Colibri's "Political" moderation

About This Message Board
1

Colibri has moderated 2 posts as “political”, made by different posters, and I don’t feel that this is appropriate. An argument could be made that perhaps these posts are still against the rules, however, which rules were violated? Colibri has slapped me with a warning point because I “should have known better”. How should I have known better than to make a non-political post complaining about a problem with the United States because it was political?

The posts in question :

From me :

*There isn’t any. Most of the time, the cop saying you did it is all it takes. The police are supposed to present a reading from a sensor but they don’t have to. What you’re talking about is the least of the problems. The state can take away your freedom for years, decades, even take your life, and the prosecutors have a direct incentive to fake, tamper with, suppress evidence, or just trick a jury into voting with their emotions. Prosecutors are popularly elected and are far more likely to be reelected if they slam accused criminals with long prison sentences, as many of them as possible, and the public will not believe those criminals if they say they were innocent (even if they turn out to be innocent years later).
*

*Yes, the system is hopelessly corrupt. Judges and prosecutors elected by appealing to people’s baser instincts. If the cops pull you over, they can legally seize any assets you may have if they claim that they are somehow connected to criminal action. They can keep this money even though you are never convicted of a crime or even charged with a crime. It is hell to try to get it back.

Canadians are warned not to bring significant amounts of cash to the US.
404 | ZeroHedge…-take-cash-usa*

This forum was “general questions”. Teasing out the factual statements here :

  1. I’m saying that a cop stating a defendant committed a crime is usually all the proof a court needs. This is a fact.

  2. I’m saying police don’t need to present an electronic record of any kind to prove someone was speeding in some jurisdictions, their word is enough. Also a fact.

  3. I said the State can take away a person’s freedom in the USA for years/decades/life. A fact. (some countries limit how long prison sentences can be unless the defendant was *really *bad, the USA does not). Fact.

  4. I said that prosecutors in the USA are popularly elected and are more likely to be re-elected if they manage to send a lot of people to prison. Fact.

  5. I said the general public in the USA generally sees the statements made by accused criminals as being obvious lies. Fact - my source is places like the CNN comment sections, where even people facing trial who were acquitted, there are countless “they are GUILTY! GET EM” posts. This is how the public generally is.

  6. A Canadian is saying the USA criminal justice system is “hopelessly corrupt”. This is basically a fact, because in the USA, if you don’t have a highly paid lawyer to defend yourself against the highly paid lawyers who are judge and prosecutors, you generally go to jail. This is corruption, albeit not the “direct bribery” kind. This is also a well established fact, I can link numerous studies showing how big a difference expensive private attorneys can make for their clients.

  7. A Canadian is warning visitors to the USA not to carry cash, as the police will steal it. Sound advice.

See, a political statement needs at the least to contain an opinion, like “Donald Trump for prezident”. My post does not, it’s a series of factual statements. No political party of any sort that I know of is trying to fix any of this, so I can’t be agitating for that party.

It would be fair for Colibri to say “please source that post better, I find <this statement> to be insufficiently supported by facts”. That’s fine. I would google for my sources and include them. I think it is inappropriate moderator behavior for me to be docked a point and told I committed a rule violation when it is quite clear I did not break the cited rule.

2

Cite? that you were warned, like a link to your post.

3

This appears to be the post in question.

4

And this is the warning for the other poster. And here is Colibri’s explanation:

I think Colibri’s explanation of the warning was pretty clear. You might think your statements are all factual, but they are arguments, not answers to a GQ question. And the second post with “Yes, the system is hopelessly corrupt” is well beyond what’s usually allowed in GQ.

5

It’s wrong, and no rational finder of fact could agree with it. At all. An argument isn’t partisan or political, either…

Colibri is using the “political” excuse to ding posts and posters he doesn’t like. There is no rational way to tell if a post is “political” before you make it.

6

You were arguing a certain perception of how a court/trial works and the bias of same. That’s an opinion, not fact.

