We have staff-only discussions but I don't know how Thorongil found out. Admins and mods do have a little telltale icon on their avatars though.

I don't know what you're talking about

I've said several times that I think highly of your contributions, at least when you're not whining. I don't think you've been under-moderated and I don't particularly want to see you being singled out. TimeLine's mod powers have nothing to do with you.

So that's what it is? There's a suspicion that TimeLine has been brought on to the staff to silence certain people or crack down on something in particular? That is really not what is happening here.

I don't see why I owe you an explanation. We're always looking for potential mods, and the qualities we look for are those you'd expect us to look for.

Unless you tell us what your issue is, I can't see this discussion going anywhere.

Choosing mods has never been open to debate among the membership at large. As usual, the decision was a private one, until you decided to make an issue out of it. It's certainly not true that asking to be a mod is a ticket to modhood.

Again, what is your problem?

Believe it or not, alleviating your concerns about the mod team is not very high on our list of priorities when it comes to selecting new mods. I really still have no idea why you're harping on about Agustino.

All I did was make someone a mod. You created the drama.

You created this drama, as I see it. You often do. As for Agustino, I've no idea why you're talking about him or why you think he'd make a good mod.

If you didn't have such a deep antipathy to this forum and the people who run it, I'd rather make you a mod. We're waiting for Agustino to ripen before we approach him. He's not quite ready.

(Y)

Some of the mods are much, much quicker to delete posts than I would be. I have no reason to think TimeLine will as zealous as those members of the staff, and I see no reason to think she will pick on anyone.

You're on my shortlist already

Thanks for the support :)

You're making a mountain out of a molehill. But okay, your refusal is noted.

Honestly man, just grow up and stop playing the victim. She employed rhetoric. I've done much worse. Suck it up.

Get over it, it's no big deal.

1) Who made TimeLine a mod and why?

2) Why was the thread I made my comment in closed?

3) Why were my recent comments in the Shoutbox deleted and who deleted them?

4) Is there any assurance that TimeLine will not censure posters and posts with whom and which she disagrees — Thorongil

I made her a mod, because she is a good thinker, a good writer, and shows good judgement.

I don't know anything about 2 and 3.

I don't understand 4. Can there ever be such an assurance? Why would you expect one? Why do you have a concern about it in this case? What is your problem?

Happy Friday to you too Schop! X-)

I pretty much agree with Masha Gessen's recent articles about these issues in the New Yorker.

In the current American conversation, women are increasingly treated as children: defenseless, incapable of consent, always on the verge of being victimized. This should give us pause. Being infantilized has never worked out well for women. — Masha Gessen

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/sex-consent-dangers-of-misplaced-scale

The other relevant one:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/when-does-a-watershed-become-a-sex-panic

One of the most important points she makes, aside from the one about the infantilization of women, is that sexual assault and harassment (the latter of which I think can be usefully defined here as repeated and sometimes coercive sexual advances when the advancer knows his attention is unwelcome) are trivialized when they're conflated with unwelcome flirting (you don't know until you try) and drunken bad sex. That this conflation is happening in the present discourse I think shows that predatory and coercive sexual behaviour is being essentialized as something intrinsic to being a man, on a continuum alongside normal sexual interaction.

There's a pretty balanced podcast on Slate where they talk about whether what we're seeing is a moral panic ("sex panic"). Generally they see it as a very good thing that sexual coercion and assault are being exposed, but they do have concerns that it is indeed becoming a moral panic--and personally I would go much further than they do in those concerns.

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/doublex_gabfest/2017/11/doublex_gabfest_on_kill_all_normies_sex_panic_and_she_s_gotta_have_it.html?ref=hvper.com

(Y)

Yeah, SophistiCat created Firefox and Chrome plugins:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/28211

Yes, I'm biding my time.

>:o

Now I'm getting pissed off.

But a crosswalk is more than just a set of stripes painted across a carriageway pavement. It becomes a crosswalk only in the context of the social conventions surrounding the human use of roads. The metaphysics of traffic control.

Are zebra crossings, cross walks painted on the ground? — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Zebra crossings are crosswalks accompanied by Belisha beacons. In contrast, Pelican crossings are crosswalks accompanied by standard traffic lights. Any clearer?

Jesus, I've just looked at this discussion for the first time in ages. What the Hell is going on here? Is any of this shit useful? I'm not sure.

