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And the ban length was commensurately low. You were part of a crackdown to stop a trend that I was noticing. I don't dislike you in any way, if I did I'd hand off moderation of you to someone else. I pointed out to another user that suggested you should be given some leeway because you might not have noticed the other ban, that the ban I handed you was to give notice to other users. If you and others are more careful about posting heavily "boo outgroup" top level posts then I am happy and mission accomplished.
I'm sorry that you were the particular example, but also not sorry, because the punishment was minor, the correction seemed necessary, and you did violate the rules as I interpret them.
Admitted lack of clarity on my part. Bigger candidates tend to have more other stuff swirling around them. Its the other stuff that is fully open to discussion. Like the mamdani post where he wanted to arrest the israeli guy. If the post is just "mamdani is an idiot" that is bad and boo outgroup, but myself and other read the post as "can mamdani even do this, what would even happen" and that led to interesting other discussion. It also implied that the motivation for the orginal post wasn't entirely just "mamdani said this stupid thing". However, if a no-power position candidate says something stupid or does something horrid there often isn't much else to discuss.
It is coincidentally easier to not fall afoul of the boo outgroup posting for higher level candidates, because you can easily make it not just about the fact that they did something terrible. BUT no level of high level candidacy is an excuse for a pure or heavily boo outgroup top level post.
And your post did fall afoul of that. And your post seemed to be a specific one-upping of the platner stuff, which you alluded to in your first sentence. That is specifically what we are trying to avoid, a sort of one-upping back and forth of culture warring where this thread is just turned into another battle ground.
I think many people interpreted the ban wrong. We don't have many tools here. One tool is warning. Another tool is temp banning. And the final tool is perma-ban. In my experience plenty of people tend to ignore warnings. There will be accounts with dozens of warnings that they never act upon. And then the first time we actually ban them, suddenly they make an attempt to modify their behavior. Some of the other mods are more willing to play the "warn repeatedly" game. I'm not. In most cases I'm doing a temp ban. If it is worth it for me to defend and promote a rule, its worth it to impose some consequences on the user that broke the rule. I consider 1-3 day bans basically a slap on the wrist. 4-15 day bans a serious infraction. And anything above a 15 day ban our alternative to a perma ban.
I'm happy to engage in discussion on the ban mainly because it serves the same purpose as the ban, highlighting what behavior is not ok and what might get a future ban. This is probably getting too low in the discussion to even be viewed by most people. If you are still pissed at me and think I have wronged you, and you want another mod to review it all, then just report this comment or the comment where I moderated you. We do not approve our own comments. So someone else will come along and look at it.
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