Conservatives of Wrong Planet

Post Reply New Topic

I was banned back in 09, when bans were always permanent, essentially for going to war with the mod team at the time over arbitrary and biased interpretation and application of the rules. It didn't matter in the end that I was right and had the better argument, they wanted me gone and so I was gone. How I got back, as one of only 2 members at the time to legitimately return from a ban, is a story for a different day, involving troll sites, creative murder methods, doxxing, you know, the usual. You could say the experience left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, along with a determination to fight unfair moderation whenever I saw it.

Is that supposed to be humorous? I don't think it's in the least bit cute or funny and I seriously wonder wtf you think you are doing right now.

Was there any kind of condition attached to your return when that ban was lifted?

I have seen the idea expressed several times here that fairness means applying the rules in exactly the same way to all people. This is nonsense. Our community consists of kids and adults with a broad range of verbal and intellectual ability and in a variety of emotional states. It would be unjust and foolish to treat a young teenager exactly the same way as an experienced adult, or a person who struggles to express themselves in words the same way as person with very high language skills like yourself.

If I had a lower estimation of your verbal abilities, I would not have sent the warning. I was genuinely shocked that you took that mock concern expressed by mikah as an occasion to make a nasty remark. The remote possibility that mikah might actually have felt some concern for viper only made it worse.

I guess if I could read minds, I would have known that you didn't mean to include viper in the scope of the other wrongplanet members you really needed to tell you don't like them being here, but I don't have that telepathic ability.

I don't understand why you, and apparently Jacoby think that you need to let people know that you enjoy their absence. I don't think that's something that ever needs to be said openly in a community like this. It's certainly not the same level of attack as saying "F you" but there is no way it's not an attack.

Do you really feel entitled to use a public forum to let other people know you don't like them? If that wasn't your goal, and the issue was behavioral you could so easily have said, "I don't miss their behavior."

This warning was of no consequence to you. You were in no danger of being even temporarily banned. I had no idea of your history or why this would be a sensitive issue for you. Unless you intend to launch a slew of personal attacks in future, nothing whatsoever would come of this.

Even if there were later occasions when you broke all the rules and got a ban, the bans are temporary now and the goal is to avoid permanently banning anyone who isn't a spammer, obscene troll or can't stop themselves from compulsively attacking others. Since you aren't any of those things, there really shouldn't be a problem. This thing that you are doing now, though, that's a different level altogether.

You want to poison the wells and salt the fields over debatable issues of interpretation? Really? Because you feel entitled to tell other members that you like it when they are gone? I thought you had better judgment.

I think as a community we need to decide what sort of community we want, and how we want mods to act within that community. This is particularly true of PPR and L&D.

I do think the current PPR set up is probably unsustainable. Frankly the rules are breached in a large portion of posts and nobody is happy about being told that they've broken them.

Do we want PPR to be a slinging match where users can vent out their long-standing grudges with little fear of reprisal? Do we want it to be a place you can only post with reputably-sourced information?

I'm particularly concerned about "implications" and such. Different people can have different interpretations of someone's words. For example, when Adamantium made a thread talking about racism, Angela perceived it as an attack on her. Darmok's ongoing thread about "leftist violence and fraud" has lots of leftists feeling prickled. It's possible this was intended or wasn't (and it seems like a place where ones political views are particularly likely to bias interpretation). And frankly if we can't attack communism in case it is seen as an attack on the communist who just posted then that makes political discussion almost impossible.

WrongPlanet is a particularly difficult place to try this sort of clampdown on implications. Some of us are very skilled with words and will quite deliberately skate around any rules without quite breaking them. I know I've deliberately done this in the past, and I know Dox does it because he's publicly enquired about loopholes before (and I think that fed into the views of the mod team on that warning). I'm sure you can all think of other users who phrase posts in a way that seems to be attacking a user but is technically attacking an argument or viewpoint. Others don't have that sort of ability and will cause offence and break the rules even when they don't mean to. There's a case that this happens to sly, who seems to be quite politically moderate but gets people's bristles up because he doesn't have tact.

Alex is not likely to change his view on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ableism (three of those are written into the rules, one is clear from precedent and the last is pretty much the point of the site). I would suggest that maybe a blanket ban on advocating for white nationalism might also be useful for the health of the site.

