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I want to register that although I disagree with my learned friend in argument @KMC here and have said why below, I don't think this particular comment crosses the set lines of theMotte.
If we want to move the lines around that's fine, but it's perfectly in line with discussions of other ethnic groups that have been accepted in the past, and a new rule shouldn't be enforced retroactively.
Indians shouldn't get kid glove treatment because there are clearly open Indians among our number, where blacks or Palestinians or Iranians wouldn't because we don't have posters within those identity groups.
You read the above and your conclusion is that we just made up a new rule: "You cannot insult Indians"?
Buddha wept.
No. The rule is "You may not direct generalized insults at broad groups of people." Whether or not those groups are represented here on the Motte.
We/I did not "move any lines" or retroactively enforce some new rule against KMC. He's been warned about this before.
I would like to point out that there appear to be groups that are exempt from this this rule.
Jews/Israel are one example, MAGA-coded white guys and African Americans appear to be two others.
It is the appearance of such exemptions (IE that there are groups that users users here are allowed to denigrate and groups that they are not) that is fueling the push-back you're receiving here.
As I've said before, I chose to create this account and "rejoin" the motte after a year+ of mostly lurking in response to Charlie Kirk's murder, or more accurately in response to some of the reactions I observed on this forum. Specifically the casual dehumanization of Kirk and his supporters coupled with attempts to downplay his murder as "no big deal".
Always amusing when some posters are accusing us of allowing Joo-posting because we're a bunch of antisemites, and other posters are accusing us of protecting Jews because we're a bunch of Zionists.
You're simply wrong. There are no groups that this rule does not apply to. People are allowed to say they don't like Jews or blacks or MAGA white guys. They are not allowed to just insult people for being Jewish or black or a MAGA white guy. Do we always catch every single instance and enforce it uniformly? No, we're not AIs.
As for Charlie Kirk, your recollection does not match mine at all. Maybe someone here on the Motte said his murder was "no big deal" but I would bet more people by far on the Motte are sympathetic to Kirk than not. Even I, one of our resident "center-leftists" who had no particular fondness for him, was unambiguous about condemning his murder. Bluntly, if you are claiming one or two people said something dismissive, I'll take your word for it, though I don't remember it, but if you are claiming this was a widespread sentiment on the Motte, I think you are making things up.
I have two objections.
First: Whether you as a moderator believe that an exemption exists is only superficially relevant to whether such an exemption is perceived as existing. Similar to the arguments that I used to get into with @ymeskhout about crime statistics and electioneering, whether or not a specific instance of tom-foolery would sway the result is a separate question issue from whether tom-foolery occurred. The fact is that there are a number of of somewhat prolific users here who have built a significant portion of their "brand identity" around a sneering contempt for the outgroup. Whether that outgroup it is Jews, Blacks, or MAGA is also only superficially relevant to the conversation.
For the record I would like to commend you for the pulling the trigger on @DaseindustriesLtd but the fact that his antics were tolerated for as long as they were is a big part of the problem. People notice that certain users (and I am trying to avoid publicly naming names but if you want me to I will DM you) seem to get treated with kid-gloves, they compare these users' treatment to that of prior luminaries, and they start to pattern match. One of the patterns that is easy to arrive at given the make up of both the forum and the moderation team is H1Bs looking out for other H1Bs, and that is where I feel like users like @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon are coming from.
Second: The issue as I see it is not whether or not people here were sympathetic to Charlie Kirk, or whether one or two people here said something dismissive. The issue is that dismissive comments were tolerated, or that if they did get moderated, it went un noticed. As I have said in prior posts on the subject I don't think it was Charles Sumner (the man in my profile pic) getting beaten half to death on the Senate Floor that undermined the norms against political violence and made the US Civil War inevitable. It was the fact that that "Moderates" from Sumner's own party (the Whigs) and his opponents in the Democratic party were seen as defending it. In an alternate history where Preston Brooks and Lawrence Keitt were immediately arrested and faced broad bi-partisan condemnation does a "backwoods radical" like Abraham Lincoln get elected? Does the question of "free states" vs "slave states" get resolved with more or less bloodshed than in our timeline? I don't know but I think it's worth considering.
@Amadan
To be clear, I don't think this is limited to Indians or to Jews. My feelings, as I've said before, is that at times:
I don't think the tone of what KMC said, though I find it wrong and stupid, would have caught any flack if he said it about Venezuelans or Somalians rather than about Indian academics. That includes me, of course, I objected to his vitriol against Amar because it's someone I knew personally and a type of person I've been close with in my life. As a result, I don't think KMC ought to be disciplined for it, or I think a lot of other discussion should be disciplined similarly.
Policing purely for tone and not content would mean that the death of the Ayatollah would be dealt with the same way as the death of Charlie Kirk, which I don't think is or really could be the case. We're always going to have a bias towards our friends.
And I'm going to call you on this, as I have done before, and ask you to show me anything even close to an apples-to-apples comparison.
I actually don't remember anyone posting here on the Motte who clocked as "hating white people or men." There have been some very leftist people with woke ideas about feminism or DEI. Those ideas did not catch them bans.
Yes, posting that Venezuelans are subhumans who deserve to die would get modded. I know we have modded people for getting too inflammatory about Somalians.
As for the Ayatollah, I suppose cheering for his death is vaguely similar to cheering for Charlie Kirk's murder, but only vaguely. There is a difference between cold blooded public murder and targeted killings of leaders during a war and the discourse around the Ayatollah was mostly about whether the war was justified, not whether the Ayatollah was a bad man who deserved to die.
Given that the war was "announced" and the Ayatollah was killed at home within ten minutes, I'd say they were pretty similar levels of cold-bloodedly killing a man who was just going about his day because the shooter thought that the man was evil. This feels like a distinction without a difference.
The most obvious would be various GrandBurdensomeCount personas, where his disdain is always treated as pathological or trolling. This isn't primarily an accusation against the mods, but the forum itself, it's not that you see an attack on white people and ban someone, it's that the tone of the conversation develops such that a ban is inevitable.
Even if I agreed with you, I am still waiting for examples of anyone on the Motte who was celebrating either Kirk or the Ayatollah's murder. Until you show me an actual example of our supposed bias, you're constructing biases you think we have and imagining how we might mod hypothetical posts based on them.
In either case, it would be more about the tone than the sentiment. Someone is allowed to say "I think the Ayatollah/Charlie Kirk was a bad person who deserved to die." Someone could even make an effort post about how either bombing national leaders or shooting provocative public figures is a good thing. Simply posting "I hate Charlie Kirk and I'm glad someone shot that fucker" probably would get modded. But no one did that to my knowledge.
You're just making up nonexistent apples to compare with nonexistent oranges.
He has been modded and banned, for exactly the same sort of rhetoric that got Dase banned.
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