Earlier someone, Nick Tamen maybe?, was supporting a different position and noted that banning maga would encourage their sense of aggrieved martyrdom. I think that was a very good point.
T’wasn’t me. I remember the observation, but I don’t recall who it was.
I don't think we particularly need to concern ourselves with fascists feeling like martyrs for being planked. Ravelry and RPGnet, both many times bigger than the Ship, banned support for Trump years ago. What niche internet forums do affects the forum, nothing more.
I think my personal favorite suggestion was adding fascism to the things we don't support. That protects people who are valid contributors but may have some conservative opinions--I'm thinking for instance of ChastMastr who mentioned himself as fitting here--while still warning the maga guys* who are most likely to be actually making people unsafe.
Well, he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think @ChastMastr identified himself, in very strong terms, as someone considers abortion to be immoral? I come from a conservative Catholic family, and yeah, I don't really consider my anti-choice relatives to be consciously fascist. But I'm not sure how you'd set up a workable distinction between good anti-choicers and bad anti-choicers, for the purposes of enforcing a conditional ban. It's okay to say abortion is murder, as long as you don't say it as part of advocating a Gilead-style theocracy?
I don't think we particularly need to concern ourselves with fascists feeling like martyrs for being planked. Ravelry and RPGnet, both many times bigger than the Ship, banned support for Trump years ago. What niche internet forums do affects the forum, nothing more.
Well, there is a difference, because those forums are (I'm assuming) primarily focussed on knitting and roleplaying games, whereas our raison d'etre is discussion. Banning certain perspectives is bound to change our forum more than those ones. The question is whether we think the change is desirable or not.
@ Stetson No that was discussing possible thresholds for a Nazi equivalent nuclear ban not whether or how we clarify C1.
There's a fine but subjective line between asking a lot of questions and sealioning. And there's a point where repeated use of hostile debating tactics starts to feel aggressive and deliberate - whether it is intended to be or not. These points are personal and subjective and dont coincide neatly with the levels that trigger formal hosting.
My welcome mat has been worn out for your questions.
I don't think we particularly need to concern ourselves with fascists feeling like martyrs for being planked. Ravelry and RPGnet, both many times bigger than the Ship, banned support for Trump years ago. What niche internet forums do affects the forum, nothing more.
Well, there is a difference, because those forums are (I'm assuming) primarily focussed on knitting and roleplaying games, whereas our raison d'etre is discussion. Banning certain perspectives is bound to change our forum more than those ones. The question is whether we think the change is desirable or not.
The "perspectives" are already banned by C1. All that is being debated is what we count as manifestations of them.
This might be a blast from the past, but didn’t the ship formerly grant newbies the status of “Apprentice”? I can’t remember what one had to do to become a shipmate. I don’t know if this would help but could it discourage some of the unpleasantness.
My welcome mat has been worn out for your questions.
Okay. But if you are advocating that people be banned due to mere announcement of support for specified racist organizations, but dodge a simple question about whether Reformers(a group I'm sure you as a politically aware person are sufficiently familiar with) should be among those included in the ban, I think it presents your motivations in a somewhat unflattering light.
Apprentice status basically meant you normally didn’t get called to Hell and Hosts would explain inexperienced misunderstandings of rules rather than apply discipline. Essentially it would grant a period of licence to all newbies, thereby preventing rapid action against the demonstrable C1 offenders.
My welcome mat has been worn out for your questions.
Okay. But if you are advocating that people be banned due to mere announcement of support for specified racist organizations, but dodge a simple question about whether Reformers(a group I'm sure you as a politically aware person are sufficiently familiar with) should be among those included in the ban, I think it presents your motivations in a somewhat unflattering light.
Again ignoring what I am actually talking about which can be read in my post here.
I am not sure if continued discussion in this thread is doing much for the generally warm feelings Shippies have for each other. I for one look forward to the owners deciding if and what they want to do on this topic, and then the Ship could get back to unrestful but less choppy sailing.
Apprentice status basically meant you normally didn’t get called to Hell and Hosts would explain inexperienced misunderstandings of rules rather than apply discipline. Essentially it would grant a period of licence to all newbies, thereby preventing rapid action against the demonstrable C1 offenders.
I don’t think it would help.
Just so I understand, you mean that a blanket ban on stated party-memberships would be preferable to allowing the person to join the discussion and then booting him when he engages in racism?
But to clarify, I have no personal issue with Admin action to suspend or exclude rapidly anyone who clearly offends C1, either as currently worded or possibly strengthened.
The Apprentice option essentially gave folks 50 posts grace because of inexperience. If Admin in their judgment believe that rapid suspension or exclusion is justified much earlier than the evidence of 50 posts, I would trust them to do that.
