurring into a single indescript swarm, and it's all the same to you if it's one guy being and asshole one day, and another guy on another day. But this is madness, and I do not believe that you would ever accept the framework off aggregating assholes by ideology, and deploying moderatory actions adjusted for that, if it was your ideology, or you personally in the line of fire

Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.

If you're trying to tell me gatsuru is somehow as bad as AlexanderTurok, you're going to have your work cut out for you. For starters, don't you think keeping up with all these court cases required several orders of magnitude more effort than anything Turok has ever done here?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

Yes, I was there too. There's nothing obvious about it. There are plenty of capable debater progressive posters around here that don't get banned. Even Darwin didn't stop posting here due to the ban, he was posting here until fairly recently, and only tapped out after he made dishonest claim, briefly tried pretending he didn't actually make it, and saw people are buying it even less than his excuses for the Jussie Smollet fiasco.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.

Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole

This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :

  • he was the most progressive commenter

  • he was a capable debater

  • he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements,

I actually agree with you about personal attacks being worse, even as a singular instance, so I'm willing to agree the mods could've dropped the ball there. It doesn't make what I say untrue, though, let alone "extremely". You'd have to find an example of a specific person being able to do that over over for this argument to work.

Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?

What are you talking about? Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole, or even the posting history as a whole, is breaking the rules.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

He's a nazi who pretends to be inoffensive braindead left and gets banned for ban evasion, he's nothing like Turok.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned

Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements, which was what AlexanderTurok did here. Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

And my argument is that they're not functionally the same. Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned, he was actually given a lot of leeway.

You're trying to claim that all the instances of different people occasionally being assholes somehow add up, if they come from the same ideological background.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 2025

Your report was obnoxiously unfunny and we have to deal with enough spurious and bad-faith reports on posts.

Normally I'd leave it at that, but you have a history of this kind of obnoxious trolling, so banned for a day. Knock it off.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people

Shocking. So shocking I'm calling BS. We should be arguing if one ten thousandth or one one hundred thousandth is a better order of magnitude estimate. Not 15%. Wrong order of magnitude is putting it lightly.

I'm aware of people very concerned about the very hypothetical suffering of tiny bugs including dust mites. Imagining that they have conscious awareness and suffer. Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hqXxzFRSZqRFPCTv/killing-the-ants

https://old.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/1kpl5ur/refilism_banned/mszshz5/

We need a term for this. Toxic empathy or something.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

Although I'm biased as someone with a statistics degree, we'd get much better research if we either outright banned people who are bad or inexperienced in math and statistics from doing research, or significantly raised the standards for anyone wanting to do research (or as a compromise simply bit the bullet and mandated collaboration with a more math/stats-aware consultant). The number of statistically-illiterate or inexperienced questions that show up on reddit's askstatistics subreddit that mention offhand that it's for a paper they intend to publish is, frankly, frightening.

The big open question as I understand it in educational circles is how would we even implement something successful if the traditional mechanisms are non-functional? Any implementation requires some trust, and that trust is very diminished by administrators mandating often terrible programs or ones with onerous and impractical requirements to be implemented, which teachers understandably sabotage after paying lip service to. These programs or pushes always seem to cycle every 5 years so there's little consistency or follow-through. A lot of it is milked by educational consultants who have never taught in their lives and who have suspect financial incentives to sell things. And it poisons the well for actually-good initiatives, because they also can't get good compliance. It's almost a similar model to how dysfunction occurred in Soviet planned economies.

So in that light your point about cooperation is key.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

Given the number of closures of PP in states that banned abortion, they do not.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 2025

High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

They should also be banned with the Geneva convention. Making students write essays is probably the most wasteful way to use a functioning brains.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

Okay, that's enough 4chan-level shitty comments out of you, dipping into personal antagonism.

A lot of users are eagerly anticipating your banning. I try to factor in your unpopularity for just running against popular sentiment when you get reported constantly, but the fact is, your reports are increasingly for low-effort shitty comments and you seem to be trying to do a speed run on how many digs you can get in before you're banned. You actually occasionally have some interesting things to say, but it's mostly buried beneath snark and disdain.

