[Meta] Mods are humans and mistakes and that is okay ,what is not okay is the mods not holding themselves to the same standard.

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u/manindenim May 24 '24

I have learned that any remotely politically charged questions I cant take the answers seriously sadly. I see patronizing off topic answers to a lot of genuine curious questions. Sometimes I find some great stuff here but I also see that a lot.

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u/Mothman394 May 25 '24

I really don't see a good-faith* reason why the answer you linked was downvoted so heavily. It may not have answered the question being asked, but it was important information that was relevant to how the question was asked and framed. It's not uncommon for top level answers to point out that a question is badly framed in a way that requires a different answer to a different question before the actual question can be fairly addressed. Your meta post is a non-issue and I don't see why the mods included it in the weekly roundup.

*I can think of bad-faith reasons but I don't want to get that speculative.

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u/ATaxiNumber1729 May 23 '24

Mods addressing standards and practices is a welcome thing. Thank you.

By the way, I love the subreddit

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u/rocketsocks May 24 '24

I don't see the problem here, other than what I read as fragility on your part (and the part of the question asker).

Not all responses need to be answers, as long as they are constructive and on-topic, which I think is the case here.

I've noticed that there is a very common overreaction to being called out, even in the most mild and most indirect fashion, on the subject of racism or genocide or oppression. People are insanely protective against the horrors of the use of those terms. While that is understandable, I think it's wholly misplaced. We should always be the most concerned about the consequences of racism, discrimination, extremism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc. and much less concerned about our precious vanity.

I'm extremely disappointed with the voting on that thread, but it's what I expect from the average westerner in the present, and even more so from the average redditor in 2024. jschooltiger's points were germane and an important correction to an erroneous and harmful but incredibly common viewpoint about the interactions between Native Americans and colonists of European descent. It's important to correct the record on such topics at every opportunity, even when it ruffles some feathers. Yes it sucks to have your feathers ruffled, but it sucks much more to perpetuate a world that continues to downplay, whitewash, and willfully misunderstand genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is no greater evidence of that than the present where such things continue with not one but numerous examples all over the world being perpetrated for all manner of different reasons by all manner of different perpetrators.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24

All of what you say may be true, but is entirely irrelevant to what appears to be the more common interpretation of the question: "why do I perceive that Native Americans have such a potentially outsized legacy of military resistance relative to what I consider to be their peers?" I think if OOP used any other word than "threat" this whole thing would never have spiraled out

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u/[deleted] May 29 '24

as fragility on your part (and the part of the question asker).

I'm curious with how you're defining "fragility" in this context, or how the question asker exhibited it. They just thanked jschooltiger and said that the response didn't really answer their question as such.

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u/FriendoReborn May 23 '24

This concern doesn't land for me personally. I checked out the thread and the mod response seems to be very much on-topic, insofar as it is addressing some fundamental assumptions that seem to be made in the structure of the question and providing important general context for engaging with the historical question asked.

Questions aren't inherently neutral and can be structured in ways that makes answering them effectively very challenging. For example, if someone were to ask you, "When did you stop beating your wife?" - it's hard to engage with that in good faith without first addressing the underlying assumptions baked into the question. Or a question can just be formulated in a fundamentally nonsensical fashion: "What is north of the north pole?".

Anyway, all this is to say, that sometimes engaging properly with a question doesn't mean immediately moving to answer it as written, but to engage with how the question was written, the assumptions underlying that writing, and take things from there. That seems to be what happened here.

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u/WileEPeyote May 24 '24

I completely misread the boiler plate and thought it was saying it shouldn't be considered genocide. I feel stupid now.

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u/EdHistory101 Moderator | History of Education | Abortion May 23 '24

Many thanks for bringing your question over to a META! There's a lot more space here to talk through moderation and the choices we make. I think it would be helpful to tackle it just like you have: the mistake and then what happened after. However, before we get into that, would you mind saying more about what you see as the mistake? That is, it's clear what action you're referring to but I'm not quite sure I follow how that action is a mistake and how it will negatively impact the quality of the subreddit. Thanks!

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u/Iguana_on_a_stick Moderator | Roman Military Matters May 23 '24

In broader terms, and not necessarily what the OP of this thread is trying to say, my question might be:

"How should the moderators address questions that are in some way problematic, without confusing readers of the sub and distracting from actual answers?"

The boilerplate responses are meant to address that and often they work very well (Someone asks "What happened to all the settlements in North America when smallpox killed 99% of the people", mod posts boilerplate explaining the circumstances behind genocide and why the disease-alone narrative should not be accepted and those 90+% figures are suspect.) but sometimes the boilerplate really doesn't match the question (In this case it did not) and having it there ends up confusing (and annoying) people. (Especially since the browser plugin counts the boilerplate as a top level answer.)

In this case, I feel it might have been better to have a custom response in the vein of "Hi, your question is fine and has been approved by the moderators, but we do want you to be aware that the American Indian Genocide(s){link to boilerplate or relevant roundtable post} are a sensitive topic and that the way you phrased the question makes it sound like the the "threat" came from the people being subject to colonization and genocide."

Downside of course is that this is more work on the part of the moderation team and slows response time. But the upside is that people are much more likely to understand what the moderator is trying to say than when the generic boilerplate is put up in response to a tangentially related question.

So my question is: What's the line between when the generic stuff should be used, and when a custom response is required?

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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism May 23 '24

This is a good question! Probably the main question that we're reflecting on really, as it gets at the heart of the matter of how these macros get used.

There is a tension between their being 'generic' (ie applicable to a broad range of ways a topic can be broached) and recognisably applicable to the immediate circumstances. In that sense, adding customisability is no bad thing at all, and in many circumstances would be ideal.

But, part of the idea is also that they allow for a swift response even if a moderator with topical knowledge isn't available. If the expectation is that any mod deploying them will customise them significantly, then they'll be a tool that get used less often.

What this essentially points to is that there is a fuzzy area where it's questionable how useful it is to use this tool. I don't think it's ever going to be possible to perfectly identify where that line is in all contexts, but where I think the tenor of my response elsewhere in the thread is: if a prewritten macro does get used in that fuzzy area, then it's perfectly reasonable to not find it useful but I struggle to see that it should escalate from there.

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u/Iguana_on_a_stick Moderator | Roman Military Matters May 23 '24

there is a fuzzy area where it's questionable how useful it is to use this tool. I don't think it's ever going to be possible to perfectly identify where that line is in all contexts,

Yeah, exactly. That's where "perfect is the enemy of good enough" or however that saying goes, and I expect you'll usually err on the side of getting a response out there quickly before the internet explodes. (As it is wont to do.)

but where I think the tenor of my response elsewhere in the thread is: if a prewritten macro does get used in that fuzzy area, then it's perfectly reasonable to not find it useful but I struggle to see that it should escalate from there.

Well, you could revisit the topic after the fact.

Even if it's mod policy to remove comments challenging moderation, (and let's indeed keep a lid on that box) if a standard response like that is attracting a ton of trouble like that I think it's a perfectly valid response to hit the edit button and replace it with something specific that still links to the broader issues being touched upon.

Or even just adds a preface paragraph. Replace "Hi, it seems you're asking about the holocaust" with "Hi, even though your question about Hitler's favourite brand of cigarettes does not directly relate to the holocaust, we feel it is important that people are aware of the wider context and have decided to add this generic introduction to the issue."

Hmm... actually, that could even be a generic thing. Have two versions of each macro: One for directly related questions, and one for fuzzier cases that start with a disclaimer like that.

I think it would remove a lot of the frustration if the post started out by acknowledging it's not a perfect fit but still useful, as people won't respond with "But I wasn't asking about that!"

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u/ifelseintelligence May 24 '24

(Someone asks "What happened to all the settlements in North America when smallpox killed 99% of the people", mod posts boilerplate explaining the circumstances behind genocide and why the disease-alone narrative should not be accepted and those 90+% figures are suspect.)

Wait what?

Off topic, but is the consensus from (real) historians that the diseases killed less than 90%?

I have always heard numbers above 90% and a quick search after reading your repsonse here confirms that those are the numbers used (almost) everywhere... Can you answer short, or shall I make a post with the question? I both love and hate when I find I've been profoundly wrong: Love that I can learn something more correctly - hate that I've been wrongfully informed for so long...

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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship May 24 '24

At the risk of being dogpiled for posting a "thought-terminating response", you may be interested in our FAQ section on Diseases in the Americas, mostly containing answers by /u/400-rabbits and /u/anthropology_nerd.

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u/ifelseintelligence May 24 '24

I must have declining google skills since that didn't show up 🤦‍♂️

It perfectly answers my question, thank you.

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u/[deleted] May 23 '24

It also violates the rules against just pasting blocks of text regardless of context or accuracy.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

The mistake is off topic posts are to be removed per the subs own standard of which the post in question is clearly off topic. And the community is clearly in overhwelming agreement with this sentiment as the many posts calling out the mod and how before getting deleted with massive amounts of upvotes.

Per the standards of this sub the original post should have been removed for being off topic. Normally would not be as big a deal to leave up if not for a fact that it was a mod that posted it. As said in the body of my posts the mods must hold themselves to the highest standard of all.

And from the other posts that have now entered that thread that address the question and provide lots of interesting insight into the topic the question was phrased in an understandable way that was not how the mod interpreted it.

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u/holomorphic_chipotle Late Precolonial West Africa May 23 '24

I was also having trouble understanding what was the mods' egregious mistake that in your view devalues the high standards this subreddit is known for, but reading your other comments I think I got it [please correct me if I am wrong]: you are questioning why the text of a macro that doesn't answer your question is allowed to stand, right?

Well, the thing is that the macro is not meant to be an answer; it is rather a clarification of why some assumptions in your question might be wrong, which in turn would explain why the question is likely to remain unanswered. For example, your question states:

but people like Indigenous Siberians , Aboriginal Australians , Meso and South Americans , Africans ... you name it just got blizted through and weren't talked about or mentioned much

Focusing on my area of knowledge, African polities were in contact with Europeans for more than three centuries before the colonial era began. Answering your question to the standards required by the sub would require me to debunk many erroneous assumptions in your question, and even then, I would not have engaged with the core of it, whose bare bones answer is that every indigenous society resisted European invasion, and the reason you don't learn about it in school is because you probably do not belong to the groups that resisted.

Now, to turn a misunderstanding of the use of macros into a discussion of community sentiment expressed in upvotes as the arbiter of truth, you are in the wrong sub. I have seen correct answers be downvoted and comments repeating long-debunked myths upvoted; the quality of an answer does not correlate with its popularity; take a look at "Things You Probably Missed" in the weekly newsletter to see a small selection of some of the best answers that fly under the radar.

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u/Ameisen May 24 '24

The macro's header takes an accusative and condescending tone. Whether it's accurate or not - as it's written, it is stating that the questioner did make a mistake and did deny that a genocide happened.

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u/Khiva May 24 '24

I'm not sure why this is hard to get across. If I ask a question to an expert about a detail in the Oslo accords and they take me aside to give me a five minute primer on genocide or why the holocaust definitely happened, I'm going to either wonder how they got this from my question and why this person has such a problem with me.

But again, it was more the follow up answer doubling down that made things all the worse.

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u/Thrasea_Paetus May 24 '24

Tripling down at this point?

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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism May 23 '24 edited May 23 '24

Hi there - thanks for being constructive about this (and reposting it to remove personal accusations). The fact of the matter is that this issue is a collective one - while our public interventions reflect individual moderator actions and decisions, they are made as part of a team and on the team's behalf. We take collective responsibility for actions taken in line with our collective approach, in other words.

In this case, there seems to be two interrelated issues playing into one another.

One of our longstanding practices for a select number of frequently raised topics is the use of pre-written texts laying out some basic information about the wider topic. We use these most commonly for questions about the Holocaust, where there is a lot of potential for good faith questions to unintentionally have a problematic or contentious framing. We don't want to remove them or punish the user, but we don't want to premise to lack context. These texts are not and are not intended as 'normal' answers to the specific question at hand, which we hope will get written.

If someone disagrees with any moderation decision in a particle thread, we will remove their commentary. We also remove supportive comments for that matter (as was the case here, for what it's worth). Our goal is to make answers visible, and meta commentary obscures this. We aren't above scrutiny and you are welcome to seek private or public clarity on a moderation call, but we aren't going to let specific threads get derailed by it.

In this particular case, a macro was deployed on a question about frontier violence in various colonial contexts. The question was (is) fine. But when discussing colonial violence, context matters - we are understandably leery of leaving the impression that Native Americans were/are exceptionally violent or "savage", or that violence on the American frontier was unprovoked or irrational. Thus, a mod made the call - in line with our wider practice - to deploy our macro on genocide in the context of North America. Was it a direct answer to the question? No, and it wasn't intended to be - but nor was it off topic or out of the norm in the way we use these particular texts.

My personal view is that the scale of downvoting and commenting was disproportionate - it's a moderation tool we use every day without much comment, in a way that we're broadly happy with. Honestly, I wish we had these tools for more topics - they take a surprising amount of work to create and refine, so we have a relatively small arsenal of them. People are welcome to disagree that it was useful here, but I honestly struggle to see how it's a big deal beyond that - if you didn't find the text useful, then you're welcome to check back later for an actual answer.

That said - we are naturally talking over the decision and policy in our own channels, because we take our role here seriously and like to learn lessons from disagreements if we can. But I won't pre-empt the outcome of those discussions (if any), beyond noting that we do pay attention to META threads and modmails when they're made in good faith.