7

No, it’s a fact supported by overwhelming empirical evidence. Are you requesting cites or is it your unshakable opinion that it’s an opinion?

8

It’s a fact it’s an opinion.

9

Be more specific. I have a number of numbered facts above. If you disagree with one of them, specify which one, and explain why it is not a well known fact.

Nearly all courts, anywhere, are going to take the word of a sworn police officer. Nearly all juries ever sequestered, the word of a sworn police office stating they witnessed a crime is enough to get a conviction. Do you dispute this? By nearly all, I mean greater than 90%.

I gave a link to a news article where a traffic conviction was upheld because the officer stated he estimated the defendant’s speed.

And so on.

10

Most of the post that you were warned for was, in fact, your own opinion/bias.
The first sentence (with your cite) comes the closest to being anything “factual” in that entire post, but even that was still mostly just a blanket statement (“Oh, it happens MOST of the time, trust me!”, “Pretty much ALL of [specific group] does [specific thing]!”). While statements like that may be true, it doesn’t make it factual for sure.

11

You didn’t make that list in your original post, though. In the post, you gave a biased opinion. Had you made the numbered list that you made in the OP of this topic, it might have looked less like a political jab or rant.

Taking your post in the GQ thread as is, the warning was pretty justified.

12

Opinion–for which you can provide no evidence.

It is true that in some jurisdictions, speeding enforcement is based on the “expert testimony” of the policeman for his estimate of excessive speed rather than on RADAR recordings.

Irrelevant factoid. The state in any nation may deprive a person of liberty. So what?

Not all prosecutors are elected. The rest of your statement is opinion unsupported by evidence.

Opinion based on the wholly UNscientific appeal to the CNN peanut gallery. Clearly not a fact or all trials would end in convictions.

That the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed is arguable. That it is corrupt is merely an opinion.

It is a fact that a Canadian made such a claim. The claim, itself, is specious.

Your claims were mostly non-factual opinions. The involvement of declarations against the state make them political. If you want to defend such opinions, take them to Great Debates and stop foisting them off on General Questions. (I don’t recommend you taking them to Great Debates as I suspect that the poor quality of your logic and arguments will not serve you well, but they are more appropriate to that forum than to General Questions.)

13

Yes, the system is hopelessly corrupt.

That’s a fact? That the system is not just corrupt, but “hopelessly” corrupt?

14

There’s always been room in GQ for some leeway. Hell, in the very thread we’re talking about here, another poster got nothing more than a mild admonition for a snarky post that was, IMO, at least as much of a violation of the rules as Habeed’s post.

Still, i think it’s good to keep GQ as clutter-free as possible. It really is designed for factual answers, and i think it can be one of the most useful forums on the boards, especially if you don’t have to wade through a bunch of extraneous bullshit to see the factual stuff.

And Habeed, if you’ve been admonished for this sort of stuff before, you probably need to be a bit more careful. This is especially true if you’ve run across the same person admonishing you on more than one occasion, because while they’re supposed to apply the rules impartially, the mods are human, and are as prone to partiality and grudges as anyone else on the boards. And while your own indiscretions add up over time, with patterns of behavior often cited as a reason for discipline, any error of judgment a mod happens to make is treated de novo, with no consideration of whether the person in question might have fucked up once or ten times or 100 times before.

I think, actually, that the most problematic warning in the thread you’re talking about wasn’t the one given to you; it was the one given to race_to_the_bottom.

Emphasis mine.

If the post deserves a warning by itself, that’s fine. But the highlighted section is completely unfair. I have, on literally hundreds of occasions, been reading through a thread, come to a post i wanted to respond to, and hit the “Quote” button without reading the rest of the thread. If you do that, there’s every reason to believe that you will not see a mod note or a warning. Mods often excuse their own omissions using the (very reasonable) argument that they don’t read every post; i think the same benefit of the doubt should be extended to posters as well. Especially if race_to_the_bottom, unlike Habeed, had no history of political jabs in GQ.

