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Willa Rogers posted:Generally, I'm v. happy with life under Koos Your Daddy and it seems as if we're getting a wider range of posters these days, which means more interesting content. Seconding all of this, but on point 2 specifically, in the interaction I had with CGIR that SPR pointed out, the original crux of the meta-argument was that a poster had created a strawman of an argument and then demanded that other posters defend that strawman he'd made for them and as labored as the metaphor might be, reporting a mod arguing in bad faith (who has a historical pattern of doing so, even!) seems a bit like calling the cops on a cop - d&d mods largely being self-selected by existing d&d mods makes it difficult to feel like such reports would be taken seriously given how often the issue of authoritative tone has come up (Koos' recent intervention in the situation not withstanding - its very much seen and appreciated that Koos acknowledged that his tone is often an issue whether intentional or not). Only other thing I'd mention as an abject failure is that the guy that secretly hoped the "Reade chat" would just disappear eventually still has a position of authority here which is uhhhh...generously, "not a great look."
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Jan 29, 2022 13:19
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The employment of the term whataboutism dates back to the cold war, and came out of British intelligence agencies, and is frequently deployment in the service of supporting saber-rattling rhetoric, not just against China but against many East Asian nations that don't "play nice" with American international interests. I don't participate in the China thread for that specific reason, and I think it's a disingenuous way of turning a question of "and what moral authority does the US have to condemn China's concentration camps when we're operating our very own at our southern border" into "hey everybody, look at this poster who loves Xi Jpeg. The idea that an individual or group that engages in monstrous, genocidal behavior shouldn't be criticizing another person or group committing the same atrocity from a position of moral authority is as old as time itself - a theme that's repeated in both the Bible and the Quran, just as a sampling of the prevalence among pre-cold war ideologies (Matthew 7, Luke 6, Surat al-Baqara, 44) There are probably better ways to say that criticism of the US is outside of the scope of any particular discussion than reciting memos and talking points straight out of the western imperialist cold war playbook, and it just falls into the trap of doing an argument from fallacy - just because a criticism of the US contains a fallacy, that doesn't invalidate the criticism - if the criticism is unfounded then that should be repudiated rather than psuedointellectually going 'nuh uh that's a whataboutism!'
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Jan 30, 2022 18:26
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'Abuse' is an extremely loaded term, and applying it to posts you disagree with on the internet is tantamount to calling speeding an 'abuse' of transit infrastructure - just because a usage of it technically conforms to the broad dictionary definition doesn't mean it's an appropriate term to deploy in every situation.
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Jan 31, 2022 04:13
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Koos, would it be accurate to say that the "dictionary rule" is largely meant to provide some sort of mutual framework with which to, well, define the terms of any given argument? If that's the case, it's certainly a noble goal, but overly broad definitions like those in a general purpose dictionary probably aren't always suited to complex and nuanced topics - I could, for example, use the Wikipedia definition of gaslighting to construct a (ridiculous) argument that the consistent and targeted misapplication of the term 'abuse' by one or more parties is an attempt to gaslight other posters into questioning if they indeed are some sort of abuser in much the same way that right-wing reactionaries make the argument that something isn't racist "because the dictionary definition of racism is lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." when the outcome of any given right wing position would more harshly impact a given minority group (for an example, the idea that further defunding underperforming schools in poor urban areas isn't racist because "it's about test scores, not race!" doesn't hold up when you look at the larger demographics of poor, underperforming schools in say, Ft Lauderdale). It's definitely for the best to have some sort of mutual framework of meaning, but I don't know how that gets managed for nuanced or loaded topics.
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Jan 31, 2022 04:57
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Gumball Gumption posted:Delete the just server thread. It's a weird remnant of old D&D where the mods were happy to just let someone be the star of their own weird show. No good discussion is coming out of it and it encourages cult like behavior. Goldmine it instead. It did produce some incredible content.
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Jan 31, 2022 17:20
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