Argument By Moderation

There's a curious trend in social media that simultaneously amuses and disgusts me. I call it "argument by moderation." Moderation in this case doesn't refer to a moderate or nuanced position, but rather the people responsible for performing administration on a forum. They don't have an easy job, and once the forum gets big enough they don't even try. They'll ban or lock you if anyone complains about you whether or not it's warranted.

Last week I posted this comment, making a general observation as I occasionally do and not addressing anyone in particular.

After a few days this sparked a conversation with another user trying to peddle his "spiritualist" business and everyone who knows me knows how gladly I suffer fools. The conversation ended fairly quickly once I made it clear to him that I'm not easily swayed by bullshit. It's not the first time I've had discussions like that on Twitter although it had been a while, and I feel that I was fairly restrained compared to other evangelicals I've interacted with. I thought the matter settled until today.

Okay, time to go to the mail account I registered for this, a one-shot I created expressly for stuff I don't care about. It turns out that Yahoo! really wants more information about me because they decided that while they recognize my password they won't let me continue without further validation. The validation account I used for that address is bogus because frankly, they don't need to know and I'd never needed it before. Today, it seems, I needed it. So I have a cascading failure of confirmation emails to accounts I can't access which is preventing me from verifying that I am who I say I am.

So, round one to the "spiritual" snake oil salesman for engaging in argument by moderation after he came to me with claims that I had the temerity to question and deride once he couldn't support them. But should the Twitter admins follow up on my support request they'll be able to see this short timeline of events and hopefully draw the conclusion that there was no unusual activity on my account, just someone tattling on me for failing to show them the respect they didn't earn.