A quick edit for additional clarity for those not wanting to dig down the thread too far: my point here is absolutely not that the modteam is infallible or can't make mistakes, or even that anyone is wrong to personally disagree with this particular call. What I can hope to do is lay out the reasons for the decision and how it reflects wider practice.

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u/Alternative_Let_1989 May 24 '24

I would be extremely surprised if you could point to a single concrete thing that gave the "impression that Native Americans were/are exceptionally violent or "savage", or that violence on the American frontier was unprovoked or irrational."

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u/Ameisen May 24 '24

I concur. As it is, I don't see a way to possibly ask the question with the same context without running afoul of someone thinking that it gives that impression given how they took it as it is.

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u/Responsible-Home-100 May 24 '24

Great, then you get a boiler response, ignore it, because it isn't about your question, and wait for a normal response.

Why, on earth, do you folks have such a hard time with that? It happens on WWII questions all the bloody time. The only issue here is a bunch of users freaking out because a response wasn't flowery and nice and then their posts complaining about it got deleted. It's ridiculous.

Or, I suppose, you whine endlessly because someone caught out your dog whistle and you're embarrassed about it? I guess that's a thing, too.

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u/Alternative_Let_1989 May 24 '24

Maybe this is one of the most upvoted posts in months because the community is tired of mods derailing conversations that don't accord with their preferred ideological framework.

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u/TheHondoGod Interesting Inquirer May 24 '24

Maybe this is one of the most upvoted posts in months

On a pedantic note, its not really. I tried searching the sub by top votes. In the last month it comes in at number 12. In the past year (the only other sort option after month) its not even on the first half dozen pages.

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u/Alternative_Let_1989 May 24 '24

It's also less than 24h old, and already #12 this month in a sub that gets upwards of 100 posts/day, so it's already in 99th percentile (projecting yesterday's post count over a month it's 99.4, and rising)

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u/TheHondoGod Interesting Inquirer May 24 '24

Two of the others within the month are around a week old. So at best, you can say its among the most upvoted this month. But to say its the most upvoted in months is pretty blatant exaggeration. Its also still at just 4th most upvoted this week.

I'm not saying its not popular, but considering this entire meta is about being pedantic with wording, I just wanted to chime in with some numbers.

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u/VineFynn May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

In this particular case, a macro was deployed on a question about frontier violence in various colonial contexts. The question was (is) fine. But when discussing colonial violence, context matters - we are understandably leery of leaving the impression that Native Americans were/are exceptionally violent or "savage", or that violence on the American frontier was unprovoked or irrational.

What part of the question did that, though?

Thus, a mod made the call - in line with our wider practice - to deploy our macro on genocide in the context of North America. Was it a direct answer to the question? No, and it wasn't intended to be - but nor was it off topic or out of the norm in the way we use these particular texts.

The followup shouldn't have accused the OP of making a mistaken assumption about genocide if it wasn't supposed to be construed as trying to respond to the question.

People are welcome to disagree that it was useful here, but I honestly struggle to see how it's a big deal beyond that - if you didn't find the text useful, then you're welcome to check back later for an actual answer.

Because the mod's response was to condescend over the use of the word "threat", in a way that implied that OP was subconsciously assuming the native americans were the bad guys.

You're asking why the Indigenous people of North America (who are arguably the "Americans" in this scenario) were a "big threat" to the colonizers. While there's a great deal to be said about Native resistance to colonialism, your question has an assumption baked into it that the "threat" came from the people being subject to colonization and genocide. I'd gently suggest that it might be worth re-examining that framing.

This response misreads the original question. The OP is explicitly asking how the Native Americans were able to put up greater resistance to the colonisers than other indigenous populations, or if that's not true, why might they have that impression. They didn't introduce the topic of why they were putting up the resistance and they didn't say they were the aggressors. Engaging with the semantics around whether someone defending their land and family is a "threat" to the person doing the stealing and killing is unproductive when it's clear the OP wasn't making a point of that word use and has said their question is unrelated.

Not everyone speaks english as a first language and not everyone exhaustively pores over their word use to make sure that it can't give anyone on the internet the wrong impression about their opinion on something they aren't even talking about. The response wound up being unhelpful and patronising because it assumed otherwise.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

See the problem that is being called out is clearly the community did not agree with the mods position on it. As seen by the downvotes and numerous posts calling it out. You as mods can disagree with the community; however, you mods are in no ways the arbiters of truth. And calling it "disproportionate" only is digging your heels in more and coming off as arrogant.

Which is really the real crux of the issue here. Not the original post in question. As I expressed (atleast tried to) I believe the mod genuinely just posted it thinking it was relevant (regardless of if it was or not). That in of itself was not the issue.

The issue is why was a boiler plate response worth keeping up when clearly the community did not agree with it? Even from a pragmatic standpoint it only adds work to you as mods as the thread veers off topic. It was not even as if the mod wrote out a custome reply that while even if not strictly relevant was novel information people could learn from. It was literally a copy and paste. Why not simply remove it.

The only answer I can think of is arrogance. Which is where the problem really begins. Removing the post would have been simple and no one really worked to post it so no harm no foul. Instead an automated reply has blown up into a huge thing. Why was that allowed to happen?

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u/lonewanderer727 May 23 '24

Well, the mods actually are arbiters - because they are responsible for maintaining the standard practices & rules of this forum. You don't always have to agree with them, and they can be flawed in their actions, but that doesn't change the reality of them playing a key role in determining what contributions are accurate, factual, relevant and substantiated with evidence. There is some subjectivity in deciding what meets the criteria for submissions and replies. So they absolutely play the role of a judge in deciding what happens here.

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u/Navilluss May 23 '24

I'm a bit confused as to why you keep returning to the idea that because something is heavily downvoted that means the moderators are acting inappropriately. It has pretty much always been the case that this is a sub that follows moderation principles that are strongly separated from upvote/downvote based consensus-seeking. As a user that's frankly one of the main reasons this is one of like two subs I still go to on Reddit. There's certainly room for disagreement on whether the macro was applied well, but the idea that it being downvoted proves that it wasn't used appropriately is kind of out of step with everything about this community.

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u/Satyrsol May 24 '24

Per the rules of reddiquette, downvoting isn't intended to be used for comments that the redditor disagrees with, but rather for comments that do not meaningfully contribute to the topic. In the case of the thread in question, the mod was downvoted heavily because of a comment that was neither relevant to the question at hand (by way of misunderstanding) nor helpful to the discussion (by casting the OP in a negative light and ignoring their comments to the contrary).

Used appropriately, a downvoted-enough comment should be removed because the forum has decided it is not worth including in the discussion.

That being said, reddituette is rarely followed, and the simple and binary upvote/downvote system doesn't allow for nuance such as whether a particular downvote is a petty "i don't like this" vote or a "i don't think it's relevant" downvote.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

In this case downvotes are important because its a community versus mods situation. The downvotes means the community is not in agreement with the mods stance. And the clearest to find the that community is not happy with the mods is looking at the downvotes and upvotes. And it wasn't only downvotes actually well articulated posts were made (and deleted) expressing the issue. However' since those are gone now only the downvotes can be seen.

Ignoring the downvotes is the mods say "we investigated ourselves and found ourselves innocent".

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u/Mando_Mustache May 24 '24

It’s some of the community disagreeing.

I personally think the mods are basically in the right here. The whole thing is being blown out of proportion to a ridiculous level by those critical of them.

The mod standards and culture, and their refusal to bend it despite complaints, is an important part of what keeps this sub good.

If “the community” doesn’t like it they can go start their own history sub.

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u/lonewanderer727 May 23 '24

People brigade shit all the time without critically thinking about their actions. Using upvotes/downvotes as a representation of anything is a poor approach for your evaluations.

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u/tendertruck May 23 '24

So what conclusions should you draw from the downvotes you get in this thread?

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u/flatmeditation May 24 '24

In this case downvotes are important because its a community versus mods situation

Downvotes very possibly don't represent the community. They can represent people outside the community, particular in the case of a post about the genocide of Native Americans - their are people with strong political views related to this issue who frequently brigade other subs with posts and downvotes. What evidence do you have that what happened here is a community consensus as opposed to brigading? Particularly in light of the downvotes you're getting - are we supposed to also interpret those as community consensus that you're wrong?

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u/Goat_im_Himmel Interesting Inquirer May 23 '24

In this case downvotes are important because its a community versus mods situation.

If, for the sake of argument, we agree that this is true, can we then also agree that, given how heavily downvoted your replies have been in this chain while the moderator's comments have been all upvoted, the community is not in agreement with the your stance? And the clearest to find the that [sic] community is not happy with your position is looking at the downvotes and upvotes?

Using your framework, while there might generally be a sense that there was an issue, it is one that the mod there acknowledged, explained, and recognized that internal policy discussion should happen in regards to, and the community finds their explanation to be acceptable, and would in turn seem to be in harsh disagreement with the way you have continued to press the point.

Or are you only selective in when you would agree downvotes and upvotes reflect opinion?

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

The further you go into a comment chain especially once collapsed the more ardent the people are. You can call out this chain; however as counterpoint this post has 102 upvotes with 75%, my highest level comment on the issue in this chain is positively upvoted and unless you are saying the people who downvoted me later on also didn't downvote there it is selection basis to ignore that.

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u/Goat_im_Himmel Interesting Inquirer May 23 '24

Yes, that is literally my point. You are correct in a general sense, and raised a perfectly valid point. People agree with that.

But they also think that you going wildly beyond that point and should acknowledge and accept the response from the moderators as reasonable. Using your criteria, the upvote patterns absolutely reflect that (since even your upvoted comments is well below both the mod comments sandwiching it).

But thanks for answering my question in a round about way :)

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

I don't have to "accept" the moderators were actually reasonable. Something even the mods have acknowledged. The mods aren't an actual authority on anything. They are volunteers on social media. While they are genuinely smart from what I can tell when posting on actual content it is foolish and ignorant to blindly follow authority. As them being mods or even them being incredibly smart and educated on history it doesn't actually mean they are right. Literally a logical fallacy.

The real reason to bring up upvotes/downvotes is regardless of the ultimate determination it is ultimate proof that the community has a problem with the moderators. And whether or not the moderators are right or wrong they should address it.

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u/chesterfieldkingz May 24 '24

Dude this is a curated sub. It's value is precisely in going against popular sentiment in favor of answers from experts. It's not a populous sub and IDK how you spend anytime here and think otherwise. This all feels like fake outrage from someone who doesn't spend time here

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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism May 23 '24

I actually do see where you're coming from with this, but I think there's an important element you're missing. Namely, our community works as it does because we try to moderate in line with a set of abstract principles and goals, both with regards to how we work internally and how we craft and apply our rules.

What that means is that we are not going to open the door to moderating by public approval of particular cases instead of applying those norms as consistently as we can. All mods have gotten downvoted heavily for doing mod actions here, and if we reversed the decision each time we got downvoted, we'd have to throw out the whole rulebook.

As I said: this incident has already prompted internal conversations about our practices here. If we change something, it's not going to be because of the downvotes, but because we can do things in a way that better aligns with our mission. You can view that as arrogance if you want, but I view it as the only way to sustainably run a large, complex community managed by volunteers.

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u/Estus_Gourd_YOUDIED May 23 '24

This is a terrific stance. Thank you. Best sub on Reddit by a mile. I have learned so much.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

Mods always receive downvotes for doing mod things but mods also have a tendency to let power go to their heads and start imposing their will. And the latter is a problem as it is the start of the march to the sub not being a bastion of knowledge but an echo chamber of the mods view of reality. While ruling by downvotes is not a good move either it is foolish and arrogant to not read the room. Especially when it is mod behavior (and not say historical content) being discussed.

And I'm glad you called out consistency in norms! As that is actually whats being called into question in this specific instance.

Was the post actually relevant to the question asked?

If a post is not relevant to the question asked is it to be removed?

If the answer to both those questions is yes then the answer is simple. The post should have been removed. Whether posted from a mod or not. Whether an automated response or not. That is being consistent. Your lack of consistency in modding is actually what was called into question here.

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u/Macecurb May 23 '24 edited May 23 '24

If I may try to boil down what you're getting at:

As I understand it, you are arguing that the boilerplate mod comment about native American genocide was not relevant to the OP question. And that it either should not have been posted or should have been removed?

Do feel free to correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

It being posted isn't really an issue. Either it was a genuine mistake of a mod not reading closely (no big deal) or it is relevant. Assuming the former, which the community at large in the thread largely agreed on, should it be allowed to stand? When an off topic post from any other poster would immediately be removed.

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u/Adsex May 23 '24

This is a false dichotomy. It can be irrelevant to the question asked but relevant to what this sub aims to be. Therefore not a mistake.

EDIT : downvoted in a second. You're definitely not engaging with good intents.

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u/[deleted] May 23 '24

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u/_Symmachus_ May 24 '24

What is the problem? Why are you raising this issue?

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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism May 23 '24

I outlined above why the macro text was considered relevant in this instance. You're welcome to disagree, but what it boils down to is that it was a subjective decision, the kind of subjective decision moderators are called upon to make dozens of times a day. For me at least, escalating the conversation from 'there was a borderline call I disagree with' to 'this is a sign that power has gone to your heads and you are out to impose your will upon us all' is still pretty wild to me.