I don't think I'm going to comment on the specifics of the debate, as regards individuals, but I'll think about what everyone is saying. Generally, I don't think this forum is sexist, and certainly not coming from any of the mods, but I do think there's a gang mentality that crops up sometimes, and that could be so macho as to be unwelcoming to women. I'm not sure. (I personally find the platitudinous anti-American prejudice on the forum more annoying and destructive than any locker room talk, but maybe that's just me)

Some would probably consider the self-referential faux flirtation theme in the Shout box sexist, for example. Maybe they're right, but not clearly so in my view. I see it as more of a parody of sexual behaviour, and though it may have a fairly short shelf life, generally harmless. — Baden

I don't know if this is part of what @unenlightened has been criticizing, but in my opinion it's a sick culture that would judge that to be sexist. Assuming, as seems apparent, that those on both sides are comfortable with it and give as good as they get. That could be a bad assumption, of course, but I don't have any reason to think it is, as yet. It's confined to the Shoutbox, which is a social space and will have some of the natural features of social interaction. But then I would say that, because I've been involved in it.

I don't know what to do about any of this, if anything, because at the moment this thread seems to be just a mess of confusing bitching and bitterness.

I can see how it would work with the Northern accent

I thought "numpty" was Scottish

The thing is not a single comment by a single person, but the sense in which the, apparently entire staff gets together in a big high-fiving mocking spectacle at someone else's expense. — Wosret

Apart from your "entire staff", I think this is a fair point, and I don't like to see it either.

There are differences of course, but your views all bear a certain family resemblance to each other on many issues (for example religion). — Agustino

I think our views on religion are probably quite diverse, although you could be right that we're all atheists. I'd be happy to have believers on the mod team, but they are few and far between.

I think you're right that it's not left vs right. Some on the far Left are as supportive of the right to bear arms as American conservatives and libertarians, and not only in America.

Maybe, although I seem to disagree with them as much as agree when it comes to politics. On many issues I'm often much more inclined to agree with, say, Hanover or Thorongil than with, say, Sapientia or Street. So if you class me as being on the Left along with them, you're obscuring some deep differences.

In any case, the Left is over-represented there probably because it's over-represented among those who are into philosophy (a point made many times before in discussions like this). I'd like to see more diversity in the mod team. Conservatives are welcome. Ranting alt-right maniacs, maybe less so.

That's a laugh. The purple prose-laden, hyperbolic, and ill-tempered responses by the mod team toward anyone who supported the right to own firearms in the recent gun control thread alone puts the lie to this suggestion. — Thorongil

I wish you wouldn't lump us all together like that. The mod team did not act as one in that discussion, and we don't all share the same views or manners. For instance I don't share the views espoused in the posts you refer to, although I can be a little ill-tempered at times.

I am bummed that TGW has apparently been banned again (like the old PF). I don't get it with him since I've always found him to be fairly non-confrontational and his contributions to be valuable. — Erik

This time I think he was banned because he changed his writing style--neglecting capitals at the beginning of sentences and so on--and point blank refused to change it back. It wouldn't have been fair to make an exception just because he was an exceptionally good contributor.

And yet I am not deterred.

But as a human male, and not a Klingon, I have a three-dimensional, fully realized personality, and can therefore maintain my honour and manliness even while I scheme deviously.

I see your love of all things Klingon has its limits. Well, I'm versatile, and I don't want to rush things if you're not comfortable with that.

EDIT: I now see that you were repulsed by my all-too-easy and entirely false capitulation, rather than by the thought of Klingon-style mating.

I would make a video stripping my socks off to Beyoncé's Partition — TimeLine

Where's the egg-plant emoji when you need it? But no: ironically I respond more positively to something akin to the Klingon mating ritual, in which we sniff each other's hands and squeeze them till they bleed.

And no, Worf is a real Klingon, he chose his battles wisely. He is Klingon enough to drink prune juice and be proud. — TimeLine

I'm convinced.

This may be more concrete and pedestrian than you're looking for, but...

I find it difficult to draw a clean dichotomy between them, because speculative hurt is also real, not least in the way that it can lead a bitter nerd to cause realer hurt such as rape, harassment, online misogynistic trolling, etc. From this point of view it won't do to dismiss the feelings of unattractive young men who don't know how to talk to women, who feel victimized by what feels to them like an aggressively feminized culture, in which their words are policed by the online mob. Indeed, as Angela Nagle shows in Kill All Normies, the cultural dominance on the internet of political correctness and liberal call-out campaigns, which are often hysterical and puritanical, has contributed to the attractiveness of extreme misogyny and new forms of extreme right thinking, which have thrived on sites such as 4chan. I'm sure TGW could enlighten us further if he were still here.

If the speculative hurt of the misogynistic right-wing nerd is leveraged against the victims of harassment and assault, then it is useful to make that important distinction. But at the same time, if we want to understand what is happening to these young men and do something about it, we also need to take it seriously.