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You were banned for being antagonistic and obnoxious, not because of the side you were arguing or for lack of citations.
The claim that you have been banned for what you are arguing might be something you genuinely believe (lots of people come in with a hot take, call people who disagree with them names, and then insist they were banned for their hot take and not for their name-calling), but it is not true.
Your lack of self awareness is unfortunate.
The sass and disrespect probably feels cool to you but delegitimizes your authority and makes the quality of the forum a little worse. I usually don't disagree with your modding or your points and I'm sure it's very stressful and irritating to get abuse all the time but you're not setting a great example of civility.
A lot of people seem to have the idea that mods are bots and we are not supposed to express personal opinions, or respond to bitching at all except with a customer service voice. While we strive for civility, most accusations of being uncivil boil down to "You told someone who's being a jerk to stop being a jerk." When someone who's already been extended more grace than he deserves several times over is told he lacks self awareness, that is not incivility.
I do have the idea that at the very least, a mod's personal opinion expression at the moment of acting as a mod should not itself verge on breaking the rules.
You have a particular tendency for snide quips that I notice.
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I looked over my bans and I see for some I call Trump names and stuff like that, so I can agree that that qualifies as obnoxious. But the ban during the marriage statistics exchange was bad as was the ban for my Doki Doki Literature Club post.
Person who gets banned a lot thinks his bans are bad. Many such cases.
If half your bans are bad, people who get banned a lot will take a lot more bad bans than people who get banned rarely.
But half our bans are not bad.
All your bans were deserved.
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