So I don’t think the reinstatement of Apprentice status would be helpful.
As it happens, from memory I believe that even when the Apprentice status existed, Admin did very occasionally suspend or ban obvious offenders (trolls, advertisers, the gratuitously offensive) earlier anyway. You don’t necessarily need 50 posts of evidence. Sometimes one is enough.
I don't think most Maga think of themselves as fascists. So I don't think a warning at registration would have much effect.
I wasn't suggesting using that warning to scare off maga voters. I was suggesting that defining the ship's position would be clear and something to point to if people then start saying demonstrably ugly fascist things. Get rid of them very quickly if need be.
'-isms in C1 include fascism. Support for fascist politicians or far right movements will be considered as a breach of C1 unless admin see evidence of extenuating circumstances.
Trump, and Trump supporters, claim that they are not fascist. I think whether or not Trump is technically fascist is open to debate. Some of his minions are certainly fascists, and fascists are busy cheering him on. He's a disgusting human being, he's an authoritarian with a Pharaoh complex, and I don't think he even understands the concept of truth, but whether or not he's an actual fascist is I think a little more complicated.
If you're going to talk about me, tag me. I don't know why you've used the plural to so thinly veil discussion of things I've said, but it's bullshit.
who know we have always banned an entire group on the basis of their affiliation- Nazis- whose hands were among those on the tiller for years with these rules in place- have seemingly suddenly discovered their consciences on affiliation bans- despite never a peep of sympathy for the poor Nazis or pointing out they're not all white and making no objection when they were powerful admins who could have moved to rescind the Nazi ban.
We actually do ban an entire group based on their affiliation and always have done - regardless of their race sex or other characteristics - Nazis. If that outrages you or you think it inevitably leads to banning Catholics or you just want to argue that it does, to discredit attempts to recognise and tackle modern Nazi equivalent fascism, I'm sorry but that Ship sailed years ago and we're all on it and none of the people making these arguments seem to have noticed or commented on any ill effects or injustice of that up to now.
If someone whose admin service time overlapped with mine wants to correct me, they can and should, but I don't remember discussing a Nazi ban and I don't remember us banning anyone for being a Nazi. I imagine we would have considered it one of the "-isms" in the Ship's first commandment, but I don't recall it coming up. There are very few things we "always have done"; policies were developed in response to things that happened on the boards and have changed many times. The only time I remember banning someone based solely on a group affiliation was in the early 2000s when someone said he was a member of NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association, which advocated pedophilia). I am unfamiliar with the UK list of proscribed groups linked to upthread because it was not a thing when I was an admin. That came in when Doublethink and Alan took over, which was after I resigned.
As for my sympathies: I don't know why you're so bugged that I pointed out that there are plenty of non-white Trump supporters, but it's reality. The last person I talked to in real life with Trump supporters in her family is a young Latina woman who said the ICE raids here in southern California did not sway them. Other naturalized citizens I know who immigrated from Central American countries carry their passports everywhere they go, but these folks somehow think they'll be fine. Yes, they supported white supremacy when they voted for Trump -- maybe they think they'll get folded into whiteness the way Irish and Italian immigrants eventually were, I don't know. But I doubt very much they think I'm superior to them because I'm white. And you know what? They do have my sympathy, because despite its manifold benefits being folded into whiteness isn't all it's cracked up to be and because they are so far merely lucky they haven't been badly hurt as a result of policies they voted for.
You want to draw bright lines describing and classifying people you don't even know. Good luck with that -- it's extremely hard to do, and even harder to do in ways that make effective policies.
I'm now absolutely fed up and losing what slender abilities I have to be polite about it.
No, those abilities vanished a while ago. There are other legitimate points of view, and holding a position that differs from yours doesn't make other people defenders of Nazism. Doublethink asked for shipmates' opinions -- in the plural. Yours is just one point of view. It is legitimate and defensible, as is mine, as is @stetson's, and if the admins adopt yours, I will be just fine with that. And if this decision doesn't go your way, it will not make the sky fall.
There was a shippie who used a name that got him either banned or forced to rename, I forget which, because it was deemed racist. It was a long time ago, and certainly that is not a common occurrence, but it has happened. (The name started with Frito, and I won't say the rest unless asked)
So it is okay for older organisations to be misogynistic and homophobic but not new ones? My church organisation is 30 years old, where does it fit in to the hierarchy?
As for a small part, my gay son wouldn’t be allowed to get married in most churches. I don’t think that is a small issue.
