Really is, isn’t is?
The OP of this thread regards anything short of his own level of vituperative frothing-at-the-mouth at anyone who disagrees with him as being soft on “the Right.” I don’t see any point in responding to these kinds of charges from him more than once per incident, because he has proven himself incapable of any kind of self-reflection. Having the moderators repeat themselves does not do the rest of us any good either, because we already get it.
Of course, I should know better than to open one of these threads from this poster and be exposed yet again to all that heavy breathing.
I strongly suspected from early on that he was a stealth conservative whose whole schtick was trying to make liberals look bad. His frequent homophobic posts didn’t disabuse me of that notion.
Somebody tell me this is sarcasm.
OP drew a warning here because of his longstanding habit of making the same types of hijacks and digressions compulsively. That’s a moddable pattern. But in this case, independent of that pattern, this warning is off base. White nationalism and birth rate anxiety are inseparable topics in the current moment.
Take a step back and ask yourself why the popular discourse has abruptly shifted toward hand-wringing over “The Birth Rate” over the past few years.
The birth rate is normally just a peripheral concern of sociologists and economists unless GDP growth is at risk. Or unless someone’s soft-peddling a political agenda. Remember “The Population Bomb”, now-discredited? That was about runaway population growth, but the social undercurrent at the time was about women’s control of their bodies and abuse of the environment. Concerns about population growth was carrying a lot of the water for that.
Now, suddenly “the birthrate” is something the man or woman in the street has top of mind as a concern, except this time because it’s falling. Suspicious! Why now, though? If it’s economic, America can fix that problem trivially by admitting more immigrants.
But… the people who are most obsessed with “the falling birthrate” tend to have the opposite stance about admitting more immigrants. They don’t want it. This demonstrates that the energy behind this conversation is about the wrong kind of population growth. They are not worried about "the falling birthrate, they are worried about the relative decrease in white birthrate.
So to borrow a weather metaphor, this discourse isn’t just random popup showers emerging here and there, it’s a whole weather system, a hurricane whose hot air is white nationalism. Normies pick it up by decontextualized happenstance, because there are good reasons to worry about falling birthrate if it’s not offset by immigration.
Everyone needs to understand what they’re laundering when they’re talking about the birthrate divorced from socioeconomic concerns and the emerging white replacment theory. Der_Trihs was right to call it out and the warning ought to be reconsidered. In this current moment, birth rate anxiety and white nationalism are inseparable topics.
I strongly endorse this.
It is laughable, I agree. Rather, where moderation has consistently failed over the years is that it caters to longstanding posters regardless of political affiliation. The knock-on effect of this is that problematic but longstanding posters, after years of getting away with being problematic, have a very difficult time adjusting to getting modded for things that newer posters would have been banned for in short order.
But those growing pains are still preferable to different classes of posters getting treated differently under the rules.
It’s possible to acknowledge this and also not want a thread to be another “conservatives want to kill all brown people” thread, which is definitely the direction that post was trying to pull the conversation in.
I’m perfectly willing to agree that the OP’s hyperbole nearly always has some level of truth in it, sometimes to a large degree. That doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for every thread, or even most threads.
I agree with you maybe 90% on this. But the specifics of the OP’s post are still a bit problematic.
If he’d kept it to just the first half of the post – “these people are white nationalists” – it would have been a useful contribution. But the latter half about “most definitely killing all the undesirables” is the hyperbole he is well known for, and it can and does sidetrack threads.
I can support moderation for the “killing them all part.” But the mention of white nationalism should not have been moderated, and I hope the mods reconsider that.
@Johnny_Bravo, @HMS_Irruncible, @TroutMan, I want to clear up a tiny bit of confusion.
The actual moderation was what I quoted earlier by @What_Exit :
and myself
Note - the specific moderation doesn’t mention White nationalism specifically, and the P&E mod discussion was about the hobby-horse (which, we acknowledge is sadly relevant to a number of Right Wingers and especially white Nationalists) and massive hijack on the intended genocide of brown people.
The sections you seem to be referring too are quotes from a very small section of an extended complaint when the OP protested the warning via DMs.
And even in the section quoted above (from a part of @Aspenglow’s rebuttal) is that his efforts to make a connection are uncited, and so common we cannot help but doubt his claims that he’s making a good faith effort to stay on topic. Again, the post in question from upthread.
Note we are talking about the pattern. And if you saw the number of warnings, the flags, and notes (many of which were Warnable but see @Johnny_Bravo’s point that long term posters get a TON of slack)…
I am not blaming you or any of the others - you’re operating with incomplete information, which again was not helped by the OP not citing the actual moderation and jumping to claims of Political Bias. Instead, @Der_Trihs is heading in the direction that many long term posters have over the years of the board. A history of questionable, borderline posts that get worse over time, followed by lots of Notes to do better, digging in the heels, more notes, and finally warnings because the behavior doesn’t change.
Edit: never mind, I wanted to reply to something here but it would take this ATMB thread off-topic
That’s fair enough, most of us don’t have all the context, and there is kind of a foghorn-affect that can undermine a valid point. Can’t really be disputed.
It also seems to me that modding for tone or tendency can also become a mutually-intensifying pattern that can distort the perception of the actual posting or moderation. Again most of us don’t have access to full context, but it’s something worth thinking about.