I would also suggest that race_to_the_bottom’s post, while containing some political barbs at the beginning, is more factual than anything else. He’s talking about civil asset forfeiture here, and while i understand John Mace’s point about the use of the term “hopelessly,” i would argue that, if there’s a single law-enforcement policy in the United States that can accurately and factually be described as “hopelessly corrupt” (at least in its current iteration), it is the process of civil asset forfeiture. The ACLU says it’s corrupt; the Cato institute says it’s corrupt; John Oliver says it’s corrupt; Democrats say it’s corrupt; Republicans say it’s corrupt; conservatives and libertarians and liberals all say it’s corrupt.

Cato
ACLU
John Oliver
GOPHouse.org
Mother Jones

15

Forget what I said above. My argument is the following. It’s not up to me to explain why my post is true or isn’t true. It’s up to Colibri to explain why I should have known my post, which mentions no political parties nor advocates for any particular political position, was “political”, before I made it. I got punished with an infraction because he says I knowingly made a political post in general questions.

I’m saying that nobody could have known a post criticizing an institution was “political” before making it. Colibri’s “after the fact” explanation is weak and not convincing. He can ban me, and he can probably ban anybody, and maybe Colibri has the power to shut the whole message board down on a whim. Nothing compels him to obey his own rules. However, the users of this board should know the moderation isn’t fair.

TLDR : mens rea. Colibri needs to show, with preponderance of the evidence, that I meant to violate the rules and should have known I was in violation before I pressed post. Instead, he’s come up with the most twist around, backhanded explanation for a “theory” of why I violated that particular rule, and there is no way I could have known he would use that ‘theory’ against me.

16

The fact that cites are missing because I don’t have several hours to generate them - all of the things are supported by literally a mountain of evidence - doesn’t change the factual nature of my arguments. You’re being willfully ignorant here.

There’s no reason to post to Great Debates because there isn’t anything to debate. The United States criminal justice system is the largest police state that has ever existed in human history. We can discuss in detail it’s failings, but the undisputed fact is it puts more people in cages to rot than any other country that has every existed, and it does not reduce the crime rate below that of other, “kinder” systems like all of Europe and Japan. Do you need quotes for this, too, or have you read one of the literally thousands of articles mentioning this?

So starting with the known fact that it is hopelessly corrupt, to the core, one can then point to specific failings. The fact is, the probability that most of the failings I mentioned are true, from an objective reality sense, not some “debate club” semantics, is also most likely true. I suppose it is possible that some of the failings I mentioned aren’t that bad, and actually the reason so many people in cages is <some other cause>, you can debate that.

Still, what we have here is Z is the outcome, and variables, A…Y are the inputs. A + B + C + D = Z. Z is an enormous injustice. Therefore, for there to be such an injustice, there must be injustice on the other side of the equation. The courts or the cops must be corrupt. And we can then work out why.

17

It is a fact that many people hold the opinion that the system is hopelessly corrupt. That doesn’t make it a fact.

18

I think some people are forgetting what the question was. All the OP was asking is if traffic tickets follow the same rule as criminal proceedings where one is “innocent until proven guilty”. That was all. Launching into an indictment of the criminal justice system is not really appropriate for GQ.

19

Pretty clear, really. Note that “political” is not the same as “partisan,” as some people, including you, seem to assume.

I’ve explained to you at considerable length by PM why political posts are not permitted in GQ. In fact, I reversed a previous warning because I thought you actually understood the rule after our discussion. It seems that I was mistaken.

Note that whether a post is factually true is not a defense against the “no political jabs” rule in GQ, which I have previously explained to you. Much of your post was not relevant to the OP of the thread in question, and would have been better suited to GD than GQ.

20

Whatever. I’ve seen plenty of more political observations than that let slide in GQ.

Anyway, my main objection, as i made clear, was the fact that race_to_the_bottom received a warning, basically, for failing to see a prior warning given to a different poster. That’s bullshit.