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Yeah, that's definitely not happening.
Your assertion that I am "unacceptably partisan on this topic," as a moderator, is baseless. In the first place, I was not participating in that conversation as a moderator, and you should not be misled by PM's apparent inability to disagree with me without making that about my janitorial role. (Every. Time.) There are definitely some users whose approach to argumentation... clashes with my own, let's say, and I do often avoid moderating or even talking to them. But frankly we don't have enough active moderators for me to do this in every single instance, so I can't really pre-commit to never moderating such users, even if I rarely do.
(In fact, one of the most frequent moderation discussions we have begins with, "I am really tired of taking shit for modding genuinely horrible posts from this repeat-offender, can someone else do it this time?" Usually, these end up being Zorba's job, but I think we've all taken a turn spelling others at some point.)
The mod team has discussed topic bans for specific users in the past. A similar idea we've discussed is enforcing a minimum word counts on posts--I don't think it's ultimately a viable approach, and I don't think anyone else does, either, but it would shut down a lot of low-effort posting! So far, we've not implemented any such thing, and no serious plans to implement such things is in the works. But given his explosion here, you'd see PM get topic-banned from trans issues far, far sooner than a topic ban on anyone writing the way I've written on the subject. And then we'd inevitably be subject to accusations that this was somehow partisan, rather than a problem of PM telling people they should be eating bugs in a gulag. So that's one reason why topic bans have, thus far, been a non-starter.
If it's ultimately a concern about me setting some kind of example for the community, well. When I was first asked to moderate, the only moderator who raised a concern was @HlynkaCG, and he said something to the effect of "naraburns might like the fight a bit too much" but ultimately was okay with bringing me on. Some on our current mod team had multiple warnings on their accounts when they were chosen by the Doge process. The link between "model citizen" and "motterator" has always been... tenuous, I guess I want to say, in much the same way that some of our best quality posters have also been our worst rules violators. I definitely think more carefully about the rules now than I did when I wasn't a moderator! But if being a moderator was going to prevent me from strongly engaging on interesting topics when I feel like it and have the time, then I wouldn't be a moderator.
Clearly, some people would prefer it that way. Maybe someday, they will get their wish! But today is not that day. And tomorrow is not looking great for them, either.
I gotta say, the idea that the moderators can't have any fun or it looks bad strikes me as ridiculous. As of this writing I don't think the mods are highly paid, they do this because they enjoy the forum just like everyone else. Saying that mods can only be mods if they are here for the pure joy of moderation will select and incentivize for only moderators who are power hungry pricks who just like banning people to get their jollies. I'd rather have enthusiastic forum members than hall monitors. This is basically a social club, you have to dance with them what brung ya.
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