I didn't mean that they're small issues, only that they're not the main purpose of the organisation, and I think that matters in determining whether we should treat support for a movement as support for particular views. If you're a member of Westborough Baptist Church (for example) it's reasonable to assume you support their views on gay people. That's far less true of the Roman Catholic Church. Antiquity means that people can identify with a movement or organisation from an early age and remain attached to it for identity reasons even when they disagree with it on many fronts. For new movements there is not that 'legacy' affiliation and people have chosen to identify themselves with it.
What if someone's a member of the Roman Catholic Church and does support their views on gay issues, or women’s ordination for that matter? Is it only because they might not support their views that they’d be welcome on the Ship? (don’t get me wrong, Westboro Baptist is kind of in its own weird anti-gay and anti-everything cult category…)
The line I'm suggesting is the C1 line; the only addition I'm making is to assume that for organisations and movements whose raison d'etre is bigotry we accept statements of support as sufficient evidence of a C1 violation. In all other respects we continue to operate a don't-ask-don't-tell policy. I don't doubt there are shipmates with homophobic views; if they keep them to themselves there's no problem.
There’s something ironic, in my view, about people with views on gay issues (I assume here you’re assuming that the RC doctrines on those matters are “homophobic”?) being told “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Attempting to slippery- slope rejection of a dangerous powerful form of modern fascism is a recognisable debating tactic but it's one that can shade into bad faith attempts to represent people as saying things they are not.
Isn’t that itself a slippery slope? Just because it can shade into bad faith attempts doesn’t mean it must.
People who were previously admins - who know we have always banned an entire group on the basis of their affiliation- Nazis- whose hands were among those on the tiller for years with these rules in place- have seemingly suddenly discovered their consciences on affiliation bans-
Or maybe their consciences have been exactly where they were all this time and they just don’t agree with you on how this should be approached.
Is the Styx really the place for personal attacks like this? Maybe the people who don’t agree with you, whether or not you like it, hold those views perfectly consistently, and have done so all this time.
So it is okay for older organisations to be misogynistic and homophobic but not new ones? My church organisation is 30 years old, where does it fit in to the hierarchy?
As for a small part, my gay son wouldn’t be allowed to get married in most churches. I don’t think that is a small issue.
I didn't mean that they're small issues, only that they're not the main purpose of the organisation, and I think that matters in determining whether we should treat support for a movement as support for particular views. If you're a member of Westborough Baptist Church (for example) it's reasonable to assume you support their views on gay people. That's far less true of the Roman Catholic Church. Antiquity means that people can identify with a movement or organisation from an early age and remain attached to it for identity reasons even when they disagree with it on many fronts. For new movements there is not that 'legacy' affiliation and people have chosen to identify themselves with it.
What if someone's a member of the Roman Catholic Church and does support their views on gay issues, or women’s ordination for that matter? Is it only because they might not support their views that they’d be welcome on the Ship? (don’t get me wrong, Westboro Baptist is kind of in its own weird anti-gay and anti-everything cult category…)
The line I'm suggesting is the C1 line; the only addition I'm making is to assume that for organisations and movements whose raison d'etre is bigotry we accept statements of support as sufficient evidence of a C1 violation. In all other respects we continue to operate a don't-ask-don't-tell policy. I don't doubt there are shipmates with homophobic views; if they keep them to themselves there's no problem.
There’s something ironic, in my view, about people with views on gay issues (I assume here you’re assuming that the RC doctrines on those matters are “homophobic”?) being told “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The irony was intentional, but it is an accurate description of how we currently deal with various -isms that are tacitly or openly supported by organisations shipmates are members of. And yes, I do think RC policies towards gay people are homophobic.
That protects people who are valid contributors but may have some conservative opinions--I'm thinking for instance of ChastMastr who mentioned himself as fitting here
As a side note/clarification, I don’t consider myself “conservative”—I just try, as best I can, to be theologically orthodox. I thought I should emphasize that. Both views/beliefs I hold that some would consider “liberal” or “conservative” (or “moderate”) in the religious and political spheres stem at least partly from my understanding of that orthodoxy.
I think my personal favorite suggestion was adding fascism to the things we don't support. That protects people who are valid contributors but may have some conservative opinions--I'm thinking for instance of ChastMastr who mentioned himself as fitting here--while still warning the maga guys* who are most likely to be actually making people unsafe.
Well, he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think @ChastMastr identified himself, in very strong terms, as someone considers abortion to be immoral? I come from a conservative Catholic family, and yeah, I don't really consider my anti-choice relatives to be consciously fascist. But I'm not sure how you'd set up a workable distinction between good anti-choicers and bad anti-choicers, for the purposes of enforcing a conditional ban. It's okay to say abortion is murder, as long as you don't say it as part of advocating a Gilead-style theocracy?
