This debate about the narrow issue of whether gman was racist or a member of the alt-right is not a useful one in my view. It’s a symptom of the outdated “one drop” view of racism which views any racism as REQUIRING MAXIMUM DEATH PENALTY PUNISHMENT OR YOU ARE TOLERATING RACISM!!! versus ONLY BAD PEOPLE ARE RACISTS THEREFORE I CANNOT BE A RACIST B/C I AM POLITE DESPITE THE FACT THAT MY POLICY POSITIONS ARE ABHORRENT!!! It’s a lot of volume and not much message, IMO.
The real issue in my view is what was the appropriate, proportionate response to gman? My view now is that after a few days of his posting, once his overall pattern of conduct was clear, he should have been banned.
I understand the frustration some feel over the length of time it took to reach that point, but my view is that this was a learning experience for Tom and the mods. It’s another example of how the times we live in are not normal, both in terms of an educated and articulate person like gman exploiting an open forum for information warfare and also the deep taint on the far right caused by the unveiling via Trump of the overt racism on the far right, the racism that a lot of us were comforting ourselves to sleep by assuring ourselves that racism was much smaller and less intense than reality.
My view is that this episode was rough for the forum but I believe the powers that be at QT3 have learned from the experience.
I will disagree with Tom in one way: his new approach is to emphasize the fact that racism is not tolerated on QT3, but I think the better approach is to look at the bigger picture. Focusing on racism is too narrow and too subject to semantic lawyering of the definitions. The bigger issue is whether gman was behaving in an overall way that was problematic for the forum. I feel that there were racist assumptions underlying some of gman’s positions, but I see no evidence that he was a pro-genocide hater who views people of color as sub-human. Am I saying that he was a racist or not a racist? Who cares? It’s a semantic definition.
Did gman support, promote and promulgate views that contain abhorrent racial elements? Hell yes. Just look at the pages he danced around Timex’s demands that he condemn family separation like a legal mosquito on PCP, as one example. Did this cause many people on the forum to be extremely unhappy, even feeling threatened in some cases? Hell yes. Was his overall pattern of behavior, including but not limited to the racial elements, disruptive to the forum? Hell yes.
That’s the issue in my view. You can’t ignore the racial elements but in this particular case racial elements were not the sole or even the primary problem with gman. They were part of the package of problems with gman.