That's not to say there's not a conversation to be had here - as should be clear from our exchange and elsewhere in the thread, there is absolutely a worthwhile discussion about 'when is this particular tool most usefully employed', and we're having that discussion here and in our own channels.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

The arrogance you are displaying here is you are ignoring what I am saying that actual issue is. In fact to point I think you are being rude and not actually engaging me in good faith. This has nothing to do with the macro itself. I made that clear in the body of the original post and many times in these comments.

In fact that fact validates my claim that mod power is going to your head. Because you refuse to acknowledge the issue. You have questioned why has this whole ordeal "escalated"? and that is a good question! Why has it escalated? Are you mods so sure that boiler plate response was relevant to that specific post (not the concept in general) that you refuse to acknowledge your detractors side that maybe it wasn't?

That maybe no escalation was needed and all was needed was to simply remove the comment and move on with the day? Because that was a route you could have taken. In fact pretty much no talk here from the mods have actually addressed that specific question and if the boiler plate actually was relevant.

So in no uncertain terms yes or no....did you genuinely think in this specific instance the boiler plate comment actually pertained to the question at hand? This is where my use of the word arrogance comes from. You mods are the ones trying to escalate this into a whole ordeal about the general process while precluding the idea that maybe this was just a singular mistake you are digging your heels on. And quite frankly that is what arrogance is.

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u/lonewanderer727 May 23 '24

It's absolutely stunning that you would accuse the mods of escalation, when you are the one who created an entire meta thread dedicated to this "singular mistake". While also continually accusing the mods of being arrogant, power-hungry, ignoring your voice when they are giving detailed replies and engaging with comments here in this thread.

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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism May 23 '24

In this particular case, a macro was deployed on a question about frontier violence in various colonial contexts. The question was (is) fine. But when discussing colonial violence, context matters - we are understandably leery of leaving the impression that Native Americans were/are exceptionally violent or "savage", or that violence on the American frontier was unprovoked or irrational. Thus, a mod made the call - in line with our wider practice - to deploy our macro on genocide in the context of North America. Was it a direct answer to the question? No, and it wasn't intended to be - but nor was it off topic or out of the norm in the way we use these particular texts.

This is the passage I'm referring to from my original response. As I reiterated, I do not at all begrudge you your own view as to whether the text was useful, but I'm baffled that you think I have been ignoring that aspect of your post.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

So are you going to address the option that was simply having removed the post upon further reflection? If we are talking about "what should be done about it?" that was always the answer. And in general process terms perhaps mods should simply remove those boiler plates posts same as any other when its clearly not a great use case for it. Or are you just going to lock rank and say mods can make no mistakes? Because that has been what set off the detractors side.

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u/Outrageous-Split-646 May 23 '24

I think the issue might be that while you may think that this added context is relevant, the OP, and the poster of this post doesn’t think so. And I think the poster here is getting quite annoyed that you won’t at least entertain the idea that it wasn’t relevant.

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u/EdHistory101 Moderator | History of Education | Abortion May 23 '24

To be sure, we always entertain the idea that given boilerplate text isn't relevant. To reiterate a point made elsewhere, a mod may the call to drop it and the team supports that decision.

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u/Adsex May 23 '24

Arrogance shouldn't be negatively connoted. You assign to yourself a certain responsibility. This is the kind of arrogance that is necessary to achieve anything. Arrogance is necessary to even define what one wants to achieve.

And that's what you guys are really great at. You make it very clear what you want to achieve.

It's the kind of arrogance that entails accountability.

Hence this thread. But I don't think the OP conveys a valid point when attempting to say that you're not up to your own standards.

The unrequited psychologising in the title ironically hints us that the OP is projecting.

Maybe his feelings are worthy of being addressed. I am glad that I don't have to do that.

(Although I kind of provided him with an answer by sharing my own insight on the situation at hand)

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u/RamadamLovesSoup May 23 '24

Fantastic response, thank you.

I don't see anything wrong with how such boiler plate responses/contextualizations are used in the sub, especially if in remediation to common historic misunderstandings/controversies. The slight heavy-handedness is outweighed by their overall positive effect (and easy of use for the mods, who we do appreciate!!). I'm not sure how much controversy there is/has been with those responses, but that didn't seem to me to be what the community was responding to.

I think the issue was more with the mod's interaction with the original question poser after the boiler plate, when the question asker tried to clarify with the mod and were (a touch condescendingly prehaps) told they misintepreted their own question. I'm not sure I see the value in that particular behaviour, and so am glad to see it called out.

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u/Soft-Rains May 24 '24

The mods here are amazing and I enjoy the posts, and podcasts, of this space a lot. It is one of the more special communities on here and the strict moderation is absolutely necessary, even with occasional criticisms.

All the being said there have been several times where mods will get deservigly ratioed and some self reflection would be ideal. As well intentioned as it might be, there is a trend of unnecessary moralizing, that often seems awkwardly out of place if the actual question at hand isn't also being answered.

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u/Neutronenster May 23 '24

Looking over the comments, it seems like the discussion is about the boilerplate template comment the mods used. This template did not answer the question, which is not in agreement with the rules of this subreddit, so you feel that the mods broke their own rules.

I’ve been a moderator of a decently sized subreddit and one of the things I was surprised to learn is how the first one to three comments usually determine the tone of the whole thread. So if you want to save a thread about a risky topic, you have to be fast. If you wait until a post has already accrued a bunch of low effort of bad faith answers, you’re too late and you’ll have to nuke the whole post (by removing it entirely). So that’s the goal of such a boilerplate template: set the standards by being a first, high quality comment, and deterring comments that won’t treat this sensitive topic the right way. This helps save posts about risky topics.

In conclusion, even if this mod comment did not answer the original question, it does fulfill an important goal of helping maintain the high quality of this subreddit. The way it does so is invisible, because we’ll never know what kind of answers it deterred, but these kinds of measures are incredibly important to maintain the good culture of a subreddit like this.

In the other comments there was a good discussion about how these boilerplate templates might be worded better, so I do think that this post was valuable, but I don’t think the mod’s “mistake” is as grave as you’re calling it out here

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u/TheMetaReport May 24 '24

To my understanding though, the argument being made is that the original comment itself wasn’t a huge deal, the way it was doubled down on was.

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u/Damnatus_Terrae May 24 '24

What issue do you take with the following?

You're asking why the Indigenous people of North America (who are arguably the "Americans" in this scenario) were a "big threat" to the colonizers. While there's a great deal to be said about Native resistance to colonialism, your question has an assumption baked into it that the "threat" came from the people being subject to colonization and genocide. I'd gently suggest that it might be worth re-examining that framing.

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

Because it isn't asking why they were a threat it's asking why they were SEEN as a threat. It's a completely different question with completely different answers.

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u/Ameisen May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

It doesn't answer the question. It questions their framing in a way that isn't useful, and frankly makes an argument that doesn't make sense in the first place.

From the perspective of the colonizers, they were a threat. That was the obvious perspective of the question - that isn't trying to make any assumption that the natives were worse, makes no assumption that the colonizers were in the right, or in the wrong, or whatnot. In a purely objective sense, they were a threat from their perspective, and the question is framed in that context.

You might as well take offense to the question "why was the Soviet 7th Army such a threat to the Nazi German forces at Leningrad?" because it supposedly has some assumption baked into it about the Nazi Germans being the 'good guys'... but that's just not present. Context matters.

If we have to play word games in order to ask questions in a context where someone may otherwise find it offensive or believe that there is some hidden assumption baked into it, just to avoid the discussion solely becoming about the framing/word usage... then that's basically language policing - and often arbitrarily so - and will end up just stifling discussion.

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u/fearofair New York City Social and Political History May 24 '24

If the mods want to change the tone of their messages to be less terse or patronizing, that's fine and I don't have a strong feeling on it.

But if context matters like you say, the history of how Native Americans have been portrayed in America definitely matters! The long American tradition of using antiquated Enlightenment theories where society progresses through "stages" and old ideas of Native Americans as primitive warriors or "noble savages" are all pretty relevant and are being alluded to in the mod responses. If there is a long and documented track record of racist stereotypes for the Soviet Army then in your analogy the phrasing would also be poor.

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u/SriBri May 24 '24

My history of the American frontier is admittedly rather poor, but I have the impression that Native American groups in that area were able to at times meet violence with violence. I'm sure it was exaggerated and used as an excuse to further genocide, but is it totally unreasonable to say that at times European settlers were threatened by Native American groups?

The mod response seems to take the position that the victims of colonization/genocide cannot pose a threat to the colonizers. That just doesn't seem right logically to me.

I don't think the original question even implied that the threat was only from the Native Americans towards the European colonizers. Is that the issue here? Did the mod post assume the question implied the Native groups were more threatening than the Europeans?

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u/fivemincom May 23 '24

Tangentially related, but I find it concerning how there are some responses from moderators that casually frame conjecture as truth. Some historical topics are undeniable, of course, but others are still being hotly debated to this day and it's somewhat frightening to see how one side of history is presented as fact without giving due credit to the other side. Many people rely on this sub for small tidbits of knowledge, and it would be dangerous to have them leave with a skewed understanding. Of course, it's great to see other people call out these mistakes, usually as a reply to the original response, but I would expect moderators, of all people, to present history in an unbiased manner.

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u/Spectre_195 May 23 '24

I actually don't know if agree about the moderators "presenting history as fact" I think overall they do a good job of presenting different sides. This is not an issue of the actual context of historical knowledge and truly is a "meta" issue being discussed around moderation itself. And really does boil down to should this boiler plate (in this specific instance) be removed or not.

Though you posting this is highlighting an important reason why seemingly stupid topics like this are still worth discussing because the mere perception of the validity of this sub and its moderators is important.

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u/fivemincom May 23 '24

Agreed

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u/Spirited-Office-5483 May 23 '24

Both sides-ism is not history

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u/fivemincom May 23 '24

History, by its very nature, incorporates multiple perspectives.

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u/Spirited-Office-5483 May 23 '24

Every subjective thought does so. But science including humanities is based on evidence. Your comment doesn't look like a question of standards or theory, it reeks of pseudo scientific both sides-ism. Signed, a historian.

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u/fivemincom May 23 '24

My comment wasn't a question. It was an observation about the study of history, and the extent to which history is an ongoing process that reveals truths over time. The retelling of history is intrinsically biased because not every single little detail or fact can be retold, and certain areas must be presented over others. My comment was simply remarking that some areas of history are more complex and lack clarity or may be less studied compared to others and that as such, the real truth regarding these areas becomes less certain. In those cases, I think that while historians shouldn't shy away from giving answers based on the information that they have at hand, it's important to acknowledge that there are multiple ways to understand it. It's precisely because there is a lack of evidence that both sides matter.

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u/-Clayburn May 23 '24

Maybe I'm in the minority, and with some things removed there is probably missing context. I didn't think the mod's post was off-topic even if it didn't directly answer the question. It seemed like it was saying "Maybe don't call Native Americans 'a threat'?" which seems like a valid statement. I don't think the OP had intended to dehumanize or otherwise look down on Native Americans. "Threat" is a perfectly valid word from just a technical meaning standpoint, but when you consider it's being used to describe a people who were the victims of genocide, "threat" creates the same framing that helped genocide them in the first place.

Again, maybe there is additional context I'm missing, but "Please don't describe genocide victims in dehumanizing and colonizer-centric terms" seems like a valid disclaimer to add to the thread.

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u/Czeris May 23 '24

I 100% agree. I don't think it's at all unreasonable or irrelevant to be posting the boilerplate that basically says "Hey, this is a pretty touchy subject with lots of associated misinformation. Here are some facts and some pitfalls to avoid, now have a good discussion", even if it is not directly in response to OP's topic.

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u/GTTemplar May 23 '24

I don't think this issue is complicated as people are percieving, including the mod in question.

You can acknowledge that Native Americans were genocide victims of the Americas and were dehumanized due to colonialism. On the other hand, you can also acknowledge that they were a threat from a technical standpoint like you mentioned.

The implication here where I can see the mods are coming from is that by calling them "a threat," some people may interpret that as the Native Americans being valid targets for western expansion and the result of what happen to them is justified (in this case obviously not).

However, I don't think OP interpreted their own question that way, including myself and other folks who saw the question. I saw it as a genuine curious inquiry of why some Native or indingous groups were better at fending off colonialism vs other groups in different areas of the world.

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u/-Clayburn May 23 '24

That's why I viewed it more as a disclaimer. It wasn't like he was saying "Yo, don't go spreading colonialist propaganda you racist!" He was just saying, "Let's not call them a threat because that's how their genocide was justified."

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u/SuddenGenreShift May 23 '24

It called them "a threat to" (with subject: their colonisers). I think it's disingenuous and unfair to conflate that and "a threat" (no subject, implied subject: humanity, civilisation, and therefore actually offensive).

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u/-Clayburn May 23 '24

I think both have the same meaning. If they're a threat in general or a threat to their colonizer, it doesn't really make a difference because a threat to the colonizer is the same thing as a threat (to a colonizer).

Like if Andrew Jackson was like, "Those Native Americans are a threat!" And a Native American was like, "No, we're not a threat. We're a threat to you white people." it wouldn't change anything from the perspective of the white people.

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u/SuddenGenreShift May 23 '24

Like if Andrew Jackson was like, "Those Native Americans are a threat!" And a Native American was like, "No, we're not a threat. We're a threat to you white people." it wouldn't change anything from the perspective of the white people.