Thank you for your efforts to understand. Yes, I agree that there can be unfortunate feedback loops, which is why I fully credit @What_Exit for giving himself some time to decide if a warning was merited, and get feedback from @Aspenglow and myself. Thus the two and half hours between the initial note and the warning (thankfully, your P&E staff tend to be on frequently!).
As is said repeatedly in the thread, we consider @Der_Trihs to be sincere in his beliefs, with good points to add. But because he’s something of a crusader, he lets his passion on the issue drive his posting, rather than following the OP. And because he’s certain he’s right, when the moderators point this out, he is very likely to lash out with accusations that we’re somehow on the other side rather than consider what we’re saying. Or, and this is what is getting him modded, to just ignore the moderation rather than even considering the POV of the mods and other posters.
NOTE - the above is my personal read on his motivations. I could be completely wrong, but wanted to emphasize the point that I (and I fully believe the other P&E mods) think he’s sincere in his feelings, but is absolutely proudly breaking the rules because he’s sincere.
I think it relevant that the thread I “hijacked” by mentioning the white nationalist motives of pro-natalism, has drifted into a conversation largely about the bigotry and ethnocentriist nature of pro-natalism. Everyone is just avoiding the words “white nationalist”.
So much for it being off topic.
If you think it’s hyperbole, you haven’t been paying attention to current events. We’re in the run-up to a second Holocaust, and once again people are trying to claim that the fanatics trying to racially purify a nation won’t do what their rhetoric and literature calls for. History repeating itself.
No, I’m not breaking the rules; I am fact trying to stay within them. That’s just you deciding that I can’t possibly think you are wrong and that my comments are, in fact, on topic. Even when other people make similar comments, which somehow aren’t “hijacking” when they do it.
I’m not “breaking the rules”, I’m being targeted for special treatment by your own admission. That’s literally what people are calling for in this thread, that I’m “bad” and deserve special, extra-hostile moderation. And my “badness” is (drumroll) saying mean things about the Right, just as I said.
So yay, in this case it’s not just right wing bias but personal hostility. With a hefty dose of bad faith arguments to boot.
Since you do not accept my good-faith explanations, I will not bother you with further rebuttals.
Funny not one flag for those off topic posts.
I think it is more challenging to be a thoughtful right-wing participant here. You post stuff. Leftish people post stuff. Leftish people’s post draws some fire, but only some of it is politically motivated. Your own stuff draws a lot of fire, much of it politically motivated, because you’ve expressed an opinion fewer people agree with. When you disagree with someone and encounter it over the course of many threads, it can easily devolve into a personal dispute where everything the other person says pisses you off. That works both ways too but there’s one of you and a lot more of the lefish people who are pissed off by what you post.
I am in no way embracing right-wing perspectives, nor am I saying there haven’t been right-wing trolls trying their damndest to piss off the board regulars. There definitely have been.
But I admire the conservative-minded SDMB regulars who have stuck to their (proverbial and in some cases literal) guns and met us eyeball to eyeball and NOT risen to trollish hateful attacks.
I don’t really want to live in an echo chamber.
And I don’t want to live in a hostile environment.
And that’s what the Dope was - for me, for many other minorities - when “thoughtful” right-wingers were less challenged by the Dope as a whole.
Right-wing thought is itself trollish and hateful and expressing it here very much is an attack. Always has been, even when the mods were giving posts questioning the mental competence of entire races of people or the sanity of the entire trans segment of society a pass just because they were seen as “polite” (by the privileged) . So no, “thoughtful” right-wingers are not any different from the rest.
Also, massive fallacy that gun control is a R/L issue - plenty of LW pro-gun people too.
Personally, I agree with the people saying this particular warning is a bad call.
One of his major points was that he was no more off topic than anyone else. The fact that no one else got reported is entirely consistent with his argument.
I saw the thread before you moderated it. I actually specifically remember noting that it was nice that what was “on topic” was not being so strictly restrained, allowing the topic to find its grounding. And it was not only Der Trihs’s post that led me to that.
Because they are not, in fact off topic any more than my own was. Which was my point.
Oh. Well, then I see this as a huge problem. You have a poster who you state is entirely sincere in his beliefs, and he is vehemently arguing that he believes he is being mistreated and did not actually break the rules.
Yet you also claim he is deliberately and proudly breaking the rules.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. Everything about his responses to his Warnings seems entirely sincere. He is very much not saying “I broke your rules because they are stupid.”
He clearly thinks he is being singled out, and that his posts were no more out of line than others. And we have his entire past history as noted in his Pit thread. When JC changed the rules of GD so long ago, his entire posting history changed. When he objects to posts, you never see him say anything outside of DMs and ATMB.
I object strongly to this characterization. This sort of thing very much plays into his belief he is being unfairly singled out.
I again point out that he is far from the only person who doesn’t see his post as off topic.
And I will add that the link to white supremacy is patently obvious. He was replying to Velocity who was discussing pro-life as a birthrate control belief. By now we all know that this became part of the Republican platform due to white supremacy. The fact he brought that up is not at all evidence he was trying to hijack the thread.
I had thought this was just a disagreement over what was or wasn’t on topic. I very much stand up against any accusation that he’s deliberately and proudly breaking the rules and lying about it.
That’s a severe accusation to make against a long time poster. I would invite you to read how much he was defended in his own Pit thread. How often he stayed on the right side of the rules. A guy who can’t even get successfully pitted is not a troll.