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The Mighty Buzzard writes:
Congrats to the wannabe APK noobtard for advancing the site's codebase despite me having extremely limited time to play. I added three lines of code and now Spam modded comments (and comment trees) auto-collapse and you can still moderate a comment as Spam even if it's already at the minimum score. Honestly, the folks using any other downmod on obvious Spam annoy me more than the noobtard does but that annoyance at least is now history. Changes are to hot code only, I'll put them in the repo as part of my next pull request.
Suck it, noob. --TMB
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Meta: Loser Noobs and Their Contributions to the Site
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Don't despise your poor relations, they may become suddenly rich one day.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @08:26AM (5 children)
I'm the AC you've been commenting about. Interestingly enough, I am a university faculty member.
The university had an issue with TPUSA in the not too distant past. TPUSA maintains a professor watchlist [professorwatchlist.org] that's supposed to expose faculty pushing left wing political agendas in the classroom. In fairness, academic freedom [insidehighered.com] does not mean that faculty can impose their political views on students. I suppose the first question, though, is why TPUSA only objects to faculty pushing left wing views in the classroom. Does that mean they would be okay with faculty pushing right wing views on students? But you're right, there just aren't many right wingers who are university faculty members. The bigger issue is why a group that says they promote free speech is maintaining a watchlist. That has a chilling effect on free speech.
Many faculty members on the watchlist are there because of op-eds or guest appearances on TV as commentators, things that have nothing to do with classrooms. Others are there because they did things like assigning students to write about or in support of positions they disagree with. Of course, requiring students to examine and write essays in support of positions they disagree with is actually a really good critical thinking exercise. The "carefully maintained" watchlist is pretty much bullshit. In the case of my university, the administration cowered to right wingers in the legislature. Faced with the prospect of retaliatory funding cuts, the administration was all too happy to skip over the due process rights in academic freedom and impose sanctions against faculty members. We caved to TPUSA, which is highly unfortunate. I'd provide more specific details but I don't care to make myself a target of TPUSA. I will say a nearby university adopted social media policies [npr.org] that violate academic freedom [ericgoldman.org] because some snowflakes were triggered by a faculty member saying mean things about the NRA.
As for moderation, I suppose I just spent too much time on Slashdot, where M2 is supposed to remove bad moderators and there's a considerably smaller amount of mod points in circulation. I could also do without triggered right wing snowflakes occasionally modding my comments to -1 before others have a chance to mod them up. And yes, I only post AC.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday September 05 2020, @08:39AM
My apologies if I misread your intentions, Herr Facultater! TP-USA is really a problem, seeing how they are lead by a community college dropout. (He just recently lost his sugardaddy, so the whole operation may fold soon). But as is often pointed out here, moderation is not censorship. It seems to hit some posters rather personally, I won't mention any names, but exaeta and hemo are extremely sensitive about getting down-modded. But really it means almost nothing, unless you get spam modded. And, as a perennial AC, you do not have to worry about your username karma, so only the cumulative super-secret karma can get you down. As for your posts, don't whine. It attracts sharks.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday September 05 2020, @05:42PM (2 children)
That's the rub. This is where academia is seen by many to have failed to serve well for generations, and for good or ill, why things like TPUSA now exist. I personally remember a psychology prof telling his class (attempting to quote by memory from 40 odd years ago..) "if you look at every bad thing the government has ever done, it was done by republicans", and don't even get me started on my macro-economics prof. :-)
Academic freedom [natlawreview.com] requires balancing the rights of the university, the professors, and the students themselves. I don't know the perfect answer any more than anyone else, but I suspect like a lot of things it involves more sunlight to make reality match philosophy. Sunlight invariably is disliked for various reasons - Some are just used to the dark, some are doing things they shouldn't under its cover, and some are opposed for perfectly valid privacy/surveillance state concerns. That last is weakened by being invoked to protect instruction [themix.net] that parents feel is inappropriate in school. Sticky wicket and I'm mixing higher ed with K-12 anyway.
Ok, also for free-speech concerns :-p
I'm no expert on TPUSA, but it has an explicit viewpoint. Why would they track those that agree with it? From their mission statement page:
If there is an expectation for TPUSA to call out the small population (possibly hidden in business schools) that are actually aligned with their views I didn't see it in my quick perusal. That expectation may need adjustment?
Fair enough, I just don't think SN has the user population to make it work and that it would lead to issues that /. was able to avoid through sheer size of its user population smoothing things out.
A lot of folks read at -1 just because of this (I do). Reasoned/valid comments at -1 that don't belong there vex me and I'll drop an upmod on them that I might not have otherwise for that reason alone. As is so often the case - that's not a right or left wing snowflake specific issue.
I also think we have categorically rebuked that you are a RWNJ.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 07 2020, @03:18AM (1 child)
You object to professors relaying truth in their classrooms? Oh, you were one of Those students! Smarter than your profs! OK, Welcome to the desert of the real.
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 07 2020, @12:34PM
Well, it's astoundingly untrue and verifiably so, so your objection is not really relevant. The Dems were the worst enemies minorities had historically. Pro-slavery, pro-Jim-Crow, anti-civil-rights bills, yadda yadda yadda. Some idiots think that changed around the late 60s but it didn't; they only switched whose votes they were trading manufactured racial hatred for.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday September 06 2020, @05:12PM
It's kind of a self-selection thing. The RWNJs aren't much for higher education (or ANY education at all), did you notice? All they want to do is destroy it, because it doesn't fit in their worldview...and they're trying to turn the ideas of openmindedness, considering all viewpoints, and fairness/equal exposure into a weapon to eradicate the very people and ideas that depend on them!
It's fucking disgusting is what it is. I don't have the words or the bile to express what kind of rancid brass-bollocked sociopathic gaslighting horseshit it is, and if anything, the underlying idea behind it--"destroy those weak fools with their own soft, stupid ideas about fairness and justice, they deserve it for being weak!"--is what pisses me off the most. Fuck those people and fuck their sociopathic bullshit.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...