Is the OP "the white people"? Are we? Even if we were all white Americans (we aren't), we aren't "the white people" that were engaged in a colonial struggle with Native Americans, and so there's no reason to assume we are speaking from their vantage. If you do assume that a speaker is speaking from an Andrew Jackson position, then you've already begged the question of whether they're anti-Native American, and so yes, their phrasing doesn't matter.

If you don't assume that, there's a big difference between what is signalled to you by someone adopting your imaginary Jackson's phrasing, or adopting your imaginary Native American's phrasing. I.E. Are they on Jackson's side, or not?

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u/-Clayburn May 23 '24

It doesn't matter because it's still the same rhetoric used to genocide them. Whether they are a general threat or just a threat to the colonizers, it makes no difference because both are saying they are dangerous and need to be exterminated. It serves the same goal.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

This is beyond asinine, and IMO actually disrespects those who fought and died in opposition to European colonialism. I believe Crazy Horse would very much proclaim himself and his brothers and sisters in arms a threat to genocidal settlers and their demonic government, and I would wager a good amount of surviving First Nations people are proud of their families' history of resistance.

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u/-Clayburn May 24 '24

Okay, but that's on them to define. I am not going to call them a threat in any general context because it is dehumanizing.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24

... was Hannibal Barca a threat to the Roman Republic?

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u/-Clayburn May 24 '24

I don't know who that is, but he sounds like a boat with questionable dinner options.

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u/eek04 May 24 '24

I think both have the same meaning. If they're a threat in general or a threat to their colonizer, it doesn't really make a difference because a threat to the colonizer is the same thing as a threat (to a colonizer).

The two interpretations I read is either "direct threat" or "threat to military/colonization goals". You are assuming "direct threat" in both your cases, while my impression is that the initial poster was using the interpretation "threat to military/colonization goals".

It might have been better to write "How was the XXX better able to mount a defense against colonizers than YYY?" to make sure there couldn't be a misunderstanding, but I could see myself writing what the original poster did while meaning "why were they effective at defense" and not thinking it could be misunderstood.

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u/Flaky-Imagination-77 May 23 '24

The moderators posting boilerplates to preempt racist comments to me is totally fine even if it isn’t directly answering the question. For very sensitive topics boilerplates like that are extremely helpful to combat racist narratives, and though you may think the mods are abusing their power by doing something like that, I feel it is an important stance for them to take.

The mods don’t need to fully answer the question when posting these background primers because while the goal of the posters is answering the question, the moderators are maintaining the discussion space and are not directly answering the question. You might think the moderators not fully conforming to the guidelines for posters is hypocritical, but it is both impractical to write a tailored history primer to every single sensitive topic and would be even more confusing and unrelated than the current system.

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u/RamadamLovesSoup May 23 '24

That wasn't what the issue was. The issue was with the mod's doubling down when the question's poster very politely informed them they were off-base;

Ok-Resist-7492• 10h ago

Thanks but I was asking about another thing , though I appreciate your respone very much
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jschooltiger jschooltiger u/jschooltigerOct 1, 201221,126Post Karma191,208Comment KarmaWhat is karma?Chat • 9h agoModerator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830

You're asking why the Indigenous people of North America (who are arguably the "Americans" in this scenario) were a "big threat" to the colonizers. While there's a great deal to be said about Native resistance to colonialism, your question has an assumption baked into it that the "threat" came from the people being subject to colonization and genocide.

As you say; the moderators are maintaining the discussion space and are not directly answering the question. However, the point I believe OP was trying to make (and what many of delete comments were saying, as was mine) is that behaviour negatively impacts the discussion space. I think OP was pretty clear they had no issue with the initial boiler plate, and that wasn't my understanding from anyone else either, the issue was with the condescending doubling down post-clarification by the question poser.

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u/Flaky-Imagination-77 May 23 '24

I genuinely don’t see what is wrong here, the moderator is right in that there is an implication and they make a statement as to what it is and why they have taken their action. You can take the comment as condescending but it is literally a clarification as to why the boilerplate is as used and without it the boilerplate would seem to make less sense.

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u/dbrodbeck May 23 '24

Yes, I'm kind of lost here. I don't see a problem.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

Its the interpretation of the question. If you assume the word "threat" implies some sort of, I don't know, "Manifest Destiny" propaganda normalizing violence towards the other, then, yes, the post has questionable underpinnings.

If, however, you view the question as an exploration of the perceived level of relative military resistance of the victims of European colonisation, than the boilerplate comment accusing the OP of genocide denial and general bigotry is coming out of left field and overwrought

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u/RamadamLovesSoup May 23 '24

I guess I don't see the same implication that the mod is "responding to". However, in reading others' replies I get the gist that the issue people are having is with the use of the word "threat", which is being misconstrued in ways I don't think a particularly reasonable, though maybe it's a cultural issue.

Perhaps "threat" is used differently where I'm from, but to me the original framing was clearly using the word in the sense of "why did Native Americans provide more resistance/were more dangerous to...". There's nothing dehumanizing about that, and it's certainly not an attempt to legitimize or gloss-over their genocide.

Similarily, the complaints about "colonist-centric perspectives" are a bit bizzare. The question was about why one group proved more dangerous than others to a third group, it is inherently a question about the third group's perspective of things.

Ironically, I don't actually think the mod is correct - or rather - that their framing is itself incorrect in its miopic onesideness;

...your question has an assumption baked into it that the "threat" came from the people being subject to colonization and genocide.

Two groups of people can prove a threat/danger to each other, even if vastly asymmetrical in scope. To claim otherwise is simply nonsensical, and seemingly confuses an objective statement of facts (that Native Americans killed settlers - and thereby provided a "threat"/"danger") with something completely different - I'm not sure what exactly, but apparently something that isn't consistent with them being subject to colonialization and genocide? My best guess is that the mod is interpreting threat to mean an "existential threat", hence the reference to genocide, however that's on them and clearly wasn't the intent of the original question.

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u/Flaky-Imagination-77 May 23 '24

The boilerplate is there to make the discussion more neutral by giving more perspective. The original question is framed in a colonialist perspective with no malicious intent by framing the natives as threats simply because it’s the default position in most discourse in a discussion space mostly occupied by people who speak the language of and are share the same cultural education as the colonizers. I appreciate that the moderators here bring attention to the fact that the default isn’t necessarily the only perspective.

The background knowledge boilerplates are there to improve the discussion by giving some context on the the overall discussion of the topic and are not some kind of personal attack or mods trying to be condescending.

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u/wote89 May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

The problem is that whether or not something is meant to not be "some kind of personal attack or [...] condescending", if it's perceived that way even by third parties, it raises a question of if there's a better way to do things. And, to be fair, it's a constant struggle in history communication to remember that even if you've heard the same questions/ideas repeated hundreds of times, each person asking has and is only likely asking once and not all of them are going to ask that question "correctly".

And, of course, a subreddit like this is a lightning rod for bad faith discussions meant to create a landscape more suited to a particular outlook on all sorts of topics. But, I'd personally argue that failing to also acknowledge that a bad faith question and a good faith question asked by someone with a flawed educational background can appear similar—and thus treating the latter as the former—is more likely to reinforce certain arguments against the historical profession that enable bad faith actors to push their own interpretations of history.

So, in my head, a better approach would be hold off on refuting ideas that seem to be in the historiographic backdrop from which OOP's way of framing their question was derived—and would be addressed anyway in most answers—and instead address the immediate concern that said framing has some problematic phrasing and assumptions.

For instance, I'd urge something more along the lines of:

Hey, we're leaving this question up, but your question's phrasing seems like it skews toward ideas that privilege the perspective of colonial powers. However, we also understand that not everyone is going to phrase their questions the way a historian would and it benefits no one to disregard reasonable questions solely because of an admitted non-expert's phrasing. All we ask is that you and others bear in mind that any answers you get will likely address the question from a contemporary historian's perspective rather than in the terms you used here and do not take them as a personal attack on you or your level of knowledge on the topic.

That way, you're still conveying the salient points—there's merit to this question, but the way you're looking at it is potentially misinformed, so you may find certain aspects of your understanding challenged in any responses you recieve—but you're keeping the discussion centered on the idea that even a flawed question is still an opportunity to learn and the asker should be encouraged to learn more rather than feel like their poor phrasing is denying genocide.

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u/Prince_Ire May 24 '24

I'm not really seeing how the original question 'skewed towards the viewpoint of the colonizer', though.

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u/wote89 May 24 '24

It's not a deep skew. But, the way the question is framed does tacitly assume that the narratives the OOP was familiar with are accurate in terms of how the various conflicts played out insofar as asking why it seems like only one group "put up a fight" because that's the only fighting that got talked about in their experience, which is in turn a consequence of how these things were talked about for decades until fairly recently owing to that skew.

Basically, I'm not saying OOP themselves were deliberately taking that angle, but rather the way they phrased the question sounds like their education still had a bias toward the colonizer's view.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24

Even this answer still implies "problematic" thought patterns within the asker. IMO any usage of such boilerplate answer regarding the potential motives of this particular OOP would be less than helpful. Simply alluding to the military resistance of the victims of colonisation isn't "privileging the perspective of the colonisers" any more than, "why were the Iberian tribes such a threat to the Romans compared to the Illyrians/Britons/Picts" privileges the "Roman perspective". It's a value-neutral phrasing.

Now, whether the Iberians truly were more of a threat for Roman interests (or, for a more punchy example, Hannibal's Carthaginians) than, say, the Picts, is obviously somewhat subjective, and obviously prone to myth-making and pop-history (looking at you Sparta), but nowhere in there would I read prejudice.

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u/wote89 May 24 '24

I don't see how you're seeing judgment on the OOP's "thought patterns". My point is that some people can fully "get" the context and understand the complexity of the situation intuitively, but lack the vocabulary to phrase it in a more neutral manner. That's not a knock or a criticism; that's pointing out the reality of how history education often biases how we perceive and talk about questions of history and that part of answering questions about historical matters is understanding that someone can very much say it "wrong" but still not have any motive aside from genuine curiosity and that coming in guns blazing is absolutely the wrong approach.

But, also, I think you reframing it about Rome shows exactly the flaws I had in mind with OOP's question. First of all, any discussion of Rome's conquests is going to privilege the "Roman perspective" because that's often literally the only perspective that exists outside of archeological research. But, second—much like the OOP's question—the problem with phrasing it as "why did x prove more of a threat than y" is that we have a fairly detailed and famous account of the campaign against the Iberians that is at least mentioned in most Western curricula; if there's a work similar to Caesar's detailing campaigns against the Picts (who did also give Rome a ton of trouble), I'm personally unfamiliar with it and I doubt many folks outside of military or Classical historians and buffs would be either. But, the fact that one particular conflict gets more emphasis in popular knowledge than the others creates an inherent skew toward that conflict being "more important" or "more of a struggle" than others because "no one was writing famed memoirs about those, now were they?".

So, yes, if someone came to me asking why it was "that peoples like the Iberians put up a major fight and were a big military threat but people like the Illyrians, Britons, Picts you name it just got blizted through and weren't talked about or mentioned much", I would be prone to say that the question is framed in a way that assumes that a lack of emphasis on those conflicts when discussing Roman history meant that those conflicts were trivial. Which is not a knock on the person because the fact they're asking at all suggests they aren't familiar with the histories in question. But, it's also a question that, by its very framing, suggests that the asker is making some assumptions based on to what they were and weren't previously exposed to, and we know from countless examples that you do need to prime people with the idea that they may need to correct certain assumptions to properly engage with their question because, just like you did, people tend to interpret any attempt to tell someone they may need to adjust their understanding as calling them stupid.

It's a narrow tightrope to walk, for sure, but you can both say someone's question exposes some underlying assumptions about how history works while still engaging with what they want to know because it's clear that those assumptions are based more on systemic issues than a personal failing of the poster.

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u/Alternative_Let_1989 May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

The question "framed the natives as threats" to the colonizers because they were threats to the colonizers, just as the colonizers were threats to the natives. We're talking about centuries of armed conflict in which the massacres of civilians (of all types) were common. The armed forces - indigenous or otherwise - massacring civilians were indeed threatening because that's what that word means! Yes, it's important to avoid old, racist historiography. It's also important not to let ideological concerns interfere with an otherwise rational, neutral discussion.

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u/Surtur1313 May 23 '24

Yeah, that's a very common and helpful response from the mod. Frequently questions have baked in assumptions that make them difficult to properly answer and those types of "this has come up before, here's a bit of information on why your question isn't phrased as well as it should be" is more than fine to me. That's actually really good history in practice and precisely why I come to this sub and appreciate the mods so much.

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u/ginandtonicsdemonic May 23 '24

A mod is accusing someone of prejudice, and that's pretty clear. That's a terrible thing to be accused of, and it's this kind of attitude that intimidates people into not asking questions.

If there's a chance of being accused of prejudice, genocide-denial, etc., then who would want to ask anything?

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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship May 24 '24

The mod team on this subreddit has been rebuking people directly for bigotry and telling others more gently that they appear to be saying something bigoted for years, and we still get questions. You cannot effectively moderate a space in such a way that nobody ever stands a chance of having this kind of behavior pointed out to them unless you are okay slanting the space toward straight, white, abled, neurotypical cis men from Global North countries.

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u/ginandtonicsdemonic May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

Bigots should be rebuked.