I do hold that view, but my approach to that politically and how the laws should be is a bit more complicated for various reasons. I was personally horrified when Roe v. Wade was overturned. (And I think going into all of this should, if it needs to be discussed, be a Purgatory thread, not hijacking a Styx thread for me to expound on it.) But I damn well don’t think people who rejoiced when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and say so, should be planked.
So it is okay for older organisations to be misogynistic and homophobic but not new ones? My church organisation is 30 years old, where does it fit in to the hierarchy?
As for a small part, my gay son wouldn’t be allowed to get married in most churches. I don’t think that is a small issue.
I didn't mean that they're small issues, only that they're not the main purpose of the organisation, and I think that matters in determining whether we should treat support for a movement as support for particular views. If you're a member of Westborough Baptist Church (for example) it's reasonable to assume you support their views on gay people. That's far less true of the Roman Catholic Church. Antiquity means that people can identify with a movement or organisation from an early age and remain attached to it for identity reasons even when they disagree with it on many fronts. For new movements there is not that 'legacy' affiliation and people have chosen to identify themselves with it.
What if someone's a member of the Roman Catholic Church and does support their views on gay issues, or women’s ordination for that matter? Is it only because they might not support their views that they’d be welcome on the Ship? (don’t get me wrong, Westboro Baptist is kind of in its own weird anti-gay and anti-everything cult category…)
The line I'm suggesting is the C1 line; the only addition I'm making is to assume that for organisations and movements whose raison d'etre is bigotry we accept statements of support as sufficient evidence of a C1 violation. In all other respects we continue to operate a don't-ask-don't-tell policy. I don't doubt there are shipmates with homophobic views; if they keep them to themselves there's no problem.
There’s something ironic, in my view, about people with views on gay issues (I assume here you’re assuming that the RC doctrines on those matters are “homophobic”?) being told “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The irony was intentional, but it is an accurate description of how we currently deal with various -isms that are tacitly or openly supported by organisations shipmates are members of. And yes, I do think RC policies towards gay people are homophobic.
Depending on the -ism, I’m now wondering what I might blunder into saying, no matter how politely, that might get me planked. That’s disturbing. I’ve occasionally pondered starting threads on various things where I’m sure my beliefs would be in the minority these days, but I don’t think the idea of planking for them occurred to me seriously, especially since I’d said those things on the old Ship literally decades ago.
I was personally horrified when Roe v. Wade was overturned. (And I think going into all of this should, if it needs to be discussed, be a Purgatory thread, not hijacking a Styx thread for me to expound on it.) But I damn well don’t think people who rejoiced when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and say so, should be planked.
It's almost as if people were complex and at least some of their views nuanced!
I was personally horrified when Roe v. Wade was overturned. (And I think going into all of this should, if it needs to be discussed, be a Purgatory thread, not hijacking a Styx thread for me to expound on it.) But I damn well don’t think people who rejoiced when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and say so, should be planked.
It's almost as if people were complex and at least some of their views nuanced!
I’ve heard the legends, but I’m not sure “nuance” and “complexity” really exist. Then again, I do believe in Bigfoot… and even ghosts and faeries… so maybe…
Of course MAGA skews white. But Trump got 45% of Latino voters in 2024. Yes, they in effect voted for white supremacy, but I doubt very much a lot of them had that in mind when they voted.
"Latino" being an umbrella term that covers many communities with different attitudes in which racial politics is frequently complicated, as you yourself point out in your subsequent post.
I have been hesitant to weigh in on this debate. Full disclosure: as a straight, white, educated, middle class, male with no significant disabilities I'm not directly affected by, and sometimes unaware of, the issues that others have raised. I'm also the kind of person 'dog whistles' are designed to bypass.
With some exceptions (Nazis, KKK) I am reluctant to ban people simply on the basis of declared political affiliation, rather than on the basis of how they behave on the boards. On the other hand I recognise the unsatisfactoriness of waiting until harm is caused before taking action, and also the problem of people whose behaviour consistently gets close to acceptable / unacceptable line, whether intentionally or otherwise, in a way that comes across as brinkmanship. But, see my first comment above, I'm not generally one of those who feels the pain of people's misbehaviour on the boards.
However, people subscribe to or support populist political movements often for quite specific reasons, and can be surprisingly blind to the wider implications of the cause they have signed up to. So I don't think there's a good simple solution to the problem.
As an example, within the last week, in the course of a long conversation with a first-generation Pakistani immigrant taxi driver he volunteered the information to my wife that he would be voting for Reform, stating that he thought other immigrants should follow the same processes he had had to if they wanted to live in the UK. That Reform's wider racism if implemented would have a negative effect on him and his family was something he was apparently oblivious to. If his motivation was racist, it was certainly a differently focussed racism than is apparent in the kinds of thing Reform members and candidates usually express.