Just realised I'm not going anywhere but hopefully there's some food for thought there. I don't claim to have all the answers by any means and I'm not speaking as a mod.

I have to say I do find this quite funny. It's making me think of James Bond OO7. Of course, one has to have been banned permanently (and experience how traumatic it really can be - I was permanently banned back on Aspies Central) to see the humor. Hopefully, no one here will have to endure a permanent ban. I would really love to hear that story sometime, Mr. D. I didn't know that you had been through the same experience.

Note: Quote-threading and quote-spinning truncated to keep my post concise/relevant/specific.

Part of my absense was due to being unlawfully held hostage via various bills of attainder (and bills of pains and penalties are also included in the U.S. Constitution's ban on bills of attainder as found in Art. 1, § 9, cl. 3; Art. 3, § 10, cl. 1). Working on trying to get the insanity of an insane punitive system Abolished & replaced with a True Crime-Reduction Program of Rehabilitation in place instead.

Also related to the very first and original post of this thread... liberals simply out-number conservatives in the general population as a whole due to the massive liberal-bias of the «mainstream» corporate-controlled media-outlets. Conservative-minority is not unique to any particular forums (and is very common to most on-line outlets in addition to the fact that forces are always actively at work to censor/suppress anything that is able to logically expose any flaws/hypocrisies amongst the liberal-agendas). I usually just stick this sign up if I come across anything that seems to be some kind of Authoritarian Thought-Police...

Not sure how to word my response but, consider that, even if you can trust one generation's leadership of any particular guild/organisation/business/etc., that does not automatically mean that the next generation of leaders can. Were I to make any volunteer-efforts at moderating, I would only offer to be a moderator over moderator-posts/actions/activity/etc., rather than moderating the members and, even then, I would not consider the word «moderator» an accurate word for the role that I would choose to assume. You might not necessarily like the changes, for example, when time-limits are applied to even the owner of a web-site or forum itself (not everybody would necessarily be as qualified as Alex to be the site/forum-owner). Perhaps «Arbitrator» would be a better term for me since «Moderator» tends to have the Urban-Definition of Police, and we all know how most of Society now feels about most Police, considering that there seems to be a lack of «policing» over the police themselves (and I question the mental-sanity of anybody who would ever want to accept a wage of a meager 30 pieces of silver in order to commit various acts of sin under a false-gods calling themselves The State of [which-ever-State] as they sell their souls unto the Devil to be cast into After-Life Abyss to be dined upon by wicked beasts and verily Flayed Alive by the demonic forces of God for an entire eternity or two of eternities and a day; this is not a laughing matter as there have been remote-viewers who have factually uncovered evidence of after-life realms-of-suffering where long lines of people walk up a cliff to be hanged upside-down by their ankles, then have their throats slit, followed by being tossed into putrid river of flowing blood with a foul stench, then everyone taking turns to be the next executioner after their skin regenerates each time a full rotation of any of these lines of people have been completed, and this horror-show is a never-ending permanent-cycle as warned about by the now-returned Messiah).

All of the Moderators are Aspies ? Well, amongst all of the Spectrum, the Aspie is considered Higher-Functioning (HFA), and a higher level-of-function would certainly be better-equipped to handle certain repetitive-tasks. I have found that neuro-typicals CAN be trained, but the neuro-typical must first respect you, then the NT becomes more willing and receptive to listening to your so-called crazy/insane/asinine/absurd/ludicrous/paranoid/etc., ideas, such that your thoughts end up not being so wild to them after all. Not all NTs know how to talk to HFAs & vice-versa, but I have had all kinds of experiences being all kinds of... roles/statuses/paradigms/etc., within my life, such that I have probably experienced nearly everything that nearly everybody from nearly every walk of life has ever experienced (from upper-class to homelessness and anywhere in between, from a guy who couldn't keep a job to save anyone's life to one whom employers competed fiercely against each other to hire permanently if possible, straight-A student to failing two entire full-time university semesters in a row back into straight-acing then abandoning school after finding it to be much more effective/valuable/economic/faster to simply self-study/self-research/self-train to be able to much more quickly surpass the intellectual-abilities of even most post-university graduates due to their insane levels of indoctrinations, the emotional roller-coaster ride of being pushed into having experienced becoming narcissistic and even mentally psychotic at one point for more than two years due to nearly 20 years of being unfairly/unjustly abused to someone who can now safely say that he is probably much more sane and rational/logical than probably everybody else in the entire state of South Dakota and possibly even the entire continent itself, from one who had been full of contempt and hatred for the entire world to want to render the entire human-population extinct to one who is now very concerned about everyone's future after-life destination, etc).