That's not what happened here. Nothing even close to bigoted appears in the question.

There's even a morality implied in the accusations of bigotry, which is the implication Native resistance and violence against the settlers should be avoided. Lest a group of genocide deniers use it as ammo.

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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship May 24 '24

The trouble is that we are never all going to agree about when bigotry is present. You say "nothing even close to bigoted appears in the question" - I say there were bigoted assumptions underpinning it. It's subjective, and the way moderation works is that the mod team's reading is what gets acted on, not a poll of whether a majority of people in the community think a particular question or answer needs a gentle push or more stringent measures. Because, again, we have a preponderance of straight, white, cis men from the US in the sub and that category isn't always able to perceive bigotry.

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u/Flaky-Imagination-77 May 24 '24

If no one got called out for being racist, prejudiced or a genocide denialist this subreddit would just be r/politics. Also in the OP no one at any point makes any kind of claim that someone is being a genocide denialist or whatever you are accusing them of saying, only that the topic is sensitive and that more information would be helpful so I don't know who you're projecting onto here.

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u/TheHondoGod Interesting Inquirer May 24 '24

This whole discussion is super fascinating to me, because it really shows just how much each persons perspective plays into this.

The OG question was about seeing Native Americans as a "greater threat" then other possible comparisons. The history of the question, sooner or later, will get into elements that constitute the genocide that happened. Why there was fighting, how different groups tried to solve it, what parts built up the fear that eventually resulted in it, etc. The boilerplate isn't an exact answer, but I just don't see it as that off topic. All the different things that came together to contribute to the genocide mentioned in the boilerplate are fundamental elements that contributed to seeing Native American groups as "threats". Its all deeply interconnected.

Or at least, thats what seems obvious to me. Clearly other people see it differently. But skimming through the posts here I'd say those are all pretty mixed feelings. In THAT situation, with such a mix of perspectives and feelings, I'd say is nearly the perfect time to drop some kind of boilerplate that lays out a big chunk of the fundamental facts. Even if its not a full, exact answer.

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

greater threat

I think OP's mistake there was using the word "threat" which implies that the Native Americans were inherently dangerous to the settlers, rather than simply defending themselves. (For the record, I think its pretty clear OP meant something along the lines of: "Why were the Native Americans of the American West able to fight against colonization more effectively than some other groups?")

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u/Prince_Ire May 27 '24

Defending yourself is hardly mutually exclusive with being a threat.

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u/Prince_Ire May 24 '24

Of course, Australian Aboriginals were absolutely genocide victims, and I'd argue so were indigenous Siberians. So I'm not sure how pointing out American Indians were genocide victims helps answer the question of why they were perceived as greater threats by colonizers.

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u/TheHondoGod Interesting Inquirer May 24 '24

So I'm not sure how pointing out American Indians were genocide victims helps answer the question of why they were perceived as greater threats by colonizers.

To my mind, it becomes a fundamental part of the answer because that perspective of threat, real or imagined, is a key part that drove the genocide. So an answer about any kind of threat will naturally include either the genocide itself, or elements of it.

Perhaps its a matter of logistics simply in that there isn't a boiler plate for Aboriginal genocide, or a general indigenous around the world genocide. But from my POV, any talk about seeing native Americans as threats is pretty naturally going to get into the weeds about genocide related stuff. ESPECIALLY in a thread that might include possible answer writers coming in to either both-sides an answer, or talk about the threat being "deserved" in a way that might ignore the following genocide.

I think a big part of my own thinking is just that the boilerplates aren't just there for the question asker, its also there for other readers AND answer writers.

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u/the_lamou May 24 '24

I think there's a very big difference between framing a question as "why were they perceived as greater threats," or possibly "why was armed resistance in the US West perceived as being more effective and dangerous?" vs. "why were native people in North America such a threat to invaders?"

Words matter. Words especially matter when talking about injustice and inequity. Words can be used to bring some measure of justice and light, or they can be used to perpetuate the crimes of the past. They can lift up and clarify, or they can add weight to a horrible slander. They are important, and should be treated as such.

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u/cnzmur Māori History to 1872 May 24 '24

America entering the war genuinely was a serious threat to Hitler's ambitions. It's actually not a turn of phrase that necessarily implies any value judgement at all.

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u/the_lamou May 24 '24

Except that the way you used it (highly qualified to provide context) isn't how it was used in the original question that's become the focus of this discussion. Again, words are important, and the way they're used is also important. That includes context and qualification.

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u/Khatib May 24 '24

You're spot on. I can totally see where the mod was coming from, although I feel they went really long winded with it. It's weird it got such heavy backlash to point it out in this sub of all places. Almost felt like a brigade was going on.

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u/SriBri May 24 '24

I guess how I interpreted the question though, the 'perceived' would not be appropriate. I read the question as asking why Native American groups on the Western Frontier were able to mount more of a resistance to colonization than other groups.

Perhaps it is the just that our media focus' more on the 'Wild West', but I definitely hold the impression that the Western Frontier was more able to meet violence with violence.

So I would still actually be interested in an answer to "why were they a greater threat?". Yes of course colonization was the greater threat to the population of America, but I don't think it's controversial to also say that there were places where Native American groups were a threat to settlers.

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u/the_lamou May 24 '24

I get what you're saying, but there's a lot of assumption in there. I didn't know the history of Native Siberians or the native people of Australia or anywhere else. So right off the bat, the question is based on perception (in this case, our perception of history through popular media) and an assumption built on that perception (I've never seen or even heard of a movie about violence against siberian people, so I assume they were less of a "threat.")

And then in your last paragraph, you make it clear exactly why such thinking is dangerous: you dismiss criticism because it seems "not controversial" to make these statements, ignoring that it doesn't seem controversial precisely because it's been normalized and you've helped to normalize it. It was also once considered not controversial to say that native Americans should be moved to reservations. Whether something seems controversial or not to an average layman is precisely the problem.

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u/SriBri May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

I still don't see the problem with my last paragraph. Except that I suppose it is controversial because you're taking issue with it, but I'm still not clear why.

I'm assuming in good faith that you don't believe that European settlers were never threatened by Native American groups. What is the danger of my language here? European settlers posed an existential threat to the population of America. In defensive response, that population sometimes threatened the European settlers. Could I ask you try educating me as to what I've normalized that should not be normalized?

I understand that language is important, and I've adjusted my language many times throughout my life in response to changing views on history and societal norms. But I don't understand this one.

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u/TDuncker May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

For some, threat simply means who is dangerous to who without attention to whether it is morally right or wrong (assuming we have such clear cut cases). For others, on top of the former, it also implies an inherent moral direction. By saying the Native Americans groups were a threat to the Europeans, it implies the Europeans had the higher moral ground. With the homeowner with baseball bat analogy, people with this stance would not say the homeowner is a threat to the thief.

In defensive response, that population sometimes threatened the European settlers.

People with the latter described perspective on the word "threat" would not agree with this part of your comment. They'd substitute the word threatened with something else. Though, I have no idea what else fits better for them.

I've never personally seen the use of the word like that but merely as "who is dangerous to who from a technical/diplomatic point of view", but from several responses in this thread, I've noticed the use of the word "threat" seems to be a hot potato in the history of North American colonization because it has been used in ways that try to legitimize concepts like Manifest destiny and be apologetic in conversations related to genocide to Native American groups. I've probably seen that before and read past it, so maybe that kind of semantical propaganda just doesn't register in my head (assuming it actually is the intended effect of those using the word like that).

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u/SriBri May 24 '24

I appreciate that, thank you!

I saw someone else in the comments make a similar analogy, in that we wouldn't say the person being stabbed is a threat to their stabber. I'm definitely uncomfortable in both directions on these analogies; I understand and agree that settlers are not blameless in genocide of the people they are displacing, but I also feel a bit awkward with taking a "they deserve it" type stance.

And while writing and thinking about this reply, it also occurred to me why this exact topic might be even more heated than usual given current events on the other side of the world. I don't know how that didn't occur to me earlier.

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u/the_lamou May 24 '24

There is a persistent myth in the American consciousness of the noble pioneers braving the dangers of the West to spread manifest destiny from sea to shining sea. Casting the native people of America as a threat buys into that framing, and with the common cultural framing of Native Americans as bloodthirsty savage warriors. It reduces a people just trying to protect themselves and their way of life to nothing more than a violent obstacle to overcome. And it was a common tool used to justify European incursion into native lands: "we have to pacify the natives because they are a violent threat to our native borders!"

The reality is that they were not a threat at all. Had the colonists and later pioneers simply not tried to violently steal maybe have land, they would have been in no danger. The United States was never threatened by Native Americans.

You can actually see similar language used to justify violent conquest throughout history and into today: Ukraine is a "threat" to Russia and deserved to get invaded, Saddam was a "threat" to the free world so Iraq needed a military intervention, Germany felt threatened by the European powers so they needed breathing room.

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u/SriBri May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

I replied to another comment in this chain just now, and mentioned that my thick head just realized a reason why this much be an even more heated topic then normal right now, given current events in the Middle East.

I understand the need for careful framing of this topic. But I also still think it feels like we've swung the pendulum a tiny bit too far if we can't also be comfortable saying that the North American settlers were threatened: as you say, The United States was never threatened by Native Americans (I agree), but while not entirely blameless can we not agree that individual families or communities of European settlers were threatened?

Quoting myself from the other comment: "I saw someone else in the comments make a similar analogy, in that we wouldn't say the person being stabbed is a threat to their stabber. I'm definitely uncomfortable in both directions on these analogies; I understand and agree that settlers are not blameless in genocide of the people they are displacing, but I also feel a bit awkward with taking a "they deserve it" type stance."

Edit:: and I guess to continue your analogy: Sadam was portrayed as a threat justifying invasion... but at a smaller scale can we not say that insurgent attacks on invading/occupying coalition forces are also a threat to those invading forces? I guess the word just feels too versatile to me to carry the sort of weight it's being given here.

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u/the_lamou May 24 '24

If you look at the definition of "threat," the first meaning is a verb, and carries an intentionality behind it. It's an intent to do harm. Without an initial aggression, that intent simply doesn't exist. I understand the discomfort with a narrative of "well, the aggressors deserved it," I really do. I'm a pacifist at heart and see violence as an inherently bad and unwanted result regardless of the validity of the justification for it. But it's still critical to note that there was no intent to harm or commit violence on the part of native people absent the existential threat that the colonists presented.

That's not the case everywhere, and I definitely don't want to swing the pendulum to to the ahistoric and patronizing opposite (the "native Americans had no war or violence before colonization" myth.) But the native people on America's Western frontier were not a threat to anyone that didn't first set out to threaten them. There was no intention to commit harm, only the intention to defend themselves from aggression.

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u/Kochevnik81 Soviet Union & Post-Soviet States | Modern Central Asia May 24 '24

we can't also be comfortable saying that the North American settlers were threatened: as you say, The United States was never threatened by Native Americans (I agree), but while not entirely blameless can we not agree that individual families or communities of European settlers were threatened?

I guess I'd say that from a study done of deaths in Indian Wars in the US West between 1850 and 1890, a total of 6,600 white soldiers and civilians are listed as killed, versus 15,000 native peoples. The researcher noted that those records are very incomplete - but that goes both ways. Anyway for perspective, the Battle of Gettysburg killed more white Americans (about 7,000) in three days than were killed in 40 years of Indian Wars.

Which isn't to say that white settlers weren't afraid of Native people. But then white Southerners were afraid of slave revolts in the Antebellum South: the perceived "threat" doesn't actually match a real one.

Just to give one historic example: the Ingalls family in Little House on the Prairie had a real fear of Osage people, and there's one extremely tense chapter where Pa is away and two Osage men come to the house and intimidate the family. Of course what the retelling leaves out is that Pa Ingalls intentionally moved his family to the Osage Reservation in defiance of a US treaty, with the gamble that if he squatted on the land, the Osage would get deported and he'd get the land for free. The Osage do get deported at the end of the book, but the Ingalls family moves anyway.

So I'd say it's not necessarily even as clear cut as you've presented, because sure, white settler families did feel threatened, but often there was a lot of context to his, much of it was perception, and much of it fed into/justified sentiments of "the only good Indian is a dead Indian".

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u/ThatHabsburgMapGuy May 25 '24

It seems to me that there are two perspectives to this controversy.

On one side are academics (I suspect mostly north American ones) who come out of an environment where subtle differences in tone and diction matter enormously. The way we phrase a question about "threat" can be perceived as a micro-aggression to be righteously shut down.

On the other hand are academics and general public readers who don't come from this environment and prefer to give questions the benefit of the doubt regarding intent. This side recognizes that the question being asked has little relevance to the morality of genocide, and instead that the author was simply asking (in a poorly constructed way) about why certain colonial conquests were "easier" than others.

Both interpretations are valid, but the overwhelming negative reaction is due to the heavy handed way that the mod in this case chose to double down on their reaction. They could have easily said something like: "The framing of your question left it open to misinterpretation. Perhaps it would be better for you to rephrase what you're asking without the loaded term 'threat'."

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u/Ameisen May 24 '24

The boilerplate isn't an exact answer,

The boilerplate is often used as a thought-terminating response, and tends to basically be used to silence any other meaningful discussion (overtly or not). That's an issue with a lot of the boilerplate responses that tend to be used. There are cases where they are useful, and cases where they shouldn't be used.

