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@Tyrone
I disagree with this, and I actually don't understand how you can believe this in light of literal firing squads on both sides in relatively recent history. The left and right fringes are both more than capable of political violence, have both historically employed political violence, and are now both much more neutered (in the West) than they were previously. This is because they exist in a decadent, sprawling empire that keeps its populace in a more or less sedate, contented state through a combination of ideological, sensory, and electronic diversion.
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@Buddamoose
I think that it was so offensive to the left because it immediately undermined one of the key underpinnings of their political outlook. Most people on the left see themselves as more intelligent than those on the right. They see those on the right as misguided, or just too dumb to grasp their outlook. What the mass use of the NPC meme did was demonstrate in an incontrovertible way that many people on the right are familiar enough with leftist arguments and ideology to predict the their responses before they actually give them. This undermines the mass psychology of the left, which leans especially heavy on the self-perception of the self as 'better' which Hoffer mentions in his works on mass movements, and so they went a little berserk over it. On the right, the mechanism through which that mass psychology is created is a bit different, so the NPC meme isn't nearly as potent when used in reverse. The exception to this is the Ben Shapiro-esque wing of the new right, which does rely on stoking that self-perception effect and so is somewhat open to an angle of attack which breaks down their formulaic thinking.
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@Tyrone
I think that consumption should be decriminalized, treatment for addicts made available, and that distribution should be heavily criminalized. Historically, this has been more effective for eliminating drug use than any other policy. Our current policy is the worst, which lets distributors off with a slap on the wrist while turning the prosecution of addicts into a side industry.
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@Buddamoose
Yeah. The sad thing is that this was literally what a bunch of us warned about when the CoC was published (that a few progressive pet causes would become enforced on the whole site) and it's come true in ways that are pretty absurd even by my dim, pessimistic expectations.
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@Nd24007
Do you live in a cave inhaling geothermal fumes all day, where kings and commoners alike seek out your oracular vision?
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@Smithereens
I think that this discrepancy really gets down to the real problem with the CoC and its enforcement: it isn't about preventing harm at all, it's about control. This is a debate site which is supposed to welcome all views, but bsh's enforcement when it comes to things like blackface, words like 'tranny' and 'nigger', and other leftist shibboleths takes for granted that the leftist consensus on these issues is the truth and then enforces the CoC based on that presumption. That means that political bias is baked into the system from the getgo, and that's the problem with a CoC which tries to make conversation 'nice': nice for whom? Many people on the left can't see it, but they would see it real quick if I was mod and decided that using female pronouns for a MtF transgender person was abusive because I, personally, see transgenderism as a mental disorder.Go fuck yourself.This for example, has far greater capacity for harm than flippant use of the word tranny in a conversation.
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@DebateArt.com
Just to be clear, it may be my fault, not the mods', since we have no means of deleting only the first post from the topics and therefore they might have had to delete the whole topic to achieve the goal.
It was a single forum post that was deleted within a thread that is still up.
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@keithprosser
If that happened, it would just be a powerful unspoken referendum that people prefer a more lax moderation environment.
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@DebateArt.com
@Castin
I think that we should extend some basic CoC to the titles and description, which will be publicly viewable. So, 'no call-out thread' applies.
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@Castin
No, they really aren't. Airmax had a great sense of humor, about everything, and people respected him infinitely more because of it. In fact, I will go out on a limb and say that it was actually the biggest key to his success. A leader who is unable to laugh/unwind and acts like they have a stick up their ass all the time is seen as fragile, emotional, and untrustworthy. One who can laugh about something that is objectively funny, can make a sensible decision to which they stick, and talks to the people whom they have power over in a natural, human matter will win trust. Nobody wants to be managed by an android.
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@RationalMadman
You can engrave that on my tombstone.
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@Castin
You have to realize that the reason that you and every other human being with any sort of soul laughed at that video was because it was funny. An obviously white guy putting black crap on his face and acting as if he is black, even going so far as to act as if he's proven his point and calling his critics 'racists' is funny because it's farce. Reacting with laughter to absurdity, overconfidence, and delusion is just the natural human reaction to something like this; it's not funny because it's 'racist'. It isn't even 'racist'. The point of the video, and the reason behind its humor, is the overconfidence of the person in it. To get all 'snooty', the Greeks called this 'dramatic irony', because the audience is aware of something that the character isn't (namely, that no one in the audience is convinced that he's black), and so an emotional response is provoked (humor).
