They fervently don’t want to be and if we have to accept racist fascist cult worship as “mainstream” we might as well end the Great Experiment right now because it will all be over in the next couple of decades when the next Trump who isn’t a fucking moron gets elected and goes full Edrogan/Putin on us.
It wasn’t his politics, it was his using white supremacist jargon that made many of us, rightfully imo, cite racism. He’s a neo-fascist white nationalist. I get he’s your friend, but it doesn’t change that fact. Some of us thought he could see the light, but all he did was cry about his oppression, refuse to engage with people and move goalposts until everyone gave up.
If we ceded the entire subforum to one person and let them put their bullshit out unchallenged non-stop.
No thanks. Anyone can play, but you don’t get a free pass and you especially don’t get a free pass for being a “troll”. This isn’t Reddit or 4chan and we don’t have an ignore option. So either he takes over everything, he plays by the rules, or he leaves.
Also this. We potentially lost someone who’s viewpoint many of us valued so that he could cry about how he was a victim after he tried to lecture us about White Culture, was called out on it and then acted superior for a month because he was cordial about his white supremacy dog whistling. Fuck that. This isn’t a safe space for anyone, much less white nationalists. We all accept that to some extent.
I disagree with this analysis. There are people on this forum who get really aggressive and rude when someone starts spouting unpopular opinions. What you see as bonking dogs on the nose, I see as merely him getting involved in a discussion and then having to fend off a dozen people calling him wrong or stupid. The problem was that he couldn’t give it a rest, ever, and had to mix it up with every single person that called him out. I think he was getting a kick out of riling people up and pushed the boundaries more than he needed to, but he wasn’t the only one at fault here.
edit: I thought about it more and I guess we’re kind of saying the same thing in a way. But I think other people also needed to let things chill. Lots of people were unable to.
It’s this obstinance that amazes me. When you’ve identified someone as a troll, it’s clear that you can’t have a meaningful conversation; you can’t change his mind. Any interaction is merely feeding his compulsion and yours. You’re not standing up for what’s right, you’re just enabling.
All I saw (after reading near hundreds of back and forth) was constant insistent on banning gman. And him, unfortunately, unable to stop responding to the attacks.
And then blaming gman for being disruptive. Quite amazing. (in a bad way).
I also think the point you made earlier, that there are folks on the more conservative side who won’t post in P&R because of the expected reaction shouldn’t be lost.
I’ve been active in P&R long enough to remember when Timex and Strollen were the ones with minority opinions, and noone that I can ever recall wanted them to be banned. I remember right before gman there was that other rabid Trump supporter, and noone that I can remember wanted him to be banned. All members who have been with us for awhile and don’t post in P&R because they think their conservative viewpoint will be censored, noone will want you banned if you started to do so.
It’s really simple, whatever your political opinion don’t dominate threads and throw out tens of thousands of words a day. State your viewpoint and then let other people fill the space with theirs, and then take some time to rest and then respond if necessary. People don’t want to browse endless ranting and disingenuous debate.
I really don’t get people being ‘disappointed’ at the community for their reaction, this is the first time it’s happened and the people wanting him banned (which I was on the fence about, personally, but I understand the viewpoint) probably have friends, family, and coworkers who are very conservative. We are intelligent and mature enough to understand the difference between political censorship and simply getting rid of a troll and/or obsessive individual.
It is nice to know that someone who was blatantly displaying bigotry towards a religious group early today finally got banned. If saying that Muslim immigration as harming the EU and that Islam is an ultra-violent religion is not enough to get kicked off the forum, I am not sure what it would take to do so. These statements, by their very nature, are bigoted. Let us all be clear. This was not about being a Trump supporter. This was about naked bigotry.
Tom making excuses for this bigot and trying to paint that bigotry as “reasonable” and an “articulate non-idiot Republican” is frankly quite disturbing. That he seems to think that these statements are acceptable makes me wonder whether he agrees with them or not or whether everything is fair game. If someone posts that the higher black birth rate is hurting America because blacks are more likely to be criminals, is this now somehow acceptable? If accepting the “political reality of the modern world” means accepting outright bigotry is going to be the new normal then that is deeply disappointing.
We speak about this forum being inclusive where people’s beliefs should be respected but that a person’s race, religion or sex is even more important. You can chance your beliefs. You cannot change your race. When someone shows incredible bigotry towards both a race and religion and the very owner of this forum is defending those statements as reasonable it makes me wonder how truly inclusive this place is.
It can be challenging to separate meaning from presentation. Some clean-cut dude, smiling and looking you right in the eyes, and saying the most heinous things. Easy to hand-wave that away, surely he didn’t mean it, but he’s so polite. The forum rules weren’t suited for that because honestly, it had never happened before. Hopefully it doesn’t again, because we lost several people whose contribution I greatly valued over it.
That was my wake-up call, not wumpus’ dramatic manifesto, but several forum members for over a decade who posted “yeah, I’m going to leave now” and that was that. No drama, just taking off. That’s scary.
On the one hand, I totally agree with Tom, on the other, what exactly is the takeaway? Trump is the biggest troll of them all. Practically by definition. Was the exercise to learn how to deal with trolls, because that is our reality? So how do you deal with trolls again? By not feeding them, and booting them if behavior continues. Definitely the forum failed overall.
You just did a really good job articulating my feelings in a way that I’ve been unable to lately. Especially when gman himself showed up in this thread and started his usual bullshit (so finally I think some people got to witness his style of argumentation first hand who hadn’t before). So I wanted to highlight your post and say thanks.
Feeding the mob scalps just makes it hungry for more.
But your place, your rules. And I don’t think you made the decision lightly. I just don’t like the precedent.
Not that I would stick around one second longer after it was made clear I was not welcome, ugliness is far too common to find without going looking for it.
I believe that very subject, the question of violence and Islam, has been debated in the past. Heatedly, if I recall, but I don’t remember if anyone was banned over it.
That’s exactly how you spot a genuine troll. They can stay calm and never take anything personally because, and this is the most important thing, they are roleplaying a character. Any insults directed at the gman persona went straight to mental dev/null because whoever was running gman did not think of himself as gman. Any arguments against his position had zero chance of changing his mind because “gman” had no mind. Gman was an elaborate script, not a person.
I don’t understand how y’all didn’t clue in on this. It was pretty screamingly obvious after a while.
To restate the obvious for the record and one hopes for the last time: of course the real reason gman had to go wasn’t because he was a “polite Trump supporter.” It’s because he was a clear-cut troll who took glee in arguing in bad faith, moving goalposts, playing the victim, and throwing gasoline on the flames whenever they seemed likely to die down.