Equally a stated ban on 'fascists' would, in my view, run foul of the well established problem of defining fascism, not helped by the fact that it has been used pejoratively by both left and right.
To the extent that we are experiencing problems aboard ship it may be that rather than establishing a list of proscribed affiliations, we need to host more closely and take firmer action on unacceptable, and borderline unacceptable, behaviour.
The difficulty of defining fascism occurred to me as well. I am generally concerned about banning people and/or threatening to ban people based on expansive ill-defined categories, which is what this is starting to look like.
Speaking only for myself, the kind of bad behaviour that bothered me on a personal level on the Ship in recent years is not confined to any particular political tendency. I think there is a probably a limit on the extent to which we can control bad behaviour while still maintaining functioning discussion boards, given that the Ship is necessarily run a very much part-time and very much volunteer moderation team.
If you're going to talk about me, tag me. I don't know why you've used the plural to so thinly veil discussion of things I've said, but it's bullshit.
Now I feel foolish and narcissistic, because I thought she was trying to lure me to post again.
If someone whose admin service time overlapped with mine wants to correct me, they can and should, but I don't remember discussing a Nazi ban and I don't remember us banning anyone for being a Nazi. I imagine we would have considered it one of the "-isms" in the Ship's first commandment, but I don't recall it coming up.
Technically, I agree. But the "I don't recall it coming up" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. It feels not exactly misrepresentation to suggest that anyone self-identifying as a Nazi was always pretty likely to be on the short path to the plank.
Stepping back to restate perspective in point form, because it feels wrong not to:
Applying C1 to much outside of actual posts feels systematically problematic.
The insidious way in which ISMs have a choke hold on the fundamental structures of society make it feel reasonable to want to start addressing it writ-large somehow. Sexism might be too big of an ask for a religion-centric discussion board, but maybe fascism isn't.
As a dry commentary on the nature of teh interweebs: IF the Ship did overtly ban MAGA (however impossible that functionally is), it might suddenly find a surge of spicy American contributors joining. Possibly a petard on which to be hoisted.
@NicoleMR, referencing that cartoon advertising mascot from our youths? Obvious and unequivocally racist and thus a violation of C1.
And even for younger participants unfamiliar with the advertising of yesteryear, I would think that googling the name of a racist mascot is going to get you more precise information(via wikipedia, if nothing else) as to whether and why it's offensive, than is googling the name of a political group. Especially if you're trying to determine whether eg. La Meute should be considered as fascist as The Proud Boys are for purposes of enforcing a first-sight banning. Wikipedia will tell you that both groups have been credibly accused of racism, sure, but it's not gonna give you any ironclad formula for determining the equivalency between the two, or how either of them measure up to an overarching scale for judging racist threats.
I don't consider it any grave assault on free speech for a private board to ban whomever it wants, and I'm certainly not jonesing for more MAGA content on the Ship. But if I understand this proposal correctly, in practice it will likely just amount to listing no more than about half-a-dozen high-profile anglosphere groups(MAGA, Reform, One Nation etc) that shipmates are to avoid announcing membership in under penalty of banning, but do little to stop anyone else who's hellbent on joining up to engage in racist diatribes(*).
Might even be slightly counterproductive, since it'll let racist newbies know what NOT to say while ingratiating themselves into the community before launching into the usual "Of course I'm against racism, but..." schtick.
(*) This precise logistical trap here is sometimes metaphorized as "the drunk who loses his keys in the alley, but looks for them on the sidewalk because that's where the light is better".
and I'm certainly not jonesing for more MAGA content on the Ship
I'm absolutely not either, but I am definitely jonesing for a broader array of political, theological, and philosophical views to be on the Ship, like we had years ago, than we seem now. From my point of view, it seems a lot less likely that one will encounter anyone who is politically conservative (or even just "moderate") in any sense of the word, anyone who is a theologically traditionalist/orthodox Christian (most now appear to either be less traditionally orthodox, or simply not believers in Christianity at all), and so on. I'm not politically conservative, but there are people of that bent whom I do respect (The Dispatch, The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, David French), and ones who are more complicated than just politically conservative/liberal that I respect (the Holy Post people), even though I might strongly disagree with them on many things--people you can have respectful and civil discussion with, who are also in agreement on the most fundamental fundamentals (for example, all of these people are anti-MAGA and anti-Trump and pro-democracy, pro-basic human rights, pro-kindness, anti-racist, etc.). I feel like we've lost a lot of Shipmates over the years who were in these categories, and I miss that.