Only miserable people who want others to share in their misery can suppress that simple, organic reaction and replace it with this bizarre, mechanistic bitterness. They're the spiritual version of a neurotic who dissects every flower that he comes across, looking for some sort of disgusting bug, instead of just enjoying the scenery. Don't let these sad people convince you to feel shame for one of the few things that we shouldn't feel shameful about.
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@triangle.128k
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Logical, drafter, wylted would be good. I don't know a lot about virt, but if he learns from bsh's mistakes then that would be fine. Castin probably has a good enough sense of humor to not overmoderate the forums. I think that Tej would also be more lax on vote moderation, but I know that he has time constraints.
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@Logical-Master
Or less rule enforcement. For the most part, I think users here can police themselves in the current forum climate. They shouldn't even waste time moderating a fully forfeited debate. And unless a user is flooding/spamming the forums, posting pictures/links to obscene images or doing anything else that seriously and reasonable interferes with most of the other members' ability to enjoy the site, they shouldn't get involved.
^^^^ This
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@DebateArt.com
Okay, let's imagine I just say fuck it and make you or drafterman a mod, can you imagine what shit storm RM would start? He would make it his life mission to remove you and drafterman from the mods position. And nothing would change, people will always complain.
I think that you really overestimate how seriously anyone takes RM. He's an entertaining guy, but I don't think that anyone on the site sees him as a policy lodestone. If he oversteps his bounds, as he did on DDO, I imagine that he would be just be banned and then make a few funny youtube videos about it.
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@DebateArt.com
This is a really good idea. I think it also might be a good idea to let all people see the thread title and maybe a short description by the moderator, but not the content, so that they know that a discussion exists and can ask to join it if they're interested. It would give people a chance to escape from the stifling moderation atmosphere that's currently settled over the site, and allow each user to self-sort into their own level of comfort. It will also let normal members get some moderation experience, and allow some criticism of moderation. For example, I recently wanted to discuss a controversial deleted thread, and linked an archived page of that thread so that another member could see what was actually deleted, and that post was itself deleted. It's kind of Orwellian that we can't even talk about content that was deleted without our posts being censored, and I can definitely see a private thread being devoted to documenting oversteps and trying to hold moderation accountable.
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Vote anti bsh.
I honestly gave him the benefit of the doubt, and took him at his word when he promised laissez-faire modding. Me, along with others, expressed reservations concerning a vague ToS and bsh's personal speech philosophy, and were assured that we were overreacted. Well, it's apparent that our fears were well founded. Somehow, 'laissez-faire modding' has transformed into banning the word 'tranny', warning users through private communication about innocuous language, and taking down a thread because it contained a link to a video which could be considered 'highly rude' by some people. This is not the loose standard that the site was promised. Neither were the experiences related by drafter (a much more productive and important member of this site than I am at the moment), bench, and triangle.
Personally, I think that drafter would make an excellent mod if given a fair ToS that actually spells out what 'laissez-faire' moderation is. I'm sure we disagree on a lot, but he would faithfully enforce the letter of the law. I agree with harder that it would have been much better to have a more wild west atmosphere followed by community feedback, but I can also understand why Mike, who has a lot of technical work to do, might have been happy to hand over moderation to someone like bsh. After all, he was, if I recall, only lightly involved with DDO, and so wasn't likely aware of the issues which might be caused by this. But, I think https://i.imgflip.com/1n0c3o.jpg.
I will respond to the other thread specifically, but I think that private threads could also help to make everything run more smoothly by letting people custom tailor the level of moderation to which a given conversation is subjected.
I will respond to the other thread specifically, but I think that private threads could also help to make everything run more smoothly by letting people custom tailor the level of moderation to which a given conversation is subjected.
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@RationalMadman
> be supposed legendary troll
> cry to mods over mean words
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@RationalMadman
Leave Mike alone with your anti-Russian bigotry. You're just jealous of our Slavic brotherhood; it's not our fault that you gypsies can't squat worth a damn.
