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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Yeah, left leaning communities do not ban slurs. They only ban the slurs against their patron groups.

I think the saddest, for me personally at least, community that went hard and hatefully left has been the Penny Arcade forums. Officially, there is a rule. The only insult you are allowed to use is "silly goose". In practice? That only applies in one direction.

They have rules against hateful content. But people openly saying a lot of white people need to be murdered in a revolution don't get moderated. Suggesting that Kyle Rittenhouse, in their Rittenhouse trial thread, was correctly found innocent? You get banned for hateful content.

It was not always this way. I'm not sure when the moderation began moderating hard left. I think it might have started after the Dickwolves controversy, and as a sign of good faith they brought on some "friendlier" moderators to "educate" the community.

Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.

Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.

To bolster this point, I'd add that I've been on the receiving end of this in a Discord server I was a big part of. The topic of the server was not related to politics, in fact they had a no-politics rule and yet woke politics ran rampant in the server every day - I remember reading so many endorsements of woke talking points in the server, to the point where some of their members were basically endorsing sentiments like "I hate men" and calling it helpful and "consciousness-raising".

I was the only one who repeatedly called for all political discussion to be halted. Eventually I got tired of trying to enforce a rule that just got ignored and laid out my disagreements with their points during one of these discussions (very politely, I might add). What happened then is that after I had a user respond to me, a mod ended up halting the discussion and stated that it was getting too political despite their complete willingness to let every political discussion in line with their beliefs stand. Then later on I was banned because I'd supposedly expressed "harmful things", and after I was banned and couldn't defend myself someone else still on that server told me that many of the users decided to shit-talk me in there. Including somebody I had considered a friend.

The idea that leftist communities exude anything akin to "positivity" is in my opinion ridiculous.

Is there a summary of that anywhere? I seem to have missed it. Was it something in the SciFi community?

*Thanks y'all, that was a wild ride.

Loose summary:

In 2010 Penny-Arcade made an irreverent strip mentioning rape that offended some proto-SJW's who thought it was insensitive to 'rape survivors'.

According to one such offendee:

"Whether or not the strip was offensive isn't really relevant at this point: More than the comic itself, what made the most impact was how Penny Arcade responded to the readers -- including rape survivors -- who said it upset them. First, they mocked their critics with a series of posts and a flippant non-apology. In a subsequent "make a strip" demonstration at PAX Prime, Krahulik further needled the issue by drawing a dickwolf, and Penny Arcade even monetized the discomfort over the rape joke by making and selling "Team Dickwolves" shirts and pennants."

Then some notable members of gaming community spoke out against PA and received a lot of insults and alleged death threats. The drama continued with one of the early designers for the PA website publicly cutting ties.

Mike Krahulic apologised and removed dickwolves merch from their store. Then later recanted and said at a later PAX Q&A panel that he regretted backing down and removing the merch. The week after PAX he clarified his comments.. I think it roughly died down after this point.

tldr; Comic used rape as a joke, feminists got upset on behalf of rape survivors. Drama ensued.

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