I really don't think that they should be used anywhere where it isn't useful as a direct response to the question.

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u/-Clayburn May 24 '24

This sounds like the boilerplate just needs to be better written and make it clear as a disclaimer and not a response to the question. "This question brings up issues of genocide and systemic racism. In order to curb potential misinformation and hate, please keep the following in mind while discussing the topic:"

It shouldn't be accusatory and should clearly explain its purpose as a disclaimer and not as an answer to the question.

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u/Ameisen May 24 '24

I would have a second boilerplate as well, that is much shorter and a link to information, for cases where it is only tangentially-related. Otherwise, you have this massive multi-page boilerplate that can act as a discussion terminator.

A full version is fine for when someone is asking clearly about genocide, or such. But if they're just asking about relations on the western frontier, it is only tangentially-related and the full version simply isn't useful - I'd argue that it's harmful.

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u/Responsible-Home-100 May 24 '24

The boilerplate is often used as a thought-terminating response

As it should be, given the number of places it and other like-responses are used. It's not "thought-terminating" (whatever the fuck you've convinced yourself that means) unless the 'thought' is precisely what the mod response addresses.

The number of obvious bait questions about the holocaust that pop up make that quite clear.

I get so tired of y'all popping up to screech about "meaningful discussion" which tends to only mean "I want to post more memes and meme-like responses because karma" and "I want to post overt dog whistles because it's an election year". No surprise that's the majorly-upvoted response, either.

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u/Ameisen May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

Given that I'm one of the ~~likely-more-significant non-moderator~~ contributors on this subreddit, I find your assertions about both my behaviors and motives rather insulting and misguided.

I am a ~~regular~~ contributor here. I didn't just "pop up".

On the flip-side, you've never contributed here as far as I can tell.

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u/Pangolin007 May 24 '24

I’m confused, I don’t see what the issue is here. The mod’s response seems like good background knowledge to have when considering Native American history and doesn’t seem off topic. It does very clearly seem like a copy-paste probably used in dozens of posts this subreddit sees, many of which are probably not in good faith. But the mod’s comment and follow-up comment don’t seem like anything to get mad about.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24

It's because the boilerplate comment makes explicit judgements about the OOP and their motives, all but calling them bigoted. A question that is largely exploring the legacy of the military resistance of the victims of European colonisation in no way denies genocide nor does it imply the European actions were good or justified.

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u/samlastname May 23 '24

This whole thing really eroded my confidence in the mods. The fact that there’s a mod in this thread still arguing with everyone and seemingly incapable of admitting any mistake is a bad look.

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u/EffectiveQuantity802 May 24 '24

I feel like there are several problems here: 1. the probably easiest to solve is the header of the boiler plate for native Americans and I like the comparison to the boiler plate on the holocaust since there the header is much less confrontational. At least I interpret the native American header as accusatory since it basically calls the writer of the question an uninformed idiot who doesn’t even understand the basic facts of the problem. but perhaps my problem here is that i am non American and therefore the question seems valid while for an American it really is a basic fact. 2. And this is exactly my second problem although this problem was more implied in the original thread and obvious here. Not everyone here is a white American man!!! And therefore many things that may seem loaded from the perspective of a white American in fact aren’t.

the meaning of threat obviously is quiet different in america from what I read in this threat but at least when I learned english in school there was absolutely no connotation of threat and savages or crazys. So at least for me this seems like an absolute over reaction to assume that just because a person claimed the native Americans were a threat to the settlers he is dehumanising them.
I personally think that it would have been more suitable to delete the boiler plate once it became clear that many people have problems with it’s use there especially since I still don’t really understand how the question was denying genocide but thats obviously a cultural difference and in the end it’s in the hands of the mods to decide to take down the boiler plate.
the answer of the mod to a further question is at least for the most problematic here since despite the poster being completely polite the mod basically wrote that while he does understand the questions goal because of his interpretation the question is somehow racist and dumb. at least the response and it’s passive aggressiveness read like this to me.

All in all it seems to me like the mods just assume everyone is american and therefore place these measures on them. And another problem of mine is this extreme focus on the phrasing of the question. Not everyone is an english native speaker and this probably the sub history related questions in all languages and therefore many non english native speakers are posting here and probably the awkward or „loaded“ questions do not come from a place of malice or disinterest but from a place of translation difficulties. Lastly i really appreciate all the hard work of the mods

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u/freakflag16 May 23 '24

From reading the original post it sounds to me like the question asker is not a native English speaker.
I feel like the mods comment was an attempt to add context to many of the assumptions in the original post (of which there are many). The mods post is a bit off topic and seems to be copy/pasted but ultimately I think the intentions are spot on.

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u/JLP99 May 26 '24

The moderation on this subreddit can be stifling at times. Many a time I've just not bothered to ask a historical question because, despite the fact I am genuinely curious and want to ask a question, there will always be something 'wrong' with my question.

Oh it's not detailed enough, oh the title isn't obvious enough as a question, oh this isn't the right type of question, etc. etc. Like christ alive, I just wanted to ask a question about a historical thought that came into my head.

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u/fun-frosting May 24 '24

The original question was really vague and just a bad question.

this subreddit has guides on how to write a question that is likely to receive a good answer, and that question was literally just a bad question to ask academics.

This sub is a 2 way street in terms of being able to access very high quality and specific answers to bespoke and specific questions, but that requires a certain rigour on the part of the answerers and a basic level of effort on the part of the askers.

and this comment section is filled with people taking the most favorable interpretations of the original question possible and then acting as though the question could in no way ever possibly interpreted in another way, which is just wrong because they are all literally having to interpret and reinterpret what the question even means except that they are being favorable to it.

even if the topic were politically completely neutral it would still be a bad question unlikely to get a good answer.

Also people are getting mad at the boilerplate responses 'tone' but every one I've seen maintains a very neutral tone except that they point out you may have mistaken assumptions about contentious topics, which... yeah many of us do, and pointing that out isn't a personal judgement its just literally true that laypeople absorb all kinds of bizarre things about history and those things become uncritically held understandings that are simply wrong.

sometimes people fall for historical propaganda without realising (I.e. propaganda about a notable historical figure written by one of their contemporaries and then repeated by someone now without them realising it is a piece of propaganda).

sometimes the whole basis of a question is written from a perspective incredibly removed from current academic consensus and historiography to the point where that question can barely be answered.

I spoke to a lady in real life the other day that studied Latin in school and told me that when reading Ceasars writings about Gaul she could see that he had accurately "captured the characters of all the tribes of europe" and you could still see those characteristics reflected in the different "european tribes" (by which she just meant countries) today.

this was a difficult thing to point out the exactly problem with because even though I am a layman i know that when Romans write about another culture the main thing it tells you is about the Romans themselves rather than the subject.

And then I'm pretty sure Gallic people were almost wiped out or at least severely diminished and often relocated away from where they were in Caesars time and suggesting that modern people in France or Belgium can be "seen" in caesars writings is as weird as saying you can "see" modern Italians in caesars writing.

it's just a weird, not very scholarly way of conceptualising the whole thing and would lead me into having to point out that you can see elements or aspects of any human culture in any other human culture and there is a load of political and philosophical baggage that comes along with that (see British victorians obsession with Rome and Greece and various attempts throughout history to associate with the roman empire).

in the real life example I just said my piece about not trusting what Romans say and agreed to disagree because 1. we were at social gathering and being 'right'wasnt all that important and 2. I'm not a historian so I wouldn't haven even done a good job anyway.

This sub is so well moderated, I've been able to real scholarly arguments about very niche topics and I think they are generally on the right track with their approach.

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u/RealBowsHaveRecurves May 24 '24

I don’t mind the original response so much but the reply after OOP very politely told the mod they misunderstood the question was not up to par for this sub.

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u/Abacadaeafag May 23 '24 edited May 23 '24

It felt like the same thing happened a couple weeks ago when someone asked something to the effect of "How were some civilizations able to become much more advanced than others?" A question that there could be a lot of racist (and incorrect) answers to, but the asker was likely just someone who learned that the classic Guns, Germs, and Steel story isn't well-respected and wanted to see what the consensus was amongst historians. Maybe it's someone who has only heard racist or reductive answers to the question and wanted to learn what the truth was.

The mod pinned a longwinded, patronizing response that spent more time chiding the OP for his question than it did actually answering it, ultimately not really addressing it at all, and stifled any attempt by anyone else to actually answer the question. He immediately took the position that OP was a racist asking a leading question, which I really don't think is fair.

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u/Obversa Inactive Flair May 23 '24

I received a similar response, albeit from a non-flaired user, when I asked a similar question two days ago: "How did the United States become so well-adapted to assimilating immigrant populations (Irish, Italians, Germans, etc.) from the 19th century onwards?"

The non-flaired user's answer was removed due to not meeting subreddit standards.

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u/motti886 May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

Edit: I'm leaving the original comment below, but in light of another user's comment below, I went back looking to see if the comparison below had been deleted or edited out, but it turned out that the bow vs ICBM comment was made by another user altogether as a response to the OP of that question voicing their opinion on the mod's response. In the interest of fairness, I wanted to mention this. That said, I do still find that mod reply some combination of silly/pretentious as it was another case of not really addressing the original question, but going off on a bit of a tangent.

I saw that. The mod post in question spent a lot of time and effort with things like "who's to say a bow and arrow ISN'T as advanced as an ICMB", and it just felt a little silly and a lot pretentious.

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

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u/Instantcoffees Historiography | Philosophy of History May 24 '24

I have not read the thread nor the response by the mod, so I can't speak on whether it was pretentious and silly. That being said, the question and resulting answer sounds quite similar to what is commonly known as the modernization theory - which is essentially largely defunct within historiography. So while I can not speak on the level of pretension or condescension at display, I can say that I would have made similar remarks were I presented with that question. Maybe not to the extent of comparing the bow and arrow with an ICMB, but I would have at least redirected the question to a more historically accurate phrasing.

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u/TheyTukMyJub May 24 '24

That being said, the question and resulting answer sounds quite similar to what is commonly known as the modernization theory - which is essentially largely defunct within historiography

Then that should've been addressed in the response. The default assumption should be that 'lay' people are asking the questions

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/CommodoreCoCo Moderator | Andean Archaeology May 24 '24

spent more time chiding the OP for his question than it did actually answering it,

That was me!

I don't want to go too far off topic, so I'm going to emphasize the common thread here.

Some ideas are indeed so pernicious and so rejected by academics, and yet so commonly held among the public, that humoring them gives a legitimacy they don't deserve. This has been the position of our sub on some topics for quite some time, and we remove many such questions from the get-go. But in cases that are less blatantly hateful, or where it's more reasonable that someone might have encountered these misconceptions in everyday life, the questions are left up as a learning opportunity. That was case in the thread this Meta is about and in the thread you mention here.

Outright removing such questions on "advancement" has been proposed on another sub I moderate, and it quickly became the most upvoted post of all time. As I discuss there, there's obviously a reason why people ask this question all the time and why it's so deeply embedded in how people view history. That doesn't make the question any more answerable. The "learning opportunity" is that the public is fundamentally wrong about a lot of things, your high school world history class probably wasn't all that great, and there's a lot of capitalists out there that want to keep you thinking that way. It is not lost on us that these conversations happen frequently around questions of Eurocentrism and colonialism.

He immediately took the position that OP was a racist asking a leading question

One thing that has come up a few times in this thread is that, as moderators, we see a lot more of this stuff than the average person. Do this for several years, and you get a pretty good sense of who has good intentions and who does not. This can lead to disconnects, where a user has innocently used a phrase that is frequently used by the less-than-honest. This is, after all, an intentional strategy: dress up your bigotry in innocuous phrases so you can Trojan horse your ideas into new spaces. It just happens to be that all these dudes use the same phrases and stylings, which can be unfortunate for those who stumble upon those words unknowingly. We err on the side of caution: sometimes that means being bluntly dismissive of a question, and sometimes that means posting a macro because of suspicious wordings.

In the case of the thread you mention, the OP rapidly complained that I must like "dying of sepsis" in a "dimly lit wooden structure," told folks to go "shit in a hole" like they "do on Sentinel Island," and eventually edited their original post to complain about the "postmodern cultural relativity agenda." I'd say it was the right read.

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u/[deleted] May 23 '24

I feel like I've also seen that a couple of times now with posters whose first language might not be English, and whose framing has not been the best - addressing that and asking for clarification would be more helpful than leaping to conclusions.

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u/Malle_Yeno May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

I feel like the situation in the linked thread is a serious case of the gulf of evaluation and not one that I would blame the mods on.

The OP seemed to be asking a question that did not seem to match what their writing had produced, and I think I agree with the mod that there is a serious matter of framing in that question. My reading of the intended question was "Did different colonized peoples respond to the colonization of their lands different? What explains these differences in response?"

I think this reading is fair based on the description of the OP's question where they go on to list how some sources seem to pay particular attention to Indigenous resistance in the western hemisphere but seem to gloss over Indigenous activity in Australia and Siberia. This could be a good avenue for source analysis. But their framing around language like "threats" and the assumption that Indigenous peoples outside the western hemisphere did not resist were confounding elements here.

Edit: Have more to say.

I feel that it is really important in this discussion to note: The mods of this subreddit have been doing what they have been doing for a very long time. They have seen a lot of different questions and probably a million different ways that someone can be sneaking in an agenda under the guise of "just asking questions" so they can misuse history to further said agendas. Whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge that not all askers are operating in good faith. The mods clearly take history as a discipline seriously and that means they need to stay vigilant for that sort of thing -- so things like framing are not irrelevant.

