This. Also I publicly apologized to him and the community for taking the bait there and responding in kind.
In the interest of the community and out of respect for you, I’m doing my best to ignore stuff here that I’d like to respond to, but if the people who disagree with me are going to ignore your request and keep making their arguments and shitting all over my reputation, I’m probably going to jump back in.
Yeah, I’ll have what everyone’s having. I think the guy is probably right, but his being right or wrong is a separate question from whether he gets to say he’s right on this particular website. For me, very little hinges on which way we go. I never wanted to be a mod and I don’t believe in internet democracy. As I’ve said before, benevolent absolute dictatorship is the second worst kind of modding after literally every other kind.
Needed an extra 
Your posts are historically informed and you recently chose John Brown as your avatar, so you can’t possibly think you’re the first rebel to come to despise moderates? That’s like revolution 101, they tell you that before they give you your first pitchfork.
The game theory part stumped me. Threaten enough disorder or effect enough disorder, moderates are as likely if not more likely to abandon justice than to accept it, and they will come to support those who promise to crack heads and restore order. Isn’t that why moderates are shitty to begin with?
Just keep in mind that today’s edgelords are often tomorrow’s moderates. So some “violent outlier” animated by the intensity of spirit you’re attempting to ignite here may come to the conclusion that those who ruminated wistfully about the likelihood of violence without actually getting to the work of it were as useless to the cause of justice as any other moderate.
Nobody is telling you to deny the truth, although in some cases you could keep the truth to yourself? Your deeper reflective critiques aren’t getting you banned, your way too specific edgelording around killing your enemies is tough, for the moment at least.
There may not be a single poster on the forum who hasn’t thought about or wondered aloud how many gun deaths there would have to be to change Republican intransigence on gun control. Some of us have concluded that there may not even be a number. But you constantly say stuff like “not enough victims” after specific shootings, which is not “analysis”, it isn’t even being merely inflammatory, it’s just sick.
You seem to conflate not talking about something with being forced to lie quite a lot. Nobody is forcing you to lie about your post election plans. To the extent that you’re implying that you might do something violent, some of us are asking you to a) not do anything violent and b) not to use this forum to workshop serious/not serious/who knows? threats against your political enemies.
This is of course completely bogus. Being inflammatory is your explicitly stated rhetorical strategy for dealing with the yoke of civility, read your own OP? The suggestion that not being charitably interpreted is driving you to be inflammatory is dishonest in the extreme, and you said you don’t like to be dishonest.
It seems like this has already happened. NBZ’s posts were challenged, and then a discussion and vote ensued.
The problem was, and still remains that the one person in a position of authority wasn’t, as trolly put it:
I don’t think there’s a problem with a good faith discussion about NBZ’s posts. Even after a “decision” has been made. But if the majority sentiment is going to be ignored by those who should most respect it, the cite will continue to tie itself into knots.
Only 55 and 53 people voted in those polls so they don’t count, despite being among the highest participation polls on the site (from a quick search, the first ads on unstuck poll garnered 62 voters).
Saying those polls are a referendum on NotBruce’s work is a joke. Let’s have a direct up or down vote and be done with it.
You may want to think twice about making this suggestion as it may present the opportunity to call into question (and redo) important votes like this.
It’s not a redo in any sense of the word. The polls simply do not support the mandate you claim to have.
They are like polling if Trump should be impeached for specific act X, getting a result in your favor, then claiming you have a mandate to let Trump do whatever he wants without consequence.
There’s a societal cost to suppressing unrest caused by injustice. Sure, their initial impulse might be to crack heads and restore order, but if you raise the cost of suppression and make it known that it will be a recurring cost, that they would be committing to an endless war (where “war” is meant to be a metaphor and not necessarily a violent struggle), eventually, enough members of the suppressing classes will grow weary. Basically, you make it so that it is an easier path for them to give in than to continue with the status quo.
Moderates are shitty because they go for what is easy instead of what is right, so the solution is to make what is not right also not easy. So, how do we go about making moderates uncomfortable?