You've gotten a lot of warnings and no bans yet. Here's your first one-day ban. I am disappointed that once again a left-leaning poster cannot control himself enough to avoid getting banned, but that seems to be the path you are on. Change my mind.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

I could answer that question with an epithet but it would be bad form to do so. I assume he's a sock puppet of someone banned several times before.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

Money is fungible. Things like rent, electricity, staffing, etc are all shared. They cannot be separated. You can't provide money to PP without funding abortion. If you wanted to, you could spin off the abortion wing, call it Banned Parenthood, make sure there is no staffing overlap, and charge them market rates for rent and facilities, maybe you'd have a decent argument.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

Okay? So ban porn advertising on any site that targets children. I'm pretty sure that law isn't even necessary because websites have a lot more control over their ads than stores have over their neighborhood.

If a city council sorted their areas by crime rate and excluded adult bookstores from the bottom X%, then I'm pretty sure the (prospective) store owners would have a good case the restrictions are illegal. If the city pulled all its cops and banned private security from them, it would be a slam-dunk case.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

Yeah, the 'homeless person' concern is not the main objection, and I don't think anyone here's going to care what Texas' policies about low-cost IDs are.

That said, I think there are serious privacy and chilling effect concerns regarding this specific implementation and how it interacts with normal website management. The Texas law applies to any website run by a commercial entity (with a tiny number of exceptions), where more than 1/3rd of its content is 'harmful to minors', must do this verification or face sizable fines (up to 10k USD/day, plus 250k USD if a minor sees any banned content). Any web host operating in the United States that serves both adult and non-adult content, or even repeats content from its users, needs to do some pretty serious evaluations.

This wouldn't be too rough if the burden from age verification was tiny -- you take the precautionary principle to the max or divide the website and/or commercial entity -- but that doesn't seem to be the case. The plaintiffs here had a bit of a nut for a lawyer, but his claims that age verification could cost 40k USD for 100k users were plausible enough for a skeptical Texas court to accept it. That's steep but workable for a conventional commercial porn site; HB 1181 does not operate based on being a commercial site selling porn, but on being a commercial entity serving partially adult material. Even if he's off by a 'mere' couple orders of magnitude, there's a lot of websites and services where that's going to bring the risk-reward underwater, or outspend what sort of losses that a hobbyist is willing to lose out on.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

The one who banned the abortion pill?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

the current government controls people through threatening their driving licenses

This is a pretty odd thing to say given how generously drivers are treated in much of the Anglosphere. To actually get banned from driving in the US or UK you have to be preposterously negligent. Recently a footballer here in Britain was caught speeding eight times in as many weeks (and none of them were even close), lied to the police after some of them and was given a driving ban of less than a month. There are perhaps few less sympathetic groups in the Western world than suspended drivers.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.

Indeed. Suppose Ignatiev were to reply to your comment (and general worldview) with:

“My dear SS, I agree completely. I think all practicing Jews should renounce their religious practice (including, as I have already argued, kosher dining and food preparation), and all ethnic Jews should abandon their cultural particularity. Jews should convert to mainstream Protestant Christianity, the predominant gentile religion in the United States, or practice no faith. They should marry gentiles (of course most already do, but let’s say all of them). All Jewish religious institutions (synagogues, museums of tolerance, etc) should be closed, all religious clothing banned. Those who refuse these terms ought to go to Israel, but those who accept them can remain in America with no further restrictions placed on their participation in society, culture, politics or the economy. Furthermore, any racial agitation by white nationalists towards those former Jews who fully, sincerely renounce and abandon their Jewishness will be strictly prohibited.”

Would you accept his offer?

Because that is the difference between Ignatiev’s position and those of the dissident rightists who borrow his words in this case. He (like all communists) allowed for conversion; even the last emperor of china was converted, after all. You do not.