Precisely accurate.
Prior to the warning I received from Jonathan Chance, I certainly did not feel a chilling effect either.
“A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been falsely arrested.”
Still confused. Do you claim the chilling effect has anything to do with politics? Have you changed your mind since you stated it was not the result of bias, or is there some way to square the two?
If you have somehow found a way to square the two, are you certain that your squaring is the likeliest explanation, and is not influenced by confirmation bias?
How can a warning that you thought was proper and justified have a chilling effect/
The speed limit is 55. I am pulled over for going 60. I agree the ticket is proper and justified.
If I notice that cars with a Dallas Cowboys sticker are permitted to drive 65 before they are pulled over, and cars with Redskins stickers get ticketed for 60, I would contend that there was a chilling effect in play for expressing my Redskins fandom.
Hopefully made clear by my illustration above.
I can’t think of a good way to definitively eliminate confirmation bias, so, no, I am not certain. That is, I FEEL sure, but that’s what I’d feel if swayed by confirmation bias.
The post to which you are responding was a joking conflation of the voter ID issue and the issue in this thread. The truth is that message board moderation is not and cannot be subject to these kind of legalistic categories. Effective moderation is inherently discretionary and subjective and content-based. It will therefore always be subject to significant biases. The best fix, which you’ve oddly backed off from it seems, is to seek more political balance among the moderators. Trying to make everything into a categorical, discretion-less rule will not make the moderation better.
That said, I think the case for bias or chilling effect in this instance is pretty weak. I thought the rule as enunciated in this thread was as follows:
Political comments in GQ are permissible when:
(a) the original question has been definitely answered; and
(b) where the poster is clearly expressing an opinion and not trying to pass it off as a factual answer; and
(c) at least part of the post is on-topic; and
(d) a hijack based on the post hasn’t happened yet (else a mod note re-directing the conversation may become necessary if it does happen).
Seems like a sensible and relatively categorical set of factors to me. There’s far less room for bias in that one than in many of the other modding customs on this board, IMO.
That rule just encourages folks, if they wish to see the post moderated, to engage in a hijack in order to draw the attention of the moderators. And the poster needn’t brake any rules himself-- just challenge the factual nature of the political statement.
I haven’t backed off that fix. I agree it’s one possible cure. I am simply not arguing specifically for it. I think there are other efficacious fixes.
If I choose to express a political opinion in GQ consistent with the above guidelines, and receive a warning for violating the bright-line rule that appears in theGQ sricky thread regarding politics in GQ, what recourse have I? “Richard Parker told me I could?”
You said “fixes”, as in more than one. Care to tell us of other fixes that would help with this bias problem you are perceiving?
Has this happened to you or anyone else, or is this a perception without actual example?
I’m fascinated by all these mental gymnastics dedicated to plowing forward with an argument of essentially zero merit. Yes, the above accurately captures one of your complaints, that there is supposedly some kind of “bright line” about pulling a thread off topic that has made it impossible for you to make the kinds of comments that, apparently, liberals can make with impunity.
Yet we see threads all over GQ drift off into incidental subtopics all the time, often with informative and interesting results. And if you mean that moderation is disproportionately focused on thwarting political digressions when they lean conservative, well, we just had a couple of examples upthread of rather snarky politically charged conservative digressions that got by without being hit by the kinds of sanctions you seem to be in such fear of. For some reason, the evidence never seems to support your contentions.
Speaking as a disinterested ordinary observer, ISTM that a rational view of the situation would reveal that the kinds of things that get mod-noted or sometimes even warned in GQ tend to be either (a) hostile or insulting attacks against a political figure or group, especially if they’re just totally out of the blue and totally irrelevant, or (b) a sequence of off-topic political exchanges that is hijacking the thread. IMHO, the moderation in GQ is generally pretty easy-going and focused on keeping it a forum for fact-based discussion, which is not the same as iron-fisted enforcement of some draconian principle that no opinion, joke, or politically-tinged comment of any kind may ever be introduced. The allegation that such might be allowed but only if they’re “liberal” digressions is even more ridiculous.