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@DebateArt.com
Dunno if it's been put here already, but extending the voting period by a day or two if a vote is removed. I recently voted on a debate, and the vote stood at three argument votes to pro and one argument votes to con. With 11 hours left within the voting period two of the pro votes have been removed (not because of the argument votes, but because of one-point S&G and conduct points) and it is now tied. This seems like something that can be easily gamed by multiple parties, with people holding off vote reports until the last minute to prevent votes for the other party being recast before the timer runs out. Extending the voting period when votes are removed incentives early reporting and discourages any attempt at abuse. Dealing with that is also probably really dispiriting to anyone who puts a lot of effort into debating and voting, while also rounding up people to vote on a debate, only to have those votes deleted at the last minute.
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@RationalMadman
That ability is judged by a third party observer, and I'm confident enough at this point to leave it at that. I'm sure that your self-aggrandisement will serve its standard comic relief purposes, so this hasn't been a complete loss.
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It's really crazy how the drift from originalism has lead us to have a country which doesn't even really have laws any more. The letter can just be interpreted any which way, and more and more as time goes on what goes into legislation text wise has little to no bearing on the policy's ultimate execution. As tortured as birthright citizenship is, it still can't touch the 'buttsex marriage' interpretation. If you went back in time and read them Obergefell v. Hodges, they would either shoot you, kickstart your 19th century comedic career, or institutionalize you.
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@Alec
The difference between a sperm cell and a zygote is the chromosome count. The chromosomes determine who is a human and who is not. A zygote has all the necessary chromosomes. A sperm cell does not.
This is an oversimplification, common for laymen. They both have the same number of distinct chromosomes (hopefully), the zygote simply has two copies. We say that the zygote is diploid and the gametes (sperm and egg) are haploid to describe this difference. That doesn't mean that the diploid organism is 'more alive'. When you look at the evolution of plants, the more primitive plants such as mosses and liverworts were (and are) actually haploid-dominant in terms of their life cycles. Any moss that you see growing around you is all haploid tissue, with the sporophyte (those weird brown threads) being the only part that is diploid. Eventually, as plants evolved more and more the haploid part of the life cycle was reduced, until now the opposite is true: the flowering plant tissue that you see is diploid, with the only haploid tissue being within the pollen and ovules. Fungi also sometimes have haploid-dominant life cycles. The number of copies of chromosomes doesn't indicate advancement; there some plants with extremely high levels of polyploidy.
Because of the way that humans have evolved, ploidy overlaps well with our ethical definitions of what 'human' is, but step outside of our species and you'll see that it's just a happy coincidence. Nature often does quite interesting and complicated things with chromosomes that would defy our staid expectations.
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@RationalMadman
An ad hominen is an argument (a fallacious argument). My statement wasn't an argument, it was an observation, albeit an unflattering one. If I had said 'RM is bad at debate, so he's wrong about kritiks', that would be an ad hominem. I'm saying that your inability to wrap your head around this pernicious aspects of kritiks indicates that you don't know much about debate preparation. My argument was already made beforehand, and still stands.
You would think that being able to parse basic logic would come more easily to a feared debater.
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@Wylted
'To be born' in a Catholic sense, where life beings at conception. I believe that humans shouldn't intercede to end the process from then on out. I agree with you in a biological sense, in which case, yes, the sperm and egg are just as alive as the zygote.
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@YeshuaBought
You don't have the right to live either, bitch. Two can play this fucking game.
I agree, I don't. That's why I'm grateful for what I have: because I have no right to it. I'm not a hypocrite. And that extends infinitely more so to God, who doesn't owe us anything at all.
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@RationalMadman
It's painfully obvious that you've never competently prepared for a debate before in your life.
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@RationalMadman
I mean, if you read the thread or grasped the central concept you would realize that it's impossible to prepare for all kritiks. If someone is debating presidential war powers, they would need to prepare for an infinite number of arguments. They would need to prepare for the 'racial justice' kritik to which they were subjected, or a criticism of republican government from a strict monarchist, from a totalitarian communist, from a fascist, from an anarcho-primitivist view. They would need to prepare against the arguments for pacifism, both secular and religious arguments. Then they would need to be familiar with multiple pacifist religions, from Quakerism to Jainism. And all of these possible lines of attacks are still less absurd than the one which actually happened in an actual debate championship: that of racial justice. Open things up that wide, and the possibilities are endless. It's possible to link just about anything to the topic, and you'll end up being blindsided by arguments that have nothing to do with the subject at all.