Regarding Fnord, I assume that he's still around, just not posting anything (unless, somehow, for some reason, posting from a different identity, although such is unlikely given his style of rule-abiding since I recall that not having more than one account was one of those things that was much more clearly defined if I remember correctly). That guy would disagree with me a lot originally (especially when it came to "controversial" topics like the para-normal or conspiracies), but there also came times when we were in complete agreement about things/problems about civilisation/society/etc., and changing my vocabulary from primitive-wording to describe what was once known as para-normal or spiritual-phenomena instead into what I currently view as technological-phenomena turned out to be more acceptable descriptions of my views of reality that did not warrant any rationalist-needs to engage in polemics against mysticism.

@Adamantium : I am just going to comment on the last post you made referencing your dialogue with Dox. I think it would be of benefit for you to calm down a bit with how you are responding to him/her. When your emotions are running or starting to run high it can result in clearly «agitated» expressions. Let me just quote some of your post to help you get an idea of some of the dialogue that seems to jump out at me as a somewhat «neutral» party here...

«I seriously wonder wtf you think you are doing»
«This is nonsense.» (Semantics. Most disputes are usually just misunderstandings with semantics.)
«It's certainly not the same level of attack as saying "F you" but there is no way it's not an attack.»
(A verbal-sword used against another as an attack is one thing but the expression-of-feelings is yet another, some expressions most-certainly having the obvious intent to offend, whilst others risk the potential to be offensive even if not intended : if I were so-called moderating I probably would just politely PM him about the issue with how the post was worded and advise him that such )
«If I had a lower estimation of your verbal abilities» (This might be why we could use high-EQ people around, for one's technical-capabilities are not always necessarily an accurate measure of their self-calming abilities, and it is those with the highest levels of self-calming before writing/posting/responding who can respond/write in the most sane manner for, logically speaking, the greater the level of negative-emotions running through one's feelings at any time of mental-activity the more «insane» the thoughts tend to become, thus it follows that the calmest person has the most amount of sanity to make a reasonable determination, whilst the angriest person would only be able to make insane judgments)
«Do you really feel entitled to use a public forum to let other people know you don't like them?» (This is a form of badgering when interpreting and looking as a whole at your response)
«You want to poison the wells and salt the fields over debatable issues of interpretation? Really? Because you feel entitled to tell other members that you like it when they are gone?» (Badgering. Also, know that «judgment» abilities DO swing from «sane/rational» towards «insane/irrational» when negative-emotions are running high, regardless of verbal-skills, and it would be better to try to determine/understand the root-causes of what might be causing those negative-feelings, and to help any said forum-member who is displaying any obvious signs of negative-emotions to understand that what they are posting seems to come across as a post of negativity, and to simply ask them to please pay attention to their state-of-mind or state-of-emotions and request that they please wait for their emotions to calm down until all feelings of anger or animosity has left them before making any further posts in regards to said topic/subject)

I think it might not necessarily be a bad idea to have a guide-line area for self-calming of emotions (not as a forced rule but simply as a guide-line to direct everybody to if anybody is seen to be disruptive that any member can direct other members to in order to help rehabilitate said forum/community member). Please forward this post of mine also directly to Alex (site/forum-owner) for his review and consideration of putting up such a guide-line somewhere. The «logic» behind this that I use is that, when people practice/exercise certain chi-gung/meditation/yoga/etc.-type or similar techniques and/or breathing exercises, many people often report feeling better or refreshed or calmed down, etc. Similarly, people who have gone through severe sadness/depression also know that, even if the emotional-state was in heart-break at the time of falling asleep, the emotional-pain is not as severe/intense upon waking up after being asleep. I believe that Alex will know how to word the guide-lines in the best manner possible after using these very same or similar wisdom-inducing techniques so as to help community/forum-members be able to recover from potential negative-influences much more quickly/effectively than they could get/see from seeing most so-called doctors. I wish this community well with its Peace-efforts as my forum-time will now be much more limited than before due to real-world issues that force me to try and rehabilitate the entire mess of government-officials even in the face of their threats upon my freedoms/liberties (hinted about this at the very beginning of this post of course).