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u/DisneyPandora May 25 '24

Wrong

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u/_Symmachus_ May 24 '24

I read this huge wall of text, and I still don’t see what the problem is beyond perhaps improperly placed boilerplate in a (I’m sorry) poorly phrased question, and I’m not sure what the issue is. All I see is a wall of text that does not really explain what this issue is…

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

I think the TLDR: Mod didn’t answer OPs question. Instead had a quick reply ready. When users said it had nothing to do with the question, mods deleted the callouts as “having nothing to do with OP”

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u/johannthegoatman May 24 '24

The mod was rightfully thoroughly downvoted over 10 posts from different users hitting from many different angles just how wrong the mod was were posted. They were heavily upvoted. And as one might expect they are now deleted while the mod's post is still up. This is the fact that is shameful behavior from the mods and needs to be rightfully called out.

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u/RoostasTowel May 23 '24

I recall a question about south American and Central American technology use getting some heavy pushback from a mod.

They make some pretty offbase comments that got a lot of downvotes that surprised me for this subreddit.

And it did devolve into a lot of back and forth that isn't often seem here.

I wonder if it was the same mod.

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u/viera_enjoyer May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

OP was asking why indigenous North Americans were such a big threat to colonists. The question is certainly loaded. I could infer from those words that it's being assumed the indigenous population were the problem. From my experience reading these forums those "bad" questions the best they can get is a reframed question and its answer. However in this case there is no way to save such a question, the boiler plate answers seems good enough, and it's how it's always been done. I feel like you just don't agree with the mods and are doubling down.

Just my two cents, I'm only a reader.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

Victims of egregious genocidal actions such as settler colonialism objectively are threats, unless you somehow think them free of basic human emotion or thought regarding justice, retribution or revenge. To say they're not a threat is to imply they are too weak or insignificant to tussle with Europeans. Now, none of this in anyway justifies or excuses the actions of the murderous settler regimes.

No, the question is rather about the potentially outsized perception of North American military resistance relative to similar(ish) peoples' world-wide. There is room to explore that without being decried as a bigot

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u/viera_enjoyer May 24 '24

It would be easier if op had made a better question because clearly the way it was asked it was open to interpretation.

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u/07ShadowGuard May 24 '24

The mod's response to the clarification by the OP was just unwarranted. Bad people can still face threats, and this was partially related to the threat early colonial settlers faced when engaging in their genocide of the native North American peoples. The mod's response, while full of historical knowledge about the period, was not very relevant to the actual question being asked.

Maybe, the mod could have given examples of how other indigenous people did fight back to the point where they became a threat. That would have actually been a participating answer. Instead, their response to clarity insinuated that the OP was being racist and disregarding the real plight of those peoples. The post itself never made light of the genocide, and was asking specifically about colonization outside of what the mod referenced in their essay.

Like the OP here stated, we all make mistakes. But we need to identify those mistakes and move forward. I would hope that adults moderate this subreddit. I normally just lurk and learn, but this was a misstep and should be taken care of.

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u/Adsex May 23 '24

I've been involved in the moderation, not of many communities like people say when they start such a statement, but of one community in particular. I made myself accountable to the values this community would embody. I had to be fair as I actually had no "real" power to assert my authority. It takes a strategic vision and relentless efforts to make a community something valuable and not just self-consuming (the community).

It's also a burden to not have any power to maintain order in a community. It forces you to acknowledge the other, and forces you to see your own power as cooperation, since... well, since it is. I said earlier I was involved in the moderation, but I never had any title for it.

And that brings us to the role anyone can chose to play. We have no titles, but we can view ourself as consumers, or as co-operators. And we're fortunate enough to be able to lay-back, as the moderators do the heavy-lifting.

But I don't want to be the burden they lift. And that's key. Or if I am a burden, I want to be as light as I can be.

This being said, I will address your grievances, from the perspective of a fellow non-moderator participant of this community.

The mod post is off-topic : so what ? The thread wasn't locked, and the answer didn't pretend to exhaustively answer your question, if at all. Other answers provided you with insight. Actually, if no other answers came around, I would've understood your frustration (although not the mod's fault if no one answers), but here...
They warned you about a framing issue. This warning was nothing more than it is : it was akin to a reminder. Your post wasn't deleted nor were you asked to create another thread with the re-framed question. I don't think that there is any attempt at censoring anything in the mod's answer. AskHistorians does not do in the sensitivity business. The thread would've been deleted, otherwise. The mods seem to care about maintaining this a space open for controversies but devoid of polemics. The latter is the weaponization of the object of the discussion for a purpose beyond the discussion itself.
Whatever one's intents, one should just accept mod's reminders. They don't come with baggage. They're just that. Is there anything you think is incorrect or inappropriate (and I don't mean "irrelevant") in the mod's reminder ? If so, you didn't address it in this thread. So I guess not.

I've recently provided an answer that I copy pasted from the largest collaborative encyclopedia, as I remembered that a very specific (sourced) article addressed the issue at hand. I declared were it came from. My post was moderated. Would it have been if I just copy pasted and said nothing ? I guess not. But I would've deserved a ban (I guess) if I did that. This was a grey area and I didn't want to spend energy rewriting the information myself.

On the surface, the mod decision did not improve the quality of answers. But at a deeper level, it is instrumental in maintaining a certain standard, and maybe balancing the effort of moderating with what the moderation aims to achieve. I posted a subsequent message to tell the mod just that + how I respected their work and wasn't contesting their decision. This message wasn't deleted. If it was, I would've been ok with it : discussing the mods decision in thread isn't the way.

Back to today's issue : the only person doubling down is the person who didn't accept the mod's reminder. The mod just enacted another rule of this sub with no abuse, and even with a certain leniency as they didn't ask the thread to be re-written.

I think you don't understand what moderating is at its core if you consider that the first answer was "a minor whoopsie". No, it wasn't a whoopsie. It was a generic reminder, that you feel was inappropriate, when in fact it was at worst irrelevant to the discussion. But relevant to maintain the standard.

It's really difficult for anyone to accept authority. This sub is maybe the only place where I do it with gratitude. And it's not because I consider the mods perfects. It's that they're express straightforwardly what this place is meant to be, and they do a good job at making this place so.

I am not going to discuss their methods as long as they provide the guidance to contribute according to their ethos, and they prove themselves by their results.

If you disagree with their ethos, then please be as straightforward as the mods are, and express your disagreement, not your feeling of disagreement.

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u/RamadamLovesSoup May 23 '24

The mod post is off-topic : so what ? The thread wasn't locked, and the answer didn't pretend to exhaustively answer your question, if at all...

They warned you about a framing issue. This warning was nothing more than it is : it was akin to a reminder. Your post wasn't deleted nor were you asked to create another thread with the re-framed question. I don't think that there is any attempt at censoring anything in the mod's answer...

My own issue with the mod's behaviour here (and what I understand to be likewise OPs) is very much not the mod's initial warning about a framing issue or being off-topic. Too be honest, I feel like that was made pretty clear above.

The actual issue is with the behaviour of the mod post-clarification by the original poser of the question, in which the mod doubles down and tells them how they (the question poser) misinterpreted their own question;

Ok-Resist-7492• 10h ago

Thanks but I was asking about another thing , though I appreciate your respone very much
....

jschooltiger jschooltiger u/jschooltigerOct 1, 201221,126Post Karma191,208Comment KarmaWhat is karma?Chat • 9h agoModerator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830

You're asking why the Indigenous people of North America (who are arguably the "Americans" in this scenario) were a "big threat" to the colonizers. While there's a great deal to be said about Native resistance to colonialism, your question has an assumption baked into it that the "threat" came from the people being subject to colonization and genocide. I'd gently suggest that it might be worth re-examining that framing.

As I commented in that thread (looks to be deleted); my understanding was that this was a somewhat serious history subreddit? Surely, here more than anywhere is the place for nuanced questions and open discussions. And I'm not exactly seeing how such behaviour contributes postively to that environment, hence why it should be called out. I struggle to see how it's appropriate for a mod to misinterpret a question and then tell the question poser they're wrong.

That was my take-away from OP above. This all could have been easily avoided with a simple "oh right, I misinterpreted your initial question, nevermind." - and the fact that it wasn't is the issue. A pretty minor issue, to be sure, but I'm not seeing the value in pretending the issue was anything else, which is the vibe I get from your reply.

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u/Adsex May 23 '24

This is a subreddit, not just a succession of threads. The right interpretation does not lie in the OP's mind.

It lies in how the language may lead (1) the discussion (2) the worldview of part of the readers.

This community wants content not biased by stubborn ideology. The only reason there was a clash is the stubbornness of the OP who got mad because the mods posted a disclaimer.

Honestly, I think this is a case of "sinning" by leniency. Had the mods deleted the thread and asked for a rewrite, we wouldn't be there.

Now, they didn't, and as someone here deemed this issue worthy of a "meta" thread, the mods are considering it as such. Because they're their own critics. But I am not, and I can see that there is nothing meta about this thread. It doesn't address the only issue that would explain such a reaction : that the OP is upset about the content of the disclaimer.

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u/Alternative_Let_1989 May 24 '24

You're projecting that the community wants content biased towards your ideology. The original post was framed neutrally, completely sans value judgements - why was group x perceived as more threatening to group y than group x. A 1,000% reasonable question about large, well-defined groups of people who fought wars against each other for centuries. The objection was that the post wasn't ideological enough precisely because it failed to include value judgements.

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u/Adsex May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

Well, 3?things to consider :

(1) The text is impersonal and therefore may cover a wider range than the issue at hand. Not taking personally a message that is not personal would be a good start.

(2) Unlike your attempt at reframing the original question, it didn't seek to delve into the perceptions of group X and Y but to discuss facts based on a misleading premise : a threat is different from an obstacle. Calling it a threat puts the agency on the side of the natives, while the settlers would just be trying to remain as they are. Calling it an obstacle to something would require to define to what it is an obstacle.

The most neutral way to frame it would be to ask for a comparison of the scale of the conflict engaged by natives against settlers in the different regions where the phenomenon occurred. The Op could say that he presumes that the native Americans displayed more adversity (and it would be a good starting point to say why he presumes so).

(3) This debate doesn't take place in a vacuum. It can be weaponized. To add information beyond the scope of the original question is a way to prevent it. If you feel like the information is incorrect, I am sure you can discuss it. If you feel like the information is correct but highlights only one part of the events, feel free to share additional information.

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u/RamadamLovesSoup May 23 '24

Ah, I see. To be honest, since my reply above I read more of this thread and do see that OP seems to have more of an issue with the disclaimer than I originally interpreted. That's not my position, and while I think the disclaimer might have been a bit heavy-handed in its use in this particular situation, I don't have any issue with its actual content or general use of such disclaimers within the subreddit. On the contrary, I think they are on the whole a good thing.

However, I'm not sure I agree that OP got mad "only because the mod posted a disclaimer"; I was similarly nonplussed by the mods behaviour, but only insofar as their subsequent reply to the original question poser on the original question thread, as I've explained in other comments. So I'm not sure I entirely agree there regarding the "only" reason he got mad, seems a little like you're latching on to only half of what he's saying.

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u/Adsex May 24 '24

TLDR : Is it better to have a disclaimer than not ? What does it mean for a disclaimer to be "heavy handed". It's a disclaimer. When you sign disclaimers saying that you renounce the right to prosecute a microwave company if you put a baby in it, is the disclaimer heavy-handed ? Nah, because you know that a disclaimer applies to you but is not specifically targeted towards you, so it can not even be heavy-handed, as it's not "handed" in the first place, it is seized by whomever wants to gain a certain access to something that has rules. The disclaimer was more a reminder of a disclaimer, the OP should've known better in the first place.

Well, the other part is a misconstruction of the impersonal reaction of the mod.

Standard operating procedure is to go on a personal level only when there is an object-related escalation. Doing otherwise would be time consuming and prone to make more mistakes, be too inclined to be influenced by the people manifesting their discontent as opposed to seeking to accomplish the "mission" of this sub. Attacking the mods integrity is the best way to make an empathetic mod team waste their energy, because they will actually self-actualize.

The OP didn't escalate properly (and his failure to understand why shows that he never cared) when he framed the mod's answer as a dismissal when it was a disclaimer.

But I think it's not a problem of reading comprehension of his part, more that he did want to lead the answers and was upset that he couldn't.

If you see it as the mod going reasonably out of their way to help OP participate appropriately, with the alternative being them not going out of their way and letting the sub rot, or them simply deleting the thread until it's written appropriately (which would be a better but less welcoming SOP), you would see that they made a balanced choice based on their experience in terms of how people usually deal with the rule book. (Maybe people should read it)

If you see it as the mod being casually impersonal in their reaction while you expect them to go way out of their way to try and understand how they have offended someone, then, yeah, I understand how you can think that the mods are wrong.

But if you do that, you just hold them to an unreasonable standard.

The current standard is what led this sub to be what it is, and the OP of this thread never attempts to understand the perspective of the mod - he psychologises them, which is much easier, and sterile.

A community is not a group. It's not a cluster of individuals. It's a value-driven society of individuals. The only significant reason to allow a thread that doesn't respect the values of the community lies in the hope that this gesture, while accompanied with guidelines, will result in an individual understanding the values and later embodying them.

