ANYWAY!
It’s Friday yall, let’s just pump up a metaphorical jam!
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Really I think it’s that nobody has been publicly guillotined by Jacobins lately
If it were a real-world social problem in the present day, all these guillotinings that keep happening, then it would probably be moderated as a threat or as glorifying violence
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user ryanwood has been benned after:
1 - lamenting that we are calling out racist behaviour on the internet
2 - lamenting that he is being called out for calling us out
3 - pointing out that we shouldn’t consider racists racist without context because he used to say racist things but is better now, and
4 - utterly, utterly derailing the topic as a result.
Pretty clearly, this isn’t the sort of user that’s going to make a positive contribution here. A debate over calling out racists for being racist is one thing, and one could narrowly construe an argument about the methods involved, sure - but this wasn’t that. This was a “Racists shouldn’t be outed because maybe they didn’t mean it” sort of, frankly, bullshit that we hear whenever there are rape or bigotry allegations in all sorts of situations everywhere. Enough.
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Re: Guillotines
I think everything has been already discussed, more or less:
But that’s me. If there is still the need, we can unlock the old threads or start anew with a fresh thread.
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User GaryO has been banned. The user started innocently enough with wanting to know the context of a racist video - but when their comments chose to ignore the questions around just what, exactly would justify racist remarks, and result in a multipost derail about not blindly believing women, well, “when people show you their true colours, believe them”, to paraphrase the common expression.
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Agreed. I made my case for a direct-democracy alternative then, and I stand by it.
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User swiftyfive has been banned from the BBS after a repeated pattern of finding (or making) incendiary or provocative posts that were explicitly intended to derail or upset others.
I’ve said this before: I work hard to ensure that unpopular opinions that are otherwise within our guidelines are supported here. That’s not what happened here, repeatedly. Instead, an (often infammatory) counterargument is dropped into an established conversation, usually without context or explanation (and importantly, without a personal opinion from this poster), and then fireworks ensue.
That’s not about “having a discussion”, that’s about kicking over anthills.
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It’s a potent symbol. A guillotine that’s used in 1793 can reliably be taken to mean, “conversations made impossible by the rich, getting bloody expensive”.
A year later, the same guillotine shows a lot more wear, and would instead symbolize, “let’s kill every intellectual we can find who’s likely to slow us down”.
But like using any swear words or sarcastic meme, you have to read the room and discern the context. I’m pretty sure anyone on this board who’s arguing in good faith, is going to use it in the first tense. The Trump supporter who thought it would be a good idea to display a gallows while capitol police were beaten to death? I wouldn’t trust them with a guillotine any more than a rope noose.
It takes a really thick blogger not to pick up on that difference in context.(edited to clarify: yes, that’s meant as irony)
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And nothing of value was lost…
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All this swift and competent moderating is seriously impeding my testing of the ignore feature.
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Oh, ‘Ignore’ isn’t just for obvious fail-trolls with no lives; it’s also useful for perfectly cromulent members posting in good faith with whom we simply don’t wish to engage because we don’t enjoy it.
When it works properly, that is.
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User Wally has been banned.
Thanks to the various members who brought up this user’s past posting history before they attempted to antagonize in this topic right here. This user had a history of direct attacks, rules-lawyering and tone-policng in just about every topic they posted in. They posted infrequently enough to fly under the radar, but thanks to some detailed flag comments from you folks, the situation was evident in retrospect.
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I must say, this one kind of caught me by surprise. I once had a run-in with Wally in which he threatened that he would have me banned (and I half believed him…one of my posts got flagged, then one of his, then he started calling for the mods to come clear everything up…), but I just chalked it up to someone having a bad day. The whole thread got so heated that it had to be locked up prematurely. I kind of gave him a wide berth after that, but I didn’t sense any ill will. He was quite prolific with his posts, and it never occurred to me that there was a pattern of such behavior.
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Unfortunately some people act very differently toward different other members here, as it sounds like might have happened here then. Very often along specific biases too that make it much easier for some to see. It’s something worth remembering, which is part of why it’s so valuable to listen to different commenter’s experiences.
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It just goes to show that not being an asshole 99% of the time doesn’t make up for that 1% of the time when somebody is an asshole. Or perhaps, not being an asshole to 99% of the people whom one encounters…
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