Thanks for the perspective. It is undoubtedly true that my verbal skills are more advanced at times than my facility for interpersonal communication.

My apologies if my reply was over the top. I was disturbed by Dox's decision to include cracks about troll sites, doxxing, and creative murder methods in his responses. If the pitch of my response was over the top, I regret it.

Do you mean me?

No, not you. You know what really bothered me? She finally figured out that she had said the wrong thing and didn't even apologize after she knew she was wrong for saying it, but that is a whole other topic.

What topic was this?

It was a vaccine thread.

Why am I being lumped in here? Personally I think if you don't have anything nice to say then you shouldn't say anything at all which is why I bite my tongue and x out of a lot of already written replies but I guess how would anybody else know that?

FWIW I have had some pretty nasty things said to me over the last year or so, I like debating and have nice discussions with plenty of people so that nastiness doesn't originate with me. Now it's very amusing to me that some off these nasty people suddenly disappeared November 9th but I would like to see them return since I feel we have some unfinished business.

I try to detach myself from the topics I discuss, sometimes it is hard with Trump topics since it becomes so personal but I feel like I've explained my beliefs at length enough times so people know where I am coming from. Another thing different is that I have kind of a two prong interest in politics, you have ideology/beliefs on one hand and sort of sporting element with strategy/winners/losers on the other which is probably part of why I was drawn to it as topic since I always been a big fan of sport. I think this sporting side to it isn't something everybody appreciates and is something I think something a lot of people resent about politics, I've cultivated this interest over a number of years and I think anybody interested in politics like that probably evolves into a more pragmatic but cynical belief system over time.

Debate is sport, anybody posting PPR should be able to detach themselves enough so they don't personally hate the person they disagree with. Maybe I'm wrong and more people hate me than I know but I don't take it personally if somebody disagrees with me, I've separated my personal feelings about people and what I think about their politics most of my life. The way I see it is that I can agree with most people on some base things so its better to find middle ground to gain a foothold and expand on that. Personally I don't have an issue with any number of left wing posters, I think we can get along just fine if we allow ourselves to and really we're not all that different. PPR is basically like some cable news battlefield but you gotta turn it off sometimes, I post around the forum and I notice that a lot of posters that might not like what my beliefs are & vice versa like the same movies or music or go thru the same issues and struggles. It is a very diverse forum for sure but there is a common thread that most of us have and I think that always should be kept in perspective. If this discussion aren't fun and stress you out then I would beg you to stay away, it's understandable especially since it's so unavoidable right now.

I don't think I am a mean person, I have my own things I am dealing with like many of you and would much prefer to be cordial with each other than be engaged in life or death combat.

I thought you had said that "I don't miss X" did not seem like an attack on X to you, that was all. Please don't take it any other way. If I conflated your responses with some else's please accept my apology.

It is interesting that "I don't miss X" seems very clearly to be an attack to me and not at all to some others. Someone wrote that it seemed to them to be a honest expression of emotion. "I hate you" and "You suck" are also honest expressions of emotion, but that doesn't make it right to vent them in public. Some emotions are best kept to yourself.

Maybe it comes back to Walrus' question of what kind of place we collectively think PPR should be, within Alex's allowable range of possibilities.

I think it would be a better place if Mikah had not searched out Viper's old thread to make that remark and Dox had not announced his honestly felt negative view of unspecified people like Viper in a reply to Mikah's comment.

If either one of them had started a new thread saying "I sure don't miss all that triumphalist nonsense we had from Democrats before election day" I would have had no objection at all. But the personal direction of it seemed ugly and something to discourage. It still does.

While the word chosen for the illustration, "idiot" was the same as the one in the incident you are thinking of, the example was generic and not meant to be a comment on that specific issue.

you don't need to be an aspie to be a moderator. where did you get that from?

i agree, WP could benefit from having some non aspie, or NT moderators.

having people with inherent weaker theory of mind moderate a website where many have that same problem creates a unique set of issues.

I know an NT has been asked to be a mod before but has repeatedly turned it down. It's certainly not disqualifying. There are more important factors to consider.

What are qualification and other factors to take into consideration? I don't really understand what is so hard about it unless it's being blocked...