Respectfully disagree. The polls are literally the posts in question and then, yes ban worthy or no not ban worthy. It’s not hard and the meaning isn’t a mystery.
Edit: Just to be clear, I have not taken a position on NBZ’s posts. You can see from the poll that I didn’t take a side.
Your post is not even true in the literal sense, three options were given, and they worded to give the reader an out to choose the middle option.
Basically fine = not ban. It’s not a “middle option.” But ok. Sorry for not putting out all 3 options in the summary. You want to eliminate them like an abstention? Spread them evenly across the other options? There’s no quorum. Not ban still wins.
Challenging the results and making an issue of the procedure when the argument doesn’t go a certain way is very tRumpy.
This is just an idealized theory, I think history shows it’s unlikely to be true, since most non-nonviolent movements from below have lead to reactionary escalation that resulted in literal revolt or war. Although maybe something like unionization in the US is a decent counter example.
Just shooting from he hip here (not really, I got this from an omniscient source). Could start with what MLK said in the rest of the letter you referenced in the OP.
You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”
I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.
Obviously, I don’t 100% agree with MLK. Who does? I’m sure there are people here who would disagree with him citing those who have “absolutely repudiated Christianity” as part of the problem.
I believe that I don’t advocate violence. I agree that I may come perilously close to advocating violence. There is a difference between the two. My risk analysis is that our current times makes it worth taking a risk, so I don’t feel any moral ambivalence about embracing variance and taking what I see as the most +EV path.
If you go to far in the direction of non-violence and pacifism, then you get Gandhi saying stuff like:
Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.
I’m not going to join a suicide pact and I’m going to resist being told that I should.
Alright, so the forum will eventually? vote on moderation rules that may or may not prohibit posts that come ‘perilously close to advocating violence’, and then this part of it will be settled.
But by the by, I don’t know how you came to your risk analysis, but that you state you don’t feel moral ambivalence about embracing [variance where there’s a greater chance of] violence is a good reason to stop and reflect. Unless you’re in a Colonel Kurtz mindset, feeling moral ambivalence about violence is a pretty good inhibition modern society has cultivated in people in recent times. That you don’t feel moral ambivalence about the paths you’re contemplating is a very good reason to rethink whether you can rely on yourself to have done a good risk analysis to start with.
Fair enough, but Gandhi drove the British out of India and MLK jr defeated Jim Crow, but maybe they didn’t do the math correctly and should have come perilously close to advocating for dropping fools instead.
I’ve spent decades thinking about this. I’m not some idealistic college kid. I am a middle-aged person who has reached some conclusions that were not lightly settled upon. I’m no longer ambivalent because I’ve gone through a lot of scenarios in my head. I know which lines I won’t cross.
If the moderation rules prohibit my point of view, I will either abide by those rules or not. I’ll eat my temp-bans and I’ll leave if perma’ed. As far as I am concerned, I neither advocate nor endorse violence. If people want to say that I do when I don’t, if people want to misrepresent my point of view, I suppose I’ll eventually be gone.
I don’t condemn violence and I shouldn’t have to. If I condone violence, that is not the same as advocating or endorsing it. If you want to conflate those, then say so in whatever rules you want to have, but saying that I advocate violence is like calling antifa a terrorist movement. I’m not going to feel sorry if right-wingers get a taste of their own medicine and I don’t feel like I should have to avoid pointing out that I don’t feel sorry if that medicine happens to be violent.
Attracting moderates by cheering for cop murders and new 9/11’s sounds like a dominated strategy but I’m not a game theory expert like von Neumann or Russo.
Feel the heat
Pushing you to decide
Feel the heat
Burning you up
Ready or not
You are well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse on this topic, reveling in bad things happening to terrible people is basically our pastime.
This is a distortion of fact, we’ve been over it before.
This.
He was not banned for those posts. I didn’t post that poll. They were also in a thread discussing a permaban and he got a tempban. So knock it off. I’m trying to stay out of this thread and put this argument on ice for now until we’ve got rules set up, but I’m not going to sit by while you spread falsehoods that damage my reputation.