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You don't have the right to live. You have the right to be born. If you cannot support yourself, then you depend on the charity of others, and should be appropriately humbled by that fact.
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@bsh1
I also think it's also really, really unfair to the other side in the debate. I was by far the laziest person on my high school debate team, but I know that a lot of people put a huge amount of effort into preparation, compiling statistics, sources, materials to reference, coming up with arguments in advance. All of that preparatory work is done under the assumption that the debate topic would frame the discussion, and if that frame is taken away via kritik then all of that research and hard work goes out the window. This is less of a problem with internet debate, but when it comes to live debate the prevalence of kritiks discourages preparation and research.
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@Vader
Its absurd, but that's how the left generally functions politically and culturally. They focus on institutional capture, then change the rules once they're in power. The new rules filter out any voices but those on the left and restricts conservatives to a 'Washington Generals' role. It's a good short game, but as we're seeing nowadays with media and higher education, they go too far and completely trash the reputations of the the institutions under their control. This kritik nonsense is the perfect example of that. Every normal person sees it as absurd, but because the structural changes have trapped them in an echo chamber they'll just continue to drive debate into the ground until no neutral party takes it seriously. Since the value of the institution lies in its ability to convince/indoctrinate the uninitiated, any utility that it had to the left is then destroyed.
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@Death23
It depends. Unless their speech has the immediate effect of inducing violence (a pretty tight standard), it should stand in a society which allows free speech. However, the planning to overthrow the government part is obviously illegal in any state.
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@Vader
That's what the kritik basically is. It has a really short history in debate, and was introduced by people who, basically, didn't want to debate as it is traditionally understood (debate is an art which requires your to restrain your adovacy within certain parameters; the whole concept of the kritik is that those parameters can be challenged). This changes the debate from a contest of rhetoric with defined terms into one in which the judges are judging the actual ideas debated themselves instead of the skill with which they are defended/attacked. Bias is always a problem in judging debates, but kritiks kick that door open way wider than it would otherwise stand by allowing judges to consider arguments outside of the debate's original limits. It also impoverishes the topics which can be debated by abolishing their specificity. An example is the viral video where the debate 'champions' turn the topic of presidential powers in a time of war into an incoherent debate about racial justice.
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@Death23
I think that there's a perfectly sensible 'heat' for the kitchen that doesn't involve hate speech at all:
- Ban people for sustained harassment, credible threats, and doxing
- Let users block one another
I simply cannot imagine a sensible person who would, beyond blocking someone who says a word they don't like, demand that said person be removed from the site. If someone is being harassed, then I agree that it should be addressed, but it has nothing to do with slurs qua slurs. It's always motivated by moderation seeking to control the 'tone' of the site even when members themselves have the means to cut off contact with anything that they find 'offensive'.
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@Death23
That's not how people work, though. It would mean that thin-skinned people from each group will leave, because people are offended at different rates. If hate speech were laissez-faire, it wouldn't favor any one group because no one group is universally thin or thick skinned. The hate speech regulation supported by bsh actually creates your nightmare situation intentionally by only extending 'protection' to 'marginalized groups' - i. e. members of the generally leftist coalition, people who are 'marginalized by society' as determined by explicitly leftist intersectional theory. And since this is being applied to just those groups, one ideological group would be subjected to regulation and one would be protected from silly words, a situation which actually is more insufferable to one group than the other.
On a debate site where diverse opinions are good, I would rather have thin-skinned people who cannot handle a debate leaving the site than I would have disproportionate pressure placed on one ideological clique. And even if the pressure was equal, I would rather lose 'thin-skinned people' because they are usually emotional thinkers who are ill-suited to heated discussion topics anyway, especially when enforcement is guaranteed to grate on those who are equipped to debate issues without taking things personally. It cultivates precisely the worst population for debate and discussion, while driving away the people who take naturally to it.
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@Death23
You said that this regulation is needed because, otherwise, the diversity of views would decrease. That a good benefit of the policy which justifies it is an increase in the diversity of ideas. They are completely corollary to one another on the most basic level. So while you may not have typed those exact words, the information was implicit within your statement, unless the most basic laws of logic have broken down and I somehow missed it,.
