Conservatives of Wrong Planet

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low-info?? from a brat coming to you
any confinement loaf, some crumbes of the streeped ?

Calling people low-info when they so rarely get things right is pretty rich I think but I digress, I was basically the only person that did get it right so it's not fair to single anyone out. Having been here longer than most, the difference this election was the venom shown from Democratic party supporters who could not handle losing and their narratives being shattered. A lot of belligerence not a lot of thought, not a lot of tolerance for discussion.

Most of this conversation is useless because I physically can't present the data and in any case there would be a huge disagreement over what constitutes "liberal". Viper, for example, was to the right of Dox (a self-identified "non-liberal") both economically and socially. Viper regularly complained about the dangers of Muslims being allowed to migrate to Europe, and protested against redistributive systems of wealth, and yet Dox considers him "liberal". No need to get too bogged down in semantics, let's just acknowledge that neatly putting people into categories is very hard.

Some brief examples, which I'm prepared to acknowledge might not be representative of larger trends but which I consider very much to be:

- Since Raptor's return, the treatment handed out to him and Kraichgauer has been very similar
- When nurseangela was last banned for personal attacks, two other users were banned within the hour for personally attacking her.
- Mootoo received far more warnings and bans for his behaviour - excluding attempts to get around his ban - than Jacoby did for similar but less persistent behaviour.

If you poll users then I end up on the right and a few of the people who have posted in this thread end up on the left.

Does it especially matter if there are more drive-by liberals if the regular users are fairly evenly split?



Oh come on, those people left long before anyone here even knew what "alt-right" meant (most people here still don't), and we have all of 3-4 people who might be described as such. Our most prominent Trump supporter has been here longer than I have, we still only seem to have the one vocal social conservative, and the religious are still hiding under a rock somewhere trying to carefully express their views without triggering an angry mob and/or ToS warning. Most of who we have are differing flavors of libertarian who nonetheless get lumped together as "conservative" by our much larger low information liberal population, the same ones who complain to you guys for letting us express our opinions at all. Given the size of that population, and that we have no moderator representation, I find that situation worrisome.[/quote]
I think the bolded section is a little hypocritical coming from the guy who lumps "progressive free marketers" with "utopian communists" and "yay Democrats, boo Republicans".

It's true that there are low-info users on both sides of the "divide". It also seems to be true that the relatively informed voices on both sides (on the right, I'd pick out Viper as mentioned, AngelRho, and ruveyn on a good day; on the left, the cat users, the Canadian civil servant (I want to say VisaGrunt but perhaps that's someone else?) and the feminist with the artwork avatar) are seemingly less involved than ever, although of course there are exceptions.

I think there are two major differences between left-wing and right-wing users that are relevant to this conversation. Firstly, and this is where bias might get involved, right-wing users who get pissed off seem to currently prefer insults that suggest the person shouldn't be involved in the conversation to begin with (stupid, shill, fraud), whereas left-wing users seem to prefer attacking people for their views (racist, homophobic, misogynist). WrongPlanet rules treat those two things quite differently - although of course accusations aren't just blindly believed or we'd have no users at all.

The second is that, with one notable exception, left-wing users are more likely to tell people to publicly tell people to shut up and that they've been reported. Right-wing users who want the mods to silence criticism of their worldview just report it. I don't think there's any less of an expectation from right-wing users that mods are their police. And you very rarely see people reporting users in their "tribe". This is particularly obvious when it comes to anti-Semitism but also applies to personal attacks. The grey libertarian tribe is both generally the best behaved and the best at reporting consistently, but most of the users in it drift in and out of activity.

On appointing a non-liberal mod: first, most of our mods are appointed for posts which have nothing to do with politics, and all the current mods are pretty centrist albeit generally left-leaning (I am probably the only one who could be described as right-leaning, maybe B19). At the last round of mod appointments, a couple of more libertarian users were considered but ultimately we went with users who were about ten times more active. I don't think there is an openly conservative user who would be suitable given the TOS requirements.

No promises, but we're currently looking to appoint new moderators (although there's every chance Alex will disagree). If anyone reading this would be willing and thinks they'd be good, then drop me a PM. Particularly interested in hearing from people who feel the system is currently biased against their political views.

I think Mr. D. (Dox) would be a great moderator. He's able to see both sides and be impartial when making a decision about a situation. He's non-judgemental and he's able to debate a topic in a low-key manner without name calling and getting emotions involved. I cannot think of any other person on this forum (including myself) who would be better fit for the job because most are either totally on the Left or completely on the Right.

Good help is hard to come by apparently as I have been told previously by a mod. What are the TOS requirements for being a moderator and how did others meet them? Wouldn't that be a continuous thing?

I reject you characterizing me as anything like mootoo, that is the bias talking.

So, let's see if I understand this:

The complaint is that there is an oppressive liberal consensus and chorus that aggressively suppresses conservative voices on WrongPlanet.

