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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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human rights', here, doesn't mean some legalistic or dictionary sense. It means matters so important that the writer is not willing to accept that their edge cases are up for discussion. It doesn't matter whether that's actually present as a descriptive sense: a lot of this class of 'human rights' are not actually protected at all, or may be not especially popular in the broader world (and, conversely, many things are not 'human rights' even if they're explicitly covered by the US Constitution and UN and large majorities in the speaker's country). It's a normative analysis for that specific context: these are axioms that can not and should not be debated in this situation. If the matter comes up, agreeing to disagree isn't acceptable.

Well, i mean thats kinda begging the question isnt it. Who gave them the authority to decide such a thing?

At the risk of tautology, the audience did, by the bit where they're doing it, and anyone's taking them seriously. I could go through the whole list of how moderators were picked up til 2012ish, but I don't think anyone cares, I don't know if it's changed since, and it's just a pretty shallow duct-tape patch on the underlying will to power. The RPGnet moderators run, for all meaningful purposes, the forum. (You can appeal to the admins, but they usually don't even bother to respond; from the rare times I've heard of them doing so, they just fob it off to the moderators.) There's nothing special about this compared to the "fuck Trump and his supporters" rule, "fuck ICE" rule, the "fuck 'nazis'" rule, or even a decade ago when it actually was a "fuck Nazis" rule, just because they call some of them about 'human rights' and some of them about not protecting awful people. It's just a norm they've set up.

In less formal relationships, the baton pass of the mandate of heaven is less obvious. But it still exists; you give people this power by interacting with them in ways where this power can be used. It's not some deep revelation about universal laws, it's just drawing lines with chalk.

And, to be fair and to steelman, that's how those sort of rules work. Barring some pretty extreme cults, state-run schools, or literal jails (badum-tish), you don't actually have some magical force requiring you to treat people seriously, or for them to treat you seriously. If someone draws lines by chalk, you either obey them, or you give them reason to fuck off.

To be somewhat less charitable, it being within one's power doesn't make it harmless. It's not hard to see what this has done to public discussion.

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