Re: Beet & fake outrage thread

[Virginiá]

Re: Beet

Last I checked, saying "the left" as a whole wants to press buttons to kill all straight white people is an insane level of generalizing and accusing a massive group of people of wanting something that probably only a small slice would actually say. Gross hyperbole if you ask me.

Also, I can't help but feel like you're actually picking fights as part of your new persona, trying to burnish your newly-found partisan conservative credentials by picking at issues every place you can. In this case, that reddit person isn't Rep. Lewis and not a politician either, right? So why are you using absurd statements from random people to balk at lefties on here?

Deleted for trolling and gross hyperbole. I'm going to be diligent and generous in moderating your posts on the election boards, Beet.

[Virginiá]

Oh right, because 2,700 is representative of tens of millions of people. You can keep bloviating about your party switch all you want, because I don't believe you are sincere. I'm going to see how long you stick with this.

[Virginiá]

Oh right, because 2,700 is representative of tens of millions of people. You can keep bloviating about your party switch all you want, because I don't believe you are sincere. I'm going to see how long you stick with this.

The fact is, this kind of language is tolerated on the left, which the Sarah Jeong New York Times incident also showed. A newspaper with 3 million subscribers now has an Editorial Board member with the same language. That's more people than will vote in Min-02 for Lewis. You want him to be, essentially, disqualified for Congress for what he said, but the same language is accepted on your side. That's called hypocrisy.

Beet, I'll be honest, I don't wish to discuss this topic anymore with you or really anyone. I already posted my thoughts in the original thread, with the gist being that I think she's an asshole but I also agree there are different dynamics at play as well. If you're going to paint me with that broad brush though, I suggest you pack it up because you probably don't know much at all about me.

However, just because you have a bone to pick about this doesn't mean you get to turn every thread about racist politicians into a "LOL LOOK AT HYPOCRISY" or whatever discussion. If you want to discuss that woman's comments further, I suggest you take it to another thread.

[Virginiá]

Topic split (sorry Arch, hate to make you captain of this garbage scow)

[Virginiá]

Hypocrisy is a legitimate counterargument to make. If you don't want to discuss it then don't, but you're using your moderating powers to shut down someone calling out racism, which is de facto defending such racism. I don't need to "know much about [you]" to object to this choice, Virginia.

Actually the primary reason I deleted your post was for Excessive Hyperbole, for the image you attached describing The Left. I explained why already. Normally I don't infract for hyperbole much at all, usually because posts worth deleting fall along other infractions, but 3 things converged that made it delete-worthy in this case: (1) The post was more geared towards HYPOCRISY on racism and scoring points rather than this specific incident with Lewis and more so, the actual election, (2) The image was hyperbole, if even serious, would still represent a really small segment of the left and yet you're trying to act it's so large you can just apply the entire left to it. Based on Dave's own examples, I think even he would have deleted that, (3) If you haven't noticed Beet, people on Atlas seem to dislike you, and on these boards in particular, quite a lot actually. The fact that people are so annoyed with you means your posts are unusually likely to receive blowback and that post was seemingly designed for it. If you're going to post material meant to score points about some general subject only marginally related to the topic +/- election and it is geared towards getting a reaction, and creates arguments, I am absolutely going to delete it. If you want to antagonize people, open your own thread on IP or PD and troll debate away.

I told users here a while ago that I was not going to stand for users waltzing in and throwing bombs into threads for their own personal amusement (or really any other unacceptable reason). The image and remark at the end was too much in this case.

[Virginiá]

You aren’t wrong that Beet’s comment was excessive hyperbole to the point of being misleading at best and false in the scope of a reasonable interpretation. However, I disagree with your decision to delete it. I disagree because I see equally disingenuous attacks made on the Republican Party a hundred times a day on these forums, attacks which are either allowed to pass or even openly approved of by you or the vast majority of the forum. I don’t mind such attacks being allowed to stand because this is the internet and it doesn’t bother me if certain posters are deluded, but it does bother me if the converse is silenced while the far more frequent is tacitly approved of. That is not the recipe for healthy discussion, and unfortunately I think your partisan leanings show through when discussing questionable posting behavior or vicious attack statements made by members of either side.

How can I be partisan here if I don't even believe Beet had some sudden conservative awakening? My thoughts are that he is screwing with everyone just like he did last time he had a sudden switch to the Republican Party. So as far as I am concerned, he is a Democrat, trolling people as he likes to do. And that colors my opinions of everything he posts. That's the thing about trolling - people rarely admit what they are doing, so you are left to interpret their behavior, and I'm not going to be that person that refuses to do anything about it just because it's often somewhat ambiguous if they are genuine or not. However in cases like this, I have even less sympathy because if they wanted to be taken seriously, maybe they shouldn't have screwed with people on and off over the years.

Also, and I've said this numerous times on this board and others, a big part of my actions regarding trolls are based on the effect they have on threads. LimoLiberal's lazy trolling was making some threads constantly unreadable, and even if you think it was unreasonable that people were letting themselves get riled up by such a person, I'm still not blaming them for something a blatant troll is doing. I'd rather address the person screwing with people for fun, even if people think I'm being partisan by doing it. Likewise, with Beet, within minute(s) of him making that post, he was already lighting a fire under the thread's butt and I've been on here long enough to know where that was going. It'd be one thing if he was posting thoughtful arguments in good faith and people were just being unreasonable with him, but that post was anything but. The last part was practically designed to piss people off.

I know there are left-leaning users who post troll-ish comments here. There are a couple off the top of my head who I wish would cut out the krazen-like comments, but I almost never see anyone respond to these comments either. I'm not pretending like every last instance of trolling can be eradicated on this forum or any forum, which is why I said numerous times in the open forum that I was mostly just going to focus on users who constantly caused real disruptions to threads, because whatever your opinion of moderating trolls is, one thing most people should be able to agree on is that we can't have threads regularly erupting in multi-page arguments where some a-hole drops a bomb and watches the place devour itself over it. Before that, some users were practically ready to stop coming here because they were sick of the constant thread derailing. In the end, if someone lights a fire, it needs to be put out, regardless of why it started.

I dunno about you, but regardless of how partisan I am, one thing I can't stand is people arguing incessantly and derailing threads all the time, and it doesn't matter if they are liberal or conservative. eg: neither I nor others want to have to sort through half a dozen pages of junk to find generic ballot polls in the polling thread.

[Virginiá]

Sorry, but this is extremely misguided. You are defining the severity of the trolling based almost entirely on the response to the trolling, which basically just validates whoever is in the majority and wants to cry the loudest (in both cases on this forum, overwhelmingly Democrats). Validating being a small child on the internet and crying to have those with contrary opinions banned is not the path to healthy discussion. If you expect Rs to put up with D trolls as long as they don’t cry about it, you should expect Ds to put up with R trolls regardless of how much they cry about it.

I'd be fine dealing with trolling on their merits, but for as much as I have tried to push for this (and I have), it still stands that Dave never explicitly said trolling wasn't allowed, even if it seems like something he'd be against. Because of that, I moved to deal with the fallout from said trolling, which often results in pages of arguments and unreadable threads, which is something I can work with. If someone turns a thread on its head, I'm going to deal with that. I'm very much aware of your concerns but I don't see any other option available to me as of this time. The common rebuttal to that is "don't do anything then," which is absolutely not acceptable to me.

You raise valid concerns of course, and it's not like I haven't thought about that, but my options are limited. And like I've said numerous times, people should rope Dave into this so we can deal with it better.