Re: Beet & fake outrage thread

[Donerail]

i love to discuss the serious policy proposals i wholeheartedly believe in on the chapo trap house subreddit, a place of enlightened political discourse where there are never jokes, memes, or "irony."

[Beet]

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.

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.

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That's always the excuse, isn't it?

[Gass3268]

Good to see that Beet is getting the King Lear/LimoLiberal treatment.

[Donerail]

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That's always the excuse, isn't it?

Jason Lewis hasn't tried it, so I guess not!

[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.

[Doimper]

Relevant:

[Beet]

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.

I'm not trying to antagonize anyone. I usually don't personally attack anyone, even though I've received a lot of personal attacks from other people.

Edit: I don't really want to extend this any further, however also to clarify for anyone reading after this, I can't help whether other people like me or not. Of course, I'd like to be liked. I'd like to contribute constructively to the forum and be considered as someone who does. I try to be friendly to posters without sucking up to people or seeking validation. I don't make posts trying to "get a reaction" or "score points." I make colorful posts sometimes because I feel that sometimes they can contribute more to a thread than a tame post. I think it makes the point more vividly. But I understand this may be misunderstood as provocation or overgeneralization. Still, lots of highly provocative stuff gets posted here (like one user saying "ban the GOP") without being deleted. But of course I respect the will of the mod for the board if given notice.

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

A shame that post was deleted.  Reddit's b3t4s0yb0y12345 sounds like an enlightening fellow.

[AlabamaGujjuGirl]

I wasn't expecting to make a first post on this forum based on my birth country and this is probably me sticking my nose where it doesn't belong, but I noticed Sonia Gandhi's name and wanted to comment that the NDA (primarily a center-right faction) refused to seat her on the basis of "laws" that prohibited her from becoming prime minister.  In that case, it was a demonstration of the NDA's rejection of having a woman as PM, so I'm not exactly sure what point Beets is trying to demonstrate.  

[Beet]

I wasn't expecting to make a first post on this forum based on my birth country and this is probably me sticking my nose where it doesn't belong, but I noticed Sonia Gandhi's name and wanted to comment that the NDA (primarily a center-right faction) refused to seat her on the basis of "laws" that prohibited her from becoming prime minister.  In that case, it was a demonstration of the NDA's rejection of having a woman as PM, so I'm not exactly sure what point Beets is trying to demonstrate.  

Well I won't pretend to contest knowledge of the situation with someone born in India, but I was referring to some reports that said the NDA objected to her foreign origins. For instance, the BBC article said that was one of the reasons she opted out. Given that, it seems the political system worked against having an ethnic Italian PM.

Welcome to the forum.

[AlabamaGujjuGirl]

Thank you!

And yes, my statement was a bit abrupt.  There was definitely major controversy about her being foreign-born and, to be fair, India's history *had* already included a female PM in Indira Gandhi. 

Mind you, I was...eight years old at the time, but it was a complicated mess and one that I hope my birth nation doesn't repeat anytime soon. 

[here2view]

Relevant:

[Torie]

Well this thread seems to have become the toxic waste dump of the Congressional Elections board, now hasn't it? I hope it's adequately fenced, to protect the children.

[MAINEiac4434]

WHY IS HE A MOD

[UncleSam]

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.

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.

[Torie]

Part of Virginia's rationale is the additional element of an incendiary comment being off topic, and devolving off into what she views as Beet's zone of obsession or whatever. You may have a point that there are similar cases when a Dem/left wing poster did the same thing, but then one should ask I think 1) was the post reported, and 2) what was the adjudication?

In addition, Mods have different styles. At the margins, I tend to be quite lax myself about content (and largely avoid the trolling rap absent unusual circumstances), and a hardass when it comes to insults. Other mods have different styles. At the margins, what we do are subjective exercises, and reasonable people, and reasonable mods, can differ a bit.

Having said all of that, if a post is edgy, inflammatory, and off topic (or largely so), and derails a thread, I myself would take some action. It is discourteous to other posters to have threads derailed by one poster's need for attention or to vent their personal irresistible impulses, or whatever.

[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.

[Badger]

Reminder: Beet is a moderator on this hellsite.

Nothing shocks anymore in that regard (with apologies to TG, Virginia, and a select few others).

[Beet]

Stop trying to make "#walkaway" happen people, please.

The #walkaway phenomenon is a real thing. Keep in mind that it's more of a slow but steady trickle over a span of many years, not a sudden jump since 2016. I started losing faith in the Democratic Party around 2012, but not as much for the American Left. Certain shifts in the American Left that started in 2014 was what killed it all, though I definitely wasn't going to embrace the Republicans at that time either, but I did consider myself libertarian-ish. Trump in 2016 and the left's behavior since then was what really put the nail in the coffin, but I'm not quite ready to be a full fledged Republican unless they stop being the party of Reagan (the mythologized version), George W. Bush, Rick Santorum, etc.

If you take a look at the #walkaway facebook group, you'll see varying stories from all sorts of people. Those people aren't necessarily going to vote for the Republicans on November 6, but they won't give the Democrats votes either. Arguably, you won't need them if turnout for the Democrats remains high and turnout for the Republicans has been mediocre as it has been for these past few special elections. That doesn't mean that people aren't abandoning the Democratic Party and the left, it just means that a greater portion of the people who vote in these elections are energized progressives and Democrats, while an even larger number of people who *might* have voted for the Republican stayed home for varying reasons. Sometimes the reason is as sad as simply not knowing that there was an election that day.

Anyway, I don't see what's so bad about critiquing one's parents and highlighting their conduct as indicative of the country's current polarized and vicious nature,  if they went so out of their way to slight your political career.

Thank you. That's exactly what I've been saying. The fall in Democratic voter registration since Trump's election is clear, objective proof that people are #WalkingAway. The sad thing is, if the Republicans lose seats in the fall, people will use it as evidence that there is no dissatisfaction with the left, when it would really only be a repetition that the president's party usually suffers during midterms.

[UncleSam]

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.

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.

Public outcry as a means of gauging a response is essentially just begging for a discussion meltdown into continual appeals to emotion.

I acknowledge that I don’t know Beet (or Limo) and that your far greater experience in interacting with these users makes it highly likely you are correct as to their true intentions. However, choosing to punish them because of the response (rather than the content they post) is not the way to go about this.

Sorry if this comes off as overly negative, I know firsthand how difficult it is to moderate online discussion so I do empathize with the difficulty and thanklessness involved.

[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.