Backgrounds in moderation

But then, you seem to be campaigning for a mod hat

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This is the picture

Indeed. Even without including moderators in that calculation, it is unfortunately true.

Sound neat and clean when you say it like that. But considering your behavior in recent months, perhaps we might predict that, two years later, as the virtual blood continues to flow—as zombies rise up, wearing new name tags—you'd probably still be criticizing us for being tyrants.

Oh, right. Under whatever new name tag you decide to wear.

There is always that risk, but I would reiterate for you a suggestion I offered Geoff; see "The Company".

Were it my site, subject to my concerns and priorities, I would see morons, trolls, hatemongers, and whine-makers escorted to the door.

But it's not my site; my concerns and priorities are not the guiding template.

In the abstraction, sure. But I recall the years before I was a moderator; I've always been able to exercise greater influence over the general tone of Sciforums as a poster.

Once upon a time, I actually hoped to be able to increase that influence by becoming a moderator. It's hard to say how that worked out.

These days, I'm in because Sciforums is a community dear to my heart.

It's also a terribly inconsistent outcome.

Or maybe I'm wrong. After all, the example I set with my citation method has proven resoundingly popular, hasn't it?

See, the thing is that we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't. As I recall, you recently advised me that I do much better playing a dispassionate role when posting. Fair enough. But there were also those who complained over the years that I wasn't emotionally flexible enough. Hell, I once received criticism for using too long of words; apparently I was being elitist.

Damned if we do, damned if we don't. It's part of the job. I've had years to get used to it, so if your contribution to yet another round of insensate complaints about this community isn't having the effect you were hoping for, sorry. Been there, done that, many times over.

When people want to give us advice without first telling us how horrible we are, they find better results than those who go about it as you have in recent times.

 

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Who...me? MMMaaaybe...Maaybe...BUT only if my head stops exploding.

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Otherwise I really don't think I can do a good job. And Bells has a whole degree, as opposed to me measly 53 cred hours.

I was just trying to talk to Gustav in a way that would not provoke Gustav into...y'know...going all Gustav on me. Ordinarily I actually would rather be like a very polite gnat towards him...a little annoying, but not so annoying he feels the need to swat.

Actually, it had occurred to me that if I restart my Quest For Bachelor's in the spring...that would rather imply my head was more together...and...

It would give me free access to articles now stuck behind a paywall!
DUUUUDE!:yay:

But I'd have to...pucker a certain something up a bit to be a proper mod...I would have to, you know, always act like a grownup...

 

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A better head

You have a better head on your shoulders than you give credit, Chimpkin. Sure, it doesn't always cooperate, and I'm probably glad mine isn't quite as stubborn as you make yours sound, but one thing I've found thereapeutic over the years—if you don't mind the unsolicited proposition—is that when the tremors of rage ripple up and tighten my jaw and eyes, I just look around for something to laugh at. And usually, I can find it in whatever is pissing me off in the moment.

Doesn't make me look any more sane, but it feels a bit better than trembling through an outburst that nobody will pay attention to, anyway.

 

Can you PM some links to me please?

 

Are moderators members? All opinions hold equal sway, including mods?

 

tiassa? do you plan on responding to post #87

how about the rest of you phd's? wanna articulate your rationale out here in the open?

we do have james's sentiments.....

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are the rest of you mods similarly inclined? you shit on due process like james?
you piss on the presumption of innocence like james? you vomit on the right to legal counsel like james? you sneer at empathy and compassion like james?

is this how you mods want to end up? like james? the vigilante justice that he administers on an internet forum is pathologically projected and assumed to be an actual state of affairs in real life?

heil!

 

You want English legal citations? That will take a while.

I'll get back to you when I finish my survey of English evidentiary law.

 

(Insert Title Here)

Well, in what way? Moderators have final say in the question of policy violations, but when participating in discussions, their opinions have the same standing as anyone else's.

This is, of course, a bit sticky when considering the difference between our scientific subfora and those more subjective.

For instance, whether or not abortion is murder is a question to be argued. Advocating murder, though? Then, yes, a moderator's opinion would hold greater sway, as would be demonstrated by the deletion of a post, issue of a yellow card, or even suspension of the advocate.

 

but but....i imagined you phd's well versed in those particular legalities. what statutes were invoked when i was sentenced to a 1 week ban?

were they the ones you lot pulled out of your respective asses?

/befuddled

 

"There is a paradox at the heart of all criminal procedure in that the more serious the crime and the greater the public interest in securing convictions of the guilty, the more important do constitutional protections of the accused become. The starting point of any balancing enquiry where constitutional rights are concerned must be that the public interest in ensuring that innocent people are not convicted and subjected to ignominy and heavy sentences massively outweighs the public interest in ensuring that a particular criminal is brought to book… Hence the presumption of innocence, which serves not only to protect a particular individual on trial, but to maintain public confidence in the enduring integrity and security of the legal system. Reference to the prevalence and severity of a certain crime therefore does not add anything new or special to the balancing exercise. The perniciousness of the offence is one of the givens, against which the presumption of innocence is pitted from the beginning, not a new element to be put into the scales as part of a justificatory balancing exercise. If this were not so, the ubiquity and ugliness argument could be used in relation to murder, rape, car-jacking, housebreaking, drug-smuggling, corruption . . . the list is unfortunately almost endless, and nothing would be left of the presumption of innocence, save, perhaps, for its relic status as a doughty defender of rights in the most trivial of cases" (justice sachs).​

