not mine but a lot of others do complain about it

I just don't understand why mods are even allowed to post tbh

especially when most of em have heavy biases

The User/Mod evolved because despite the massive riches forums like these shower on their user mods, there would not be any one else willing to do the job of moderation on forums like this. It is because they interest in using them, they find a percent willing to moderate them.

And honestly stop crying for your safe space. The mods here are pretty even handed in how they apply the rules.

Wow. This is your brain on conservatism.

Mods are not employees of the company which runs the forum. They are posters who volunteer, and get paid exactly **** all. Go post somewhere where you pay a fee for professional moderation, and you won't have this problem. Glad I could help.

And the people who complain about it should stop complaining and post better, then they won't have this problem either.

Also: what you call a "bias" is just reasonable people being reasonable. If someone doesn't believe in flat Earth, it's not a "bias". Equally, if someone doesn't subscribe to your highly misguided world view, that is also not a bias. Not all opinions are born equal, and while you are entitled to yours, those smarter than you are entitled to tell you how moronic it is.

For you everyone is heavy biases because you don’t realize your are of the minority opinion .

If the majority was extremist we wouldn’t call that group extremist ....

The south used to be like that.

Someone define volunteer for me please

I moved a selection of posts discussing moderation to this thread.

As for the argument that mods should not post, there is perhaps some merit to that. Posting or arguing does make people more married to a bias than they otherwise would be. There is of course also the counter argument. People are biased, you might as well get to see what their biases are. So I guess it is a matter of pick your poison.

I doubt arguing over moderator bias goes away merely because a mod does not post.

In the interests of true neutrality, we should probably stop reading the posts as well.

The only thing I am interested in, is what the Mods do with the mass amounts of money thrown at them for doing this job, besides not giving IVR his safe space?

@Cupee

You can't be that stupid and think I'm the one who wants the safe space. In case you missed it, Goofy begged for a containment thread for me after he provoked a response. Then he tried to do it again. I was giving Goofy a taste of his own medicine. Some of you have the problem with me responding to you, not the other way around. People have routinely tried to get me to shut up. I have no problem anyone saying anything they want, but when I rail against them, then the whining for containment starts.

^^Containment breach! Code red, get a mod here STAT!

I gave them my account details and CC-number, but still waiting for the money.

On a more serious note, after some discussion last week with EADGBE a final decision now, we're going to strike down harder on Covid-19 denial. There are posters on the forum who have experienced this thing up close, the thing is a threat to medical services if left unchecked and debates on "whether is real" or arguments about why people should not take precautions are simply useless.

Now I'm sure nobody really takes their health advice from this forum, but we will have a lesser chance of being a silent partner if people take the wrong choices.

Don't you guys get a bunch of books? You could always think about opening up a small bookstore.

He's uh... not talking about you...

ah...

The specific point made was the verifiable, objective fact that the IFR is around seasonal flu, nothing to do with "covid denialism" on the contrary, the argument assumes covid exists. There is no debate about this, everyone knows this now. That is why its crickets, or ban, when this is pointed out because "covid zealots" won't admit they were wrong about the IFR. Chezlaw is wrong. Why is he not held to a standard whereby he should offer citation to support his point that the IFR is not in the ballpark of flu? You know full well I can provide multiple citations to support my point. He can provide nothing - or if he thinks he can let him cite it here, or wherever.

It seems like kind of a pointless debate though unless you can normalize for behaviour.

Covid IFR is taking an all country effort to suppress in ways the flu does not get. If left on check and allowed to overwhelm health care systems we see how quickly that IFR spikes to many times what it is, when you flatten the curve and allow the hospitals capacity to deal with it.

This is appreciated. One of the major problems has been issued don’t get discussed with any substance because there is so much gaslighting denial of basic facts.

I don't necessarily think that you want a safe space. I'm quite sure that JV and a few other right wing posters did.

There is no question that COVID fatality rates are much lower than the early estimates of 2%. The true fatality rate for someone who catches COVID tomorrow, based on what we know now about acute treatment and in states where the health care system is not overwhelmed, is probably closer to .3%.

What I fail to understand is why anyone thinks that some sort of gotcha. .3% is still higher than seasonal flu. And even if it wasn't, severity is just one variable you have to consider when assessing the risk of a virus. The other, of course, is the rate of transmission. Your chances of getting COVID are considerably higher than your chances of getting the flu, in large part because we don't have a vaccine.

To take an extreme example, if a new virus emerged that had a .05% fatality rate, but it was so infectious that virtually everyone in the United States was expected to catch it, that would be still be a big public health issue.

.3% is close to a lower bound from all the evidence so far. A lot of the consensus is still around .5 to 1% with some higher and some a bit lower.

I originally cautiously supported an expert view of 0.6%-1% for which I got a lot of grief in another forum as it was far too low a range from those 'stupid experts'. Since then whatever the figure was, it will have dropped because of better treatments (and it should continue to drop, hopefully very significantly) but it's an odd metric because it's so dependent on the age profile of the population and treatment. It also depends on how you count deaths.

It's a difficult area for the mods. This is seriously live politics with critical decisions being made about how fast to open up etc. from individuals, organisations and governments. The mods have to do what they think is best, I'm glad it's not me (much applause).

From a modding perspective, it is uncomfortable to have to "strike down" on something that is a mainstream political stance. However, I think this is less of an 'arbiter of truth' issue in the regard that COVID denial is a clear politically motivated disinformation campaign, rather than an honest contrarian scientific stance. Also, as TD points out, this being literally a matter of life and death for people should be a huge consideration.

I started modding in 2008 and I'm still waiting on my books.

OK, I see someone deleted one of my posts in the British thread, if it's for the idiots comment, later retracted, then fair enough, but given no PM to that extent and mod references to "covid denial" I'm going to assume that is the reason. Some clarification on this point would be useful, I've read widely enough on the subject (at least in the context of the UK, ymmv in the US but I'm only really interested in where I live) that the only reasonable conclusion to make is that Covid, while it exists, is such a minor threat in the UK right now that nothing more that extremely targeted measures in relation to health and care settings are needed, and the much larger threat to the nation's health is more or less everything else (and having an economy to fund a health service to deal with it)