and I'm certainly not jonesing for more MAGA content on the Ship
I'm absolutely not either, but I am definitely jonesing for a broader array of political, theological, and philosophical views to be on the Ship, like we had years ago, than we seem now. From my point of view, it seems a lot less likely that one will encounter anyone who is politically conservative (or even just "moderate") in any sense of the word, anyone who is a theologically traditionalist/orthodox Christian (most now appear to either be less traditionally orthodox, or simply not believers in Christianity at all), and so on. I'm not politically conservative, but there are people of that bent whom I do respect (The Dispatch, The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, David French), and ones who are more complicated than just politically conservative/liberal that I respect (the Holy Post people), even though I might strongly disagree with them on many things--people you can have respectful and civil discussion with, who are also in agreement on the most fundamental fundamentals (for example, all of these people are anti-MAGA and anti-Trump and pro-democracy, pro-basic human rights, pro-kindness, anti-racist, etc.). I feel like we've lost a lot of Shipmates over the years who were in these categories, and I miss that.
Sounds like you're nostalgic for the glory days of J. Arthur Crank!
And I hear ya. FWIW, though, I don't know if the question of banning or not banning "identitarian" groups(*) is gonna make a difference to whether or not, for example, people from the Lincoln Project show up here. I doubt too many of THEM are thinking "Gee, I'm not sure if I wanna participate on a board where the MAGA viewpoint is shut out."
(*) "Identitarianism" being, I think, what people are really talking about when they posit a distinction between, say, MAGA and the Republican Party, to the moral disadvantage of the former. Mutatis mutandis for various other pairings.
If you're going to talk about me, tag me. I don't know why you've used the plural to so thinly veil discussion of things I've said, but it's bullshit.
Now I feel foolish and narcissistic, because I thought she was trying to lure me to post again.
Ah, sorry, I'd overlooked the support for Nazis in your post!
If someone whose admin service time overlapped with mine wants to correct me, they can and should, but I don't remember discussing a Nazi ban and I don't remember us banning anyone for being a Nazi. I imagine we would have considered it one of the "-isms" in the Ship's first commandment, but I don't recall it coming up.
Technically, I agree. But the "I don't recall it coming up" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. It feels not exactly misrepresentation to suggest that anyone self-identifying as a Nazi was always pretty likely to be on the short path to the plank.
Agree. But was there ever an explicit "Nazi ban" policy?
Sexism might be too big of an ask for a religion-centric discussion board, but maybe fascism isn't.
If the admins can ban fascism, they can ban sexism. Reading this sentence when the leading Democratic candidate for California governor will have to bow out of the race because of credible allegations of sexual assault is just exhausting. The ship's sexism problem is way worse than its fascism problem. Because religion, of course, but also because the Ship is left-leaning, and Christianity's deeply rooted sexism is all the more reason to take that stand.
Comments
Well, he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think @ChastMastr identified himself, in very strong terms, as someone considers abortion to be immoral? I come from a conservative Catholic family, and yeah, I don't really consider my anti-choice relatives to be consciously fascist. But I'm not sure how you'd set up a workable distinction between good anti-choicers and bad anti-choicers, for the purposes of enforcing a conditional ban. It's okay to say abortion is murder, as long as you don't say it as part of advocating a Gilead-style theocracy?
Well, there is a difference, because those forums are (I'm assuming) primarily focussed on knitting and roleplaying games, whereas our raison d'etre is discussion. Banning certain perspectives is bound to change our forum more than those ones. The question is whether we think the change is desirable or not.
There's a fine but subjective line between asking a lot of questions and sealioning. And there's a point where repeated use of hostile debating tactics starts to feel aggressive and deliberate - whether it is intended to be or not. These points are personal and subjective and dont coincide neatly with the levels that trigger formal hosting.
My welcome mat has been worn out for your questions.
The "perspectives" are already banned by C1. All that is being debated is what we count as manifestations of them.
Okay. But if you are advocating that people be banned due to mere announcement of support for specified racist organizations, but dodge a simple question about whether Reformers(a group I'm sure you as a politically aware person are sufficiently familiar with) should be among those included in the ban, I think it presents your motivations in a somewhat unflattering light.
I don’t think it would help.
Again ignoring what I am actually talking about which can be read in my post here.
https://forums.shipoffools.com/discussion/comment/785096/#Comment_785096
This is why the welcome mat is worn out, rolled up, drenched in petrol and heading for a Viking funeral on a nearby canal.
Just so I understand, you mean that a blanket ban on stated party-memberships would be preferable to allowing the person to join the discussion and then booting him when he engages in racism?
But to clarify, I have no personal issue with Admin action to suspend or exclude rapidly anyone who clearly offends C1, either as currently worded or possibly strengthened.