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@Death23
As probably someone with some of the most 'out there' views on this site, someone calling me a stupid name doesn't bother me. The idea of investing time in a site where you can get 'warned' for something that isn't cut-and-dry, dickish harassment does. It's just not entertaining or fun, and there are only so many hours in the day to spend. The idea that enforcing 'hate speech' moderation will increase the diversity of ideas is just frightfully dim. There are trannies out there who don't mind being called trannies. There aren't many people who see transexualism as a mental disorder who will also enjoy debating their PoV on a website where you can't even truncate the word 'transexual' without getting finger-wagged.
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I agree with everything that you said, but it's pretty clear that nothing will be done about it. When people raised questions about these clauses in the CoC a few months ago bsh promised laissez-daire modding. He obviously lied (inartfully), and unless the site owner intervenes this site will just become a place where you can't even say 'tranny' without being moderated for it, despite promises to the contrary. We may have looked at this place as a successor to DDO, but I don't think that that's the case. From what I can see, even if 80% of the site disagrees with the direction in which moderation is being taken, nothing will be done to reign it in. It'd be nice to be wrong, but oh well.
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@Imabench
Trolling and rulesperging, mostly.
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@triangle.128k
The Colonies were part of the Empire, and were largely filled with such Protestants to both rid England and the Netherlands of internal religious dissent and to create a geopolitical buffer against Catholic Europe in the New World. If it had remained under English control, they would have continued to use it for those purposes, and the population of America would have become more virulently anti-Catholic. Instead, freedom of religion eventually gave the Church the ability to get the camel's nose under the tent, so to speak.
England also didn't grant that land out of the goodness of their hearts, it was a calculated move. Where they had the power to do so, they purged many French Catholics, particularly in Acadie (present-day Maritimes).
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I honestly don't see it as much of a loss. England was a heretical, mercantilist mess for a long time; they wouldn't have gained much by remaining. If anything, this made the spread of Catholicism into the US possible, as the country became independent, and since it wasn't seen as a British bulwark against French and Spanish influence in the New World religious freedom worked against their original intentions (as an Anglican power in the new world/dumping ground for the craziest sects).
One of the fun archaeological digs that I read about covered a Jamestown excavation. Apparently, one of the big founders of the colony was a recusant Catholic and was buried with a small family reliquary. It really brought color to how desperately England wanted to prevent the spread of Catholicism, and how much they saw it as a contagion.
One of the fun archaeological digs that I read about covered a Jamestown excavation. Apparently, one of the big founders of the colony was a recusant Catholic and was buried with a small family reliquary. It really brought color to how desperately England wanted to prevent the spread of Catholicism, and how much they saw it as a contagion.
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Argentina has no separation of church and state, mostly because their weren't enough weirdo Freemasons in positions of power when the country was created. It has always been influenced by Catholicism, and that influence has grown over time, not waned.
I don't think that murder should be legalized because people sometimes get killed trying to murder people.
Abortion is only a 'medical procedure' when it is saving the live of the mother. Even then I don't think that it's good to do. Pray for us, Saint Gianna.
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@bsh1
So? Hysterical people used to burn herb women and midwives, that doesn't mean that it's 'dehumanizing' to make fun of someone for being a weird cat lady. I can find more regimes that murdered (and are murdering) people for being Catholic than you can find ones which murdered them for screwing other men, but it's not 'dehumanizing' for people to call me by silly names. Did fucked up things happen to Catholics? Yeah. But with the exceptions of some slaves under the Ottomans and in North Africa, (and some actions of the English in Ireland) people didn't treat us like livestock because we were Catholic. Dehumanizing is a powerful word because it's specific. It's not about telling you who you can stick your dick in or even trying to control you religious expression, its about telling you that 'you aren't human'. It's about ignoring your basic human instincts, like love for your offspring or the right to own anything that you create. Hence the name. If you say that someone is 'dehumanizing' a man by calling him a tranny or telling him to put on a pair of pants instead of a dress, then the word loses a bit of the raw power meant to describe specific, uniquely horrific acts like chattel slavery, large-scale extermination, crushing totalitarianism, or sadistic torture.
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