It is, in other words, a forum of fact-based objective discussion that is populated by humans, and discussions proceed accordingly. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Your alleged fears are incomprehensible.
Now we’re talking about moderation in GD or Elections. Putting aside for a moment the fact that the warning was justified, by your own admission, a number of us have made appearances here in ATMB objecting – with various degrees of merit – that a warning from JC was excessively harsh. A few have been reversed, most remained, but often with a general view among the participants that a mod note would have been more appropriate. Such is life. But I don’t remember any of them alleging political bias.
Again, this “bias” thing is a perspective that has never actually been substantiated. Your elaborate rationalization – that the board is so liberal-leaning that even though the mods themselves may not be biased, the effect of the rules places conservatives at a disadvantage – strikes me as an artifice contrived precisely to deal with this absence of evidence for your position, whose major virtue is that it’s so vague that it can’t be subjected to any meaningful test and so can’t be disproven.
Recall from the above that quite a number of folks have felt that they were moderated unduly harshly, and in a few cases the warning was even rescinded, and none of it had anything to do with politics. Is it possible that you, who actually admitted the warning was justified, are just affected by confirmation bias of an unsubstantiated but strongly held belief? If not, you must have evidence of posts that were considerably more offensive than yours in the same forum that did NOT receive warnings simply because they were liberal-leaning.
Is “us,” the royal ‘we,’ as the Queen might say? Are you speaking on behalf of your intestinal flora? A tapeworm? Have you a rodent in your shirt pocket equally anxious to hear what I have to say?
Or is this a rhetorical technique similar to the earlier assertion that no one is convinced by what I am saying?
The answer to your question is: when a GQ post is brought to the attention of a mod as violative of a rule, it deserves a note as opposed to a decision to let it go unless it spawns a hijack.
This answer was provided to you by inference in my post #12, and explicitly in post #14 by John Mace and in posts #54, #64, #69 by me.
I obviously cannot be responsible for your failure to inform your mouse, your cestode, or your enterococcus faecalis, Your Majesty.
In what way do you believe yourself to be disinterested? From my perspective, you seem quite interested in advancing politically liberal results.
- I used “we” to mean “any/everyone in this thread” since this isn’t a Private Message that we are exchanging back and forth, and
- You used the term “fixes”. I already know of the one fix you have proposed for this problem you perceive, and was inquiring about the others.
Here’s that link again to the post where you explicitly state that you are trying to get more conservative mods on the team -
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18752090&postcount=342
And here, I’ll quote it again:
Even if you’re not, atm, stating that your goal is to get more conservative mods on the team, you have stated that that is your goal in the past.
If you’re referring to post #47, then no, we didn’t. The first supposed “politically charged conservative digression” was Saint Cad speaking about “sovereign citizens:”
That’s not conservative.
The second is perhaps close. In discussing the veniere loophole in Yellowstone Park that might allow a federal crime to go unpunished, Saint Cad says:
But that’s a criticism leveled by both sides against both sides (see, e.g. Citizens United and Bush v Gore). The specific topic was murder, which neither side can be said to favor, and so it’s not crystal clear it’s meant as a dig. It’s necessary to believe the poster is conservative before it can plausibly be catagorized as a conservative dig.
But let’s agree, arguendo that this second example was a dig.
Saint Cad felt confident enough to post it. Perhaps his warning record is clean enough that he’s willing to risk another warning. And if I’m not so accepting of risk, why must his risk aversion be imputed to me?
Asked and answered in post 105.
Why are you continuing to forget subsequent clarifying posts in that vein? We all saw them quoted earlier.
Why don’t you tell us why you are focusing on that post and ignoring the others? Some of us want to know.
Not at all, unfortunately; in your example, it’s difficult to see the disparity as anything other than bias, whereas you claimed it wasn’t motivated by bias. In the only important aspect of the analogy, the two are disanalogous.
In the sense that I have no vested interest in the moderation of this board, other than wanting it to be fair, so I’m not inclined to defend anything I perceive as unfair. My comments stand; you can respond to them or not.