A secondary complaint is that while it's true that conservatives are LOUDER at the moment, setting, for example, the tone on gun politics all by themselves when their opinions are actually the minority ones, that doesn't mean conservatives aren't being oppressed because there are more liberal members and mods than conservative ones.

It's a bit difficult to see how the oppression thing and the louder voices, setting the tone thing can be simultaneously true.

If the idea is that things won't be fair until there are an equal number of clearly conservative and liberal members and moderators, that seems irrational, of a kind with the excesses of campus SJWs that have been documented in recent threads, and unlikely to get anywhere.

I think all moderators should have a time limit of one year. They can serve again at a later time, but everyone who would like to be a moderator should get the chance. For PPR, there should be a moderator representing both sides since that forum is the hottest for getting members into trouble.

I don't see how that would work, they need time to adapt and get used to the job, and learn along the way with experience. I wouldn't say many members are able to be fair and non-biased. I don't see many members volunteering for such a big task, either. I would imagine if the turnover was so high, this forum would collapse.

I disagree. There has to be turnover because some members may not get along with certain moderators. Also, there is a tendency to abuse the power if one is left in such a position for too long a time. Just like in government there is a time frame. Some are not equipped to handle the position in a fair manner so there should be ways to get them out.

I don't like the idea of a timeframe on moderators. That would just end up expelling the good ones and be needlessly disruptive.

I haven't seen any real evidence of a lefty bias moderating team, and believe me having come here to WP due to issues with another forum dominated by hard left authoritarian abusive egocentric brittle mods who put their own interests before that of the forum, I am now quite sensitive to such a thing. What happened to (I think) Sly was the only incident I've seen which looked potentially suspicious. And anyway, as far as I can tell, Fnord had a strong hand in that, and he's not here anymore.

As far as I can see, the moderators here do seem willing to talk with people at length and seem friendly. I'm not picking up on any fragile egos or superiority complexes or obvious bias or being too quick to resort to the banhammer or threats or hostility even when the subject is criticism of the mods, or trying to control or censor threads and opinions. They also participate in the threads and behave like regular members, and don't break their own rules. It was the opposite of all these things on that other forum.

If you are interested in being more trustworthy, I think it's all about transparency. Transparency is something I don't think the mods are lacking, but I can think of two big improvements. One would be public knowledge of all warnings and punishments, along with who delivered said punishments and the other would be to end post-deletion or editing out of non-spam and non-illegal material. Let people see when people are punished and what they were punished for. I don't know if this forum supports the function, but offensive material could be placed beneath spoiler tags or whited out so they have to be highlighted to see them. It's also useful for the members to see examples of rule breaking and the consequences.

I also know the moderators apparently have a code they have to follow. It would be interesting to be able to see this.

It is important to remember, your perspective and interpretation of your environment and reality is not universal. Facts must be respected, but beliefs are not universally shared. Last but not least our opinions are not facts and can be up for debate so long as it's constructive.

Minor quibbles: to the best of my knowledge, Fnord was never a mod and never had any particular influence with the mods. Also, Fnord is still here, but no longer posts.

If I recall, Fnord felt that he had already said everything that needed to be said, and had some idea about a particular post count being significant in some way, and when he reached that post count, he stopped making new posts.

I foolishly opened this can of worms on a day off and am now consumed with work, so it might be a while before I can make the in depth replies to some of these posts that I'd like to.

In the meantime, lest people think I'm merely being thin-skinned or angry that I didn't get away with something, I thought it might be useful to illustrate what I'm upset about. I recently received a board warning for this post:

viewtopic.php?t=330581&start=105#p7411599

I was told that this was considered a "personal attack" despite the fact that I didn't attack anyone, merely registered my lack of distress at their absence, and didn't even name any names. Do I really need to explain why I feel that I was singled out in this case, especially given that this was upheld as constituting a personal attack by the mod team at large? I'm also not ruling out the mod team functioning as a sort of clique that never goes against each other no matter how egregiously bad the call, but that's a problem for a different thread.

Yeah I don't see how that warranted any sort of moderation unless they thought it's intent was to be inflammatory and get a reaction. But then there are threads (RIGHT NOW!) that could be classed exactly as examples of this and they are allowed to stay because it's against PE Trump, the GOP or Republicans.

That really is a bad example to show Dox. Someone says they're worried about Viper and he might have ended his own life, and your response is basically "f**k Viper." Why did you do that?

Sometimes it's best to agree to disagree and that's okay. To be fair anything political at the moment is sort of inflammatory in the current climate. We are so divided, but as they say, divide and conquer. While we quibble, they continue to conquer. Probably not the right place for this so I will keep my thoughts to myself now so we don't go off topic. Singling out one person to gloat, probably not a good thing to do. Probably best to respect one another, even when we disagree. After all, we are not the enemy, we are fellow countrymen and countrywomen who happen to disagree.