The Apprentice option essentially gave folks 50 posts grace because of inexperience. If Admin in their judgment believe that rapid suspension or exclusion is justified much earlier than the evidence of 50 posts, I would trust them to do that.
So I don’t think the reinstatement of Apprentice status would be helpful.
As it happens, from memory I believe that even when the Apprentice status existed, Admin did very occasionally suspend or ban obvious offenders (trolls, advertisers, the gratuitously offensive) earlier anyway. You don’t necessarily need 50 posts of evidence. Sometimes one is enough.
I wasn't suggesting using that warning to scare off maga voters. I was suggesting that defining the ship's position would be clear and something to point to if people then start saying demonstrably ugly fascist things. Get rid of them very quickly if need be.
Trump, and Trump supporters, claim that they are not fascist. I think whether or not Trump is technically fascist is open to debate. Some of his minions are certainly fascists, and fascists are busy cheering him on. He's a disgusting human being, he's an authoritarian with a Pharaoh complex, and I don't think he even understands the concept of truth, but whether or not he's an actual fascist is I think a little more complicated.
If someone whose admin service time overlapped with mine wants to correct me, they can and should, but I don't remember discussing a Nazi ban and I don't remember us banning anyone for being a Nazi. I imagine we would have considered it one of the "-isms" in the Ship's first commandment, but I don't recall it coming up. There are very few things we "always have done"; policies were developed in response to things that happened on the boards and have changed many times. The only time I remember banning someone based solely on a group affiliation was in the early 2000s when someone said he was a member of NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association, which advocated pedophilia). I am unfamiliar with the UK list of proscribed groups linked to upthread because it was not a thing when I was an admin. That came in when Doublethink and Alan took over, which was after I resigned.
As for my sympathies: I don't know why you're so bugged that I pointed out that there are plenty of non-white Trump supporters, but it's reality. The last person I talked to in real life with Trump supporters in her family is a young Latina woman who said the ICE raids here in southern California did not sway them. Other naturalized citizens I know who immigrated from Central American countries carry their passports everywhere they go, but these folks somehow think they'll be fine. Yes, they supported white supremacy when they voted for Trump -- maybe they think they'll get folded into whiteness the way Irish and Italian immigrants eventually were, I don't know. But I doubt very much they think I'm superior to them because I'm white. And you know what? They do have my sympathy, because despite its manifold benefits being folded into whiteness isn't all it's cracked up to be and because they are so far merely lucky they haven't been badly hurt as a result of policies they voted for.
You want to draw bright lines describing and classifying people you don't even know. Good luck with that -- it's extremely hard to do, and even harder to do in ways that make effective policies.
No, those abilities vanished a while ago. There are other legitimate points of view, and holding a position that differs from yours doesn't make other people defenders of Nazism. Doublethink asked for shipmates' opinions -- in the plural. Yours is just one point of view. It is legitimate and defensible, as is mine, as is @stetson's, and if the admins adopt yours, I will be just fine with that. And if this decision doesn't go your way, it will not make the sky fall.
There’s something ironic, in my view, about people with views on gay issues (I assume here you’re assuming that the RC doctrines on those matters are “homophobic”?) being told “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Isn’t that itself a slippery slope? Just because it can shade into bad faith attempts doesn’t mean it must.
Or maybe their consciences have been exactly where they were all this time and they just don’t agree with you on how this should be approached.
Is the Styx really the place for personal attacks like this? Maybe the people who don’t agree with you, whether or not you like it, hold those views perfectly consistently, and have done so all this time.
The irony was intentional, but it is an accurate description of how we currently deal with various -isms that are tacitly or openly supported by organisations shipmates are members of. And yes, I do think RC policies towards gay people are homophobic.
As a side note/clarification, I don’t consider myself “conservative”—I just try, as best I can, to be theologically orthodox. I thought I should emphasize that. Both views/beliefs I hold that some would consider “liberal” or “conservative” (or “moderate”) in the religious and political spheres stem at least partly from my understanding of that orthodoxy.
I do hold that view, but my approach to that politically and how the laws should be is a bit more complicated for various reasons. I was personally horrified when Roe v. Wade was overturned. (And I think going into all of this should, if it needs to be discussed, be a Purgatory thread, not hijacking a Styx thread for me to expound on it.) But I damn well don’t think people who rejoiced when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and say so, should be planked.
Depending on the -ism, I’m now wondering what I might blunder into saying, no matter how politely, that might get me planked. That’s disturbing. I’ve occasionally pondered starting threads on various things where I’m sure my beliefs would be in the minority these days, but I don’t think the idea of planking for them occurred to me seriously, especially since I’d said those things on the old Ship literally decades ago.