james r of sciforums: fuck that shit,

The approach of the common law to the presumption of innocence was memorably stated by Viscount Sankey LC in Woolmington v D.P.P. 1935 AC 462, 481 to be that "Throughout the web of the English criminal law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner's guilt. . . " The Woolmington principle was, however, subject to Parliament legislating to the contrary. It is a fact that the legislature has frequently and in an arbitrary and indiscriminate manner made inroads on the basic presumption of innocence. Ashworth and Blake (The Presumption of Innocence in English Criminal Law, 1996 Crim. L.R. 306, at 309) found 219 examples, among 540 offences triable in the Crown Court, of legal burdens or presumptions operating against the defendant. They observed that no fewer than 40% of the offences triable in the Crown Court appear to violate the presumption. In 1972 a most distinguished Criminal Law Revision Committee had observed that "we are strongly of the opinion that, both on principle and for the sake of clarity and convenience in practice, burdens on the defence should be evidential only": Eleventh Report, Evidence (General) Cmnd 4991 of 1972, para 140. Nevertheless, the process of enacting legal reverse burden of proof provisions continued apace. (lord steyn).​

james r of sciforums: fuck yeah!

 

Only one ass that monkey flew out of

I have no idea. I was looking into another complaint about James when I saw you were on furlough.

We do keep logs of such information, but they are incomplete; I see no entry regarding that particular action.

 

The House of Tiassa

/kowtow

 

JamesR has the power to make judgment calls.
I assume he was given it by the...ahem.... person who runs the site...

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Perhaps if you climb the stairs every day to the broom closet and propitiate the brain with Mountain Dew, it will favor you with a Mod Hat as well...

 

Just noticed that - LOL. Ask a question, earn a rage. Oh, those golden days.

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Oh, poor you

Try better questions. Or, at the very least, sincere ones.

 

I'll continue to criticize you for behaving as tyrants for as long as you continue to do so. You don't have to behave in that way, and if you don't want to hear complaints about it you can simply stop.

But if you're still having to slay large numbers of accounts two years down the line, you're clearly doing tyrrany wrong. I tend to think that making a few well-chosen examples up-front would go a long way. A long way towards avoiding complaints of tyrrany, even - if you get your game together, y'all won't end up banning people for stupid, petty, personal reasons nearly so frequently, nor displaying nearly so much hypocrisy in tolerating worse behavior from other quarters. I've spent time on plenty of other boards with equally anti-democratic moderation structures, without any complaint. That's how I know this stuff can be done, and recognize where you're going off the rails.

??? Is this a pre-emptive accusation of sock-puppetry, or... ? Seems kind of out of the blue, frankly. That's not my style - and I've made my willingness to be implicated in suitable, principled response known repeatedly. The whole point of disposable internet personas is to dispose of them, so if you've got a serious, defensible program that involves doing away with me, I'll applaud you for it.

Moreover, the point of taking a policy action isn't to shut me up. It's to make actual first-order improvements. That such might not shut me up, isn't really a reason not to take the suggestions seriously on their own merits.

Meanwhile, you'd do well to drop the whole paternalistic line of response, where you tell people they wouldn't like their own suggestions, criticize them for imagined responses to such, etc. It's rhetorically counterproductive - doesn't prove anything to anyone, but is rather rude.

Right, right - my intention was indeed to lead to that issue. It makes perfect sense that the money side would rather not risk any dip in page-views. But moderation isn't on that side, exactly, no? Are you meaning to imply that moderation would be prevented from taking any courses of action that would risk a temporary dip in page-views?

On the one hand, there are limits to the impact that any one moderator can make through their examples - particularly when few or none of the rest of the mods care to back them up.

On the other hand, popularity (and emulation) are not the only measures of impact and success. The efforts in question have, I think, unequivocably succeeded in establishing a certain preferred level of rigor which, even if it has not become a popular format explicitly, do enable you (and moderation generally) to credibly speak and act from the expectation of a higher level of rigor than you otherwise could.

In terms of critics being critics? Sure.

But that doesn't add up to an excuse for inaction, or writing off criticisms as such. It just means that you need to use a more objective, first-order criterion for assessing which actions should be taken.

From a general perspective, I have a hard time squaring these (seemingly reflexive) defenses of the status-quo with the supposed "science site" standard. Is endless problem-finding and refinement not a foundational aspect of the scientific worldview?

Nor is your criticism-avoidance rationale for writing off suggestions going to have the mollifying effect you seem to be hoping for. You're going to have to present a first-order response to the actual issues to get meaningful traction on that front, and eschew these meta-justifications for avoiding such.

Not in my experience. I got to where I am exactly through long experience with going about it in other ways - and will happily switch tacks again the moment I identify an approach I prefer the results of. In point of fact, I've made a conscious effort to fine-tune my approach in this regard of late, although you have either not noticed or find it inconvenient to aknowledge such. So, double-check the set of incentives you're presenting, if you don't like the responses. As I've told you before: I go where the action is.

You might also look into squaring your recommendation against accusation of "horribleness" and the like with the approach of various prominent moderators to influencing the behavior of posters. Certain of them seem to be here primarily to indulge in personalized feuds of that sort - and so it does you little good to preach against such, with that kind of backdrop. Also, you started out your response to me, there, with a pre-emptive (and totally unfounded) accusation of future sock-puppetry on my part, and premised like half of it on my being too mean and petty a person to listen to. So, yeah: maybe try leading by example on that front, for starters.

 

I was more alluding to said theoretical proposed direction of the forum. If Geoff has the power (with others) to democratically assert change then mods would have an equal stake in this/that?

 

thank you
you can attend to quad after that is done

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wonder what happened to bashful bells

who do you have in mind?

 

It seems patently obvious to me that what Tiassa is saying is if we vote, to the tune of an unpredefined number (as set by the mods?), to remove said hypothetical mod who is unfit for purpose, then we have the power.

Big LOL. Or is it?

How would a poll to remove a mod in Free Thoughts or Open Government sub forum go down? What percentage of active members would need to vote to pass such an action?