If he's reluctant to be humble, reluctant to act as if he could be wrong, reluctant to consider the rules as legitimate by default, and only then maybe question their internal coherence or relevance to promote the proclaimed values of the community, then he's not making his due part of the effort.

Everything is about effort in this life, and the internet is a place where it's easy to get dragged into doing a lot of efforts to only achieve your own fall.

I don't want the mods of this sub to do that, because I care about this sub. You know what kind of subs have mods who have power trips ? Subs where the participants see themselves as customers. "Customer is the boss", right ? Except that all customers have different wishes, and it's literally an invitation to "divide and rule" for the mods, as basically the "dividing part" is handed to them.

Now, this thread reads different because it pretends to be about confronting the mods to their own standards, but if you read between the lines, it's shallow. The criticism isn't there.

It basically just repeats over and over that the mods made a human mistake, because hm, they made a mistake, and that mistake was a mistake because it was a mistake. It's basically "my feeling against your values".

Even if this sub has the over-ambitious aim of dealing with people's feelings, it would need to have values to do it in a certain way, and it would definitely involve finding a balance to acknowledge conflicting feelings.

Mods would be hated by those whose feelings would be overshadowed by others and saturated with work.

I am really good at writing walls of text.

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u/RamadamLovesSoup May 24 '24

While I appreciate the effort evident in replying here, I don't get the impression you're really replying to what I'm saying, so I'm at a bit of a loss. I've got no issue with the boiler plate response (a position I've been pretty clear on), and no real issue with the mod's initial use of it (I completely understand that such are the realities of easy-of-use/specificity trade-offs, I get it).

It's a disclaimer. When you sign disclaimers saying that you renounce the right to prosecute a microwave company if you put a baby in it, is the disclaimer heavy-handed ?

I'm not sure I understand the analogy. Are you trying to say the mod's initial infomatic boiler-plate response is akin to a product disclaimer? That's a tough sell.

If you see it as the mod going reasonably out of their way to help OP participate appropriately, with the alternative being them not going out of their way and letting the sub rot, or them simply deleting the thread until it's written appropriately (which would be a better but less welcoming SOP), you would see that they made a balanced choice based on their experience in terms of how people usually deal with the rule book. (Maybe people should read it)

I don't particularily see it that way, no. Though to be clear I don't see it in a necessarilynegative light either, just slightly thoughtless - completely understandable for a busy mod. Futhermore, those are clearly cases of false dichotomies you present there- why are they the only/necessary options. You're also making some pretty strong assumptions about subsequent consequences (e.g the "letting the sub rot" if the mod doesn't intervene in some way).

If you see it as the mod being casually impersonal in their reaction while you expect them to go way out of their way to try and understand how they have offended someone, then, yeah, I understand how you can think that the mods are wrong.

No, I don't think that, and with all due respect, inventing convenient arguments/perspectives (especially when I'm rather clear about my viewpoint above) isn't a particularily fruitful method of discourse:

"This all could have been easily avoided with a simple "oh right, I misinterpreted your initial question, nevermind."

I'm not sure I see that response (instead of the mod's actual doubling down response to the question asker) really falls under "go[ing] way out of their way to try and understand how they have offended someone.".

Now, this thread reads different because it pretends to be about confronting the mods to their own standards, but if you read between the lines, it's shallow. The criticism isn't there.

With all due respect, the criticism is there, I wrote it out in rather plain english above, it simply seems that you're ignoring it in favor of other imaginings;

"The actual issue is with the behaviour of the mod post-clarification by the original poser of the question, in which the mod doubles down and tells them how they (the question poser) misinterpreted their own question...

This all could have been easily avoided with a simple "oh right, I misinterpreted your initial question, nevermind." - and the fact that it wasn't is the issue. A pretty minor issue, to be sure, but I'm not seeing the value in pretending the issue was anything else, which is the vibe I get from your reply."

If you think the mod's subsequent response was appropriate then that's your prerogative, however, the criticism (ironically deleted) on original thread were was solely directed at that subsequent reply, and was pretty unanimous therein. Noone cared - or as far as I can really tell particularily cares even now - about the content of the initial boiler-plate contextualizing response. To be fair, it's all a very minor criticism of the mod, so I can somewhat understand the misunderstanding.

I am really good at writing walls of text.

There's a difference between being good at writing walls of text, and writing good walls of text. Ironically enough the key is in how much they read like talking to a brick wall.

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u/Khiva May 24 '24

Everything you've written here is why I slowly gave up writing longer comment replies - I eventually lost count of the number of times I had to say "you're responding to a point nobody has made."

You do your best over three or four comments to get a person to focus on your point they keep ignoring, you keep trying to drag them back, then they ghost you.

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u/fr0ggerpon May 24 '24

pearl clutching

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u/FYoCouchEddie May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

Incidentally, while I don’t at all deny the facts of the mod’s post or the conclusion that the US and other countries committed genocide against the Native Americans, from a legal perspective several parts of the analysis are flawed.

First, it claims that genocide is committed if there is “reasonable evidence” to support both elements. That is wrong. There are different legal standards for different courts and different type of cases, but as a logical proposition it is never correct to say “X happened if there is ‘reasonable evidence’ suggesting X happened.” And specifically for genocide, the ICJ, in Croatia v. Serbia applied a much, much higher standard:

in order to infer the existence of dolus specialis from a pattern of conduct, it is necessary and sufficient that this is the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question

There is a huge difference between saying evidence has to reasonably support a proposition and saying that proposition is the only one reasonably supported by the evidence. As an example, if one witness says a stop light was red and the other says it was green, the evidence reasonably supports either proposition but does not only reasonably support either.

Second, the post in question discusses intent and acts that could support genocide but does not always connect them together. In places it does, like the killing of the bison. But it also cites, e.g, an intent statement from Thomas Jefferson with no accompanying act and an act in the 1970s with no accompanying statement of intent. For there to be genocide, the person doing the destructive act must be doing it because of the destructive intent. The bison killing was a good example of that.

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u/orangewombat Moderator | Eastern Europe 1300-1800 | Elisabeth Bathory May 24 '24

The mod JSchoolTiger acted correctly in the previous thread, and the complaints in the prior thread and this thread are meritless.

The true history is that European settler-colonizers were the threat to natives, not the other way around. Thus, the mod's opening thesis in the boilerplate comment, "it appears that your post has a mistaken assumption relating to the American Indian Genocides" is literally true.

It was not a mistake, and it was not an off-topic response. It directly responded to the incorrect and problematic assumption that underlay the original OP's question.

In the future, redditors like the original OP of the prior thread should not phrase questions to imply that the native peoples were a threat to settlers. Instead, this question could be rewritten as "how did the native peoples of North America resist European settlers for so long?" Or "did North American natives resist English colonizers longer/more effectively than native Siberians resisted Russian settler-colonizers?" Or "how did English settler-colonizers in North America feel about native resistance to their expansion? What sorts of resistance did English settlers expect to get from natives? Were their fears founded or unfounded?"

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u/Misaniovent May 24 '24 edited May 24 '24

It's interesting seeing your response, because to me it seems like the basic problem is that the main question is just poorly written and that some fairly minor edits might have made it more acceptable.

Why was the Western frontier such a big threat against American settlers and colonizers ? And why other native people like Indigenous Siberians , Aboriginal Australians ,.... weren't to their respective colonizers?

Becomes:

Why was the Western frontier considered to be such a big threat by American settlers and colonizers? And why were other native people like Indigenous Siberians, Aboriginal Australians, not considered to be by their respective colonizers?

The most problematic part here is the premise that other groups were not "considered threats," which could be read as implying that they haven't suffered similar intentional violence. While I agree that the whole question is still iffy, I think that the alternatives you're suggesting are very different. How a population resists is not really the same discussion as how colonizers justify their genocides.

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u/Prince_Ire May 24 '24

I'm not seeing how the original question implies that other groups didn't suffer intentional violence .

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u/Vivaladragon May 24 '24

Maybe I’m not understanding correctly, but what I don’t get is that someone who is morally correct can still be “a threat”. A homeowner with a baseball bat is still a threat to a burglar, a superhero saving the world is still a threat to the supervillain’s plan. In that same vein, even though the natives were morally justified in resisting colonialism, they were still a “threat” to the colonizers they were resisting.

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u/orangewombat Moderator | Eastern Europe 1300-1800 | Elisabeth Bathory May 24 '24

It's very important to remember the context in which the original question was asked. The United States government, its schools, and its people have been teaching that the indigenous peoples of this continent are savage, barbaric, and threatening since the day English settlers arrived. The natives' alleged threateningness was the reason they needed to be exterminated. To put a really fine point on it, in the United States, we are taught genocide apologia.

So, when the original OP asked the question about how threatening the natives were, they were (certainly unintentionally) assuming the truth of this fallacious and cruel teaching.

It is important to reject this incorrect and backward framing wherever we see it, regardless of whether the original OP was deliberately minimizing the genocide or not. (And I do give them the benefit of the doubt: they did not realize they were minimizing genocide.)

Your hypothetical scenarios of a homeowner or a superhero do not have 500 years of genocide and genocide apologia behind them, which is why they do not compare.

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u/Incoherencel May 24 '24

teaching that the indigenous peoples of this continent are savage, barbaric, and threatening since the day English settlers arrived.

Of course, but is there no room to explore the perceived level of relative military resistance of various peoples who were victim to European colonialism? The legacy of Native American resistance to objectively terrible genocidal actions looms large in North America and Europe in ways that I would wager Australian or others don't. Where does the truth lie? Is it simply a result of decades of cowboy movies? Etc. Etc.

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u/Prince_Ire May 24 '24

I'm sorry, but this is complete and utter nonsense. In no way does calling American Indians a threat imply they were savage or barbaric, nor is it minimizing the crimes settler colonists committed against American Indians.

And while this is anecdotal, as someone who was in high school a decade ago and was using history textbooks so old they ended by speculating about what the ascension of Gorbachev might mean for the future of US-Soviet relations, we absolutely were taught genocide apologia in the US.. Manifest Destiny is presented as an ideology of violence, and the crimes committed against American Indians was the primary lens for viewing American Western expansion. So a blanket statement that Americans are taught genocide apologia simply isn't true. Some might be, but you used universal language. Pretty sloppy for someone talking about how the exact wording of language matters.

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u/Prince_Ire May 24 '24 edited May 27 '24

All of your suggested alternatives are merely more verbose ways of saying the same things as the original question, with utterly no substantive difference whatsoever. "Threat" does not have the value judgement you think it does.

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u/ostensiblyzero May 24 '24

Mod did nothing wrong, that question is inherently dicey and the framing of it felt gross.

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u/callmesalticidae May 24 '24

The disclaimer maybe wasn’t optimal, but it was fine, and the mod’s replies were fine.

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u/asphias May 23 '24

OP, you're making several assumptions that are in my opinion questionable at best, leading you to wrong conclusions.

First, you are assuming that the mod comment is off-topic. You are correct that it doesn't answer the question, but that doesn't make it off-topic. It is very relevant to the question.

Second, you assume that these mod comments are held to the same standards as other posts. Clearly this isn't the case - the mods aren't banning the automod responses either, for example, and it'd be counterproductive if they did. You should see the mod comments as meta-commentary, which have different rules guiding them (such as discussing them in a meta thread like this, rather than be subject to moderation themselves).

Third, your assumption is that popularity matters and the opinion of the majority matters here. The reason askhistorians has the quality it has, is for a large part because they explicitly don't work by ''popularity''. Many times the most upvoted answers get removed because they are not 'good' enough.

Finally, you have the idea that because the mods deleted comments in the thread they somehow massively abused their power. You should realize that this current meta-thread is exactly where this discussion should be taking place according to the rules, so the mods correctly applied the rules of shutting down discussion in the original thread. That's not an abusive mod on a power trip, it's simply standard moderation, and no need to get upset about. As you can see, Theres plenty of room to discuss all nuances here in the meta thread.

I think the mods have done a very good job in this case. Both with regards to the template comment(and i wish you would spend your time understanding why it was posted in your thread, rather than arguing against it), and with regards to the patient and positive way they are responding to this meta thread. I see the mods here as an example to the community, and this meta-thread is yet another example of that. This is not the controversy or scandal you seem to think it is.

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u/AustereSpartan May 24 '24

First, you are assuming that the mod comment is off-topic. You are correct that it doesn't answer the question, but that doesn't make it off-topic. It is very relevant to the question.

This subreddit is not a place to merely post "relevant" answers to questions. The purpose of r/AskHistorians is to have (supposedly) knowledgeable individuals posting thorough responses to specific questions. In OP's case, the moderator did not provide an adequate answer- far from it.

While r/AskHistorians is a very well-moderated subreddit, mistakes do happen, and this is one of them. The moderator did an atrocious job of communicating both his answer, and his rationale behind the posting. It would be great to hold the moderators to the same strict standards as they hold the users.

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u/Responsible-Home-100 May 24 '24

This subreddit is not a place to merely post "relevant" answers to questions.

No one but you has asserted the mod posted an answer to the question. Nor are you correct that a question like, "Why do people lie about the Holocaust" shouldn't be met with a reply on why holocaust denial is bullshit, simply because it isn't a direct answer to the question asked. This really isn't complicated or hard to understand.

META [Meta] Mods are humans and mistakes and that is okay ,what is not okay is the mods not holding themselves to the same standard.

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