I agree that it's better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don't like it when moderators do surprising things. In particular, the post didn't have more serious pathologies sometimes present in other posts (that are usually still not banned), such as hosting a bad prolific discussion or getting downvoted to minus 20.

(If I were to ban posts on the grounds that I consider them bad for LW, I would ban maybe a quarter of Discussion posts. I don't have authority to do that, and don't expect good consequences unless the procedure is accepted by the community on some level. This doesn't seem likely or even desirable in the sense that there are better alternative procedures such as weighted votes, which would have less blind spots.)

Your decision seems very obviously wrong to me. I don't want to overrule you directly without further conversation, but I don't understand at all why you unbanned the post. There's a forum for ridiculously terribly written fanfiction, and it's fanfiction.net which is famous for taking everything. The post is of quality less than zero. Why should it be here?

I don't know who unbanned this post, but I would be interested in hearing why before I reban the original.

Reason for banning original: It is super obvious that filling up Discussion with such posts would not be good for LW, I have no idea who the hell upvoted that and wonder if they were fake accounts. Will Newsome is a poster with known mental problems and the possibility that he's making fake accounts is one I've considered before. The post contributes nothing to LW and seems like a no-brainer to ban before it happens again.

Who unbanned the original? Why?

Yeah, the original post was banned. I've unbanned it. There seems to be no good (i.e. standard/accepted) reason for banning the post, so whoever did it should comment/private-message before escalating further. (Will got on a list of ban-able users a few years back for not responding to heavy downvoting of many of his comments, but for the last two years there were no problems with the comments, so they should no longer be easily banned. I've looked through the comment history, and there appears to be no other recently banned content, except that one post.)

(Will: Maybe remove the copy of the text from this post, so that it's only in the original, while this post is focused on discussing the mysterious banning of the original post?)

It is bad enough to border spam quality, especially if you just skim it. The person who took it down probably looked at it, saw that it is mostly nonsense with negative connotations (and written by someone who was inebriated at the time) and took it down. Do you seriously think that if you had instead written a normal criticizing post, which isn't vague as hell, that post would've been deleted, too?

I'm not a respected member of the community, but I personally see no problems with parody and criticism. I've read criticism on Less Wrong and HPMOR and I've had no problems with those (although I did have disagreements, of course).

It's just that this particular piece of parody isn't particularly good. It feels like someone critiquing "The Dark Knight Rises" for being about a guy dressed up as a bat. Sure, the movie is about that, but it's not really the core problem with that movie.

If someone wants to describe LW as cultish, they can take any parody of itself and present it as further evidence for their claims.

I think something like this has already happened with the Chuck-Norris-like list of Yudkowsky facts; the "Bayesian conspirator" illustration of the beisutsukai stories; and the redacted lecture screenshot that displayed "Eliezer Yudkowsky" on the right end of the intelligence scale. -- Instead of "they are cool people who can make fun" they can be spinned into "this is what those people seriously believe / this is how much they are obsessed with themselves... they must be truly insane". See RationalWiki:

That Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts page is the most disturbing thing I have read in my life. I don't need a shower, I need the outer layer of my skin peeled off. (...) It is fanboyism at a disturbing level. (...) he is hosting this shit on his website that disturbs me

On the other hand, if someone wants to describe LW as cultish, they could also use lack of parodies, or whatever else as an evidence. Once you are charged with being a witch, there is not much you could successfully say in your defense.

So at the end, perhaps we should ignore all such considerations (which, by the way, is what most non-cults do) and simply upvote or downvote things only by their own merit. Also, any attempts for this kind of PR automatically destroys themselves if it is easy to provide a link to the discussion about the PR. (And LW being LW, such discussion will almost certainly happen.)

It's the first chapter of an attempt to explicate the skills and virtues of postrationality

I admit, I never got a clear idea of what postrationality is about except that it is somewhat less rigorous and more into mysticism (?), but are you suggesting that your movement is about writing lame parodies with a few clever jokes in them in order to criticize what you dislike (or maybe what you like - it isn't very clear)?

I swear, this movement becomes weirder and weirder with every mention.

You can just tell us without involving fanfiction.

Not creating drama seems to be antithetical to creating popular literature :).