It's almost as if people were complex and at least some of their views nuanced!
***Gasp!!!***
I’ve heard the legends, but I’m not sure “nuance” and “complexity” really exist. Then again, I do believe in Bigfoot… and even ghosts and faeries… so maybe…
"Latino" being an umbrella term that covers many communities with different attitudes in which racial politics is frequently complicated, as you yourself point out in your subsequent post.
Oh, I was not in doubt of your thoughts on that!
With some exceptions (Nazis, KKK) I am reluctant to ban people simply on the basis of declared political affiliation, rather than on the basis of how they behave on the boards. On the other hand I recognise the unsatisfactoriness of waiting until harm is caused before taking action, and also the problem of people whose behaviour consistently gets close to acceptable / unacceptable line, whether intentionally or otherwise, in a way that comes across as brinkmanship. But, see my first comment above, I'm not generally one of those who feels the pain of people's misbehaviour on the boards.
However, people subscribe to or support populist political movements often for quite specific reasons, and can be surprisingly blind to the wider implications of the cause they have signed up to. So I don't think there's a good simple solution to the problem.
As an example, within the last week, in the course of a long conversation with a first-generation Pakistani immigrant taxi driver he volunteered the information to my wife that he would be voting for Reform, stating that he thought other immigrants should follow the same processes he had had to if they wanted to live in the UK. That Reform's wider racism if implemented would have a negative effect on him and his family was something he was apparently oblivious to. If his motivation was racist, it was certainly a differently focussed racism than is apparent in the kinds of thing Reform members and candidates usually express.
Equally a stated ban on 'fascists' would, in my view, run foul of the well established problem of defining fascism, not helped by the fact that it has been used pejoratively by both left and right.
To the extent that we are experiencing problems aboard ship it may be that rather than establishing a list of proscribed affiliations, we need to host more closely and take firmer action on unacceptable, and borderline unacceptable, behaviour.
Speaking only for myself, the kind of bad behaviour that bothered me on a personal level on the Ship in recent years is not confined to any particular political tendency. I think there is a probably a limit on the extent to which we can control bad behaviour while still maintaining functioning discussion boards, given that the Ship is necessarily run a very much part-time and very much volunteer moderation team.
Now I feel foolish and narcissistic, because I thought she was trying to lure me to post again.
Technically, I agree. But the "I don't recall it coming up" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. It feels not exactly misrepresentation to suggest that anyone self-identifying as a Nazi was always pretty likely to be on the short path to the plank.
Stepping back to restate perspective in point form, because it feels wrong not to:
As a dry commentary on the nature of teh interweebs: IF the Ship did overtly ban MAGA (however impossible that functionally is), it might suddenly find a surge of spicy American contributors joining. Possibly a petard on which to be hoisted.
And even for younger participants unfamiliar with the advertising of yesteryear, I would think that googling the name of a racist mascot is going to get you more precise information(via wikipedia, if nothing else) as to whether and why it's offensive, than is googling the name of a political group. Especially if you're trying to determine whether eg. La Meute should be considered as fascist as The Proud Boys are for purposes of enforcing a first-sight banning. Wikipedia will tell you that both groups have been credibly accused of racism, sure, but it's not gonna give you any ironclad formula for determining the equivalency between the two, or how either of them measure up to an overarching scale for judging racist threats.
I don't consider it any grave assault on free speech for a private board to ban whomever it wants, and I'm certainly not jonesing for more MAGA content on the Ship. But if I understand this proposal correctly, in practice it will likely just amount to listing no more than about half-a-dozen high-profile anglosphere groups(MAGA, Reform, One Nation etc) that shipmates are to avoid announcing membership in under penalty of banning, but do little to stop anyone else who's hellbent on joining up to engage in racist diatribes(*).
Might even be slightly counterproductive, since it'll let racist newbies know what NOT to say while ingratiating themselves into the community before launching into the usual "Of course I'm against racism, but..." schtick.
(*) This precise logistical trap here is sometimes metaphorized as "the drunk who loses his keys in the alley, but looks for them on the sidewalk because that's where the light is better".
I'm absolutely not either, but I am definitely jonesing for a broader array of political, theological, and philosophical views to be on the Ship, like we had years ago, than we seem now. From my point of view, it seems a lot less likely that one will encounter anyone who is politically conservative (or even just "moderate") in any sense of the word, anyone who is a theologically traditionalist/orthodox Christian (most now appear to either be less traditionally orthodox, or simply not believers in Christianity at all), and so on. I'm not politically conservative, but there are people of that bent whom I do respect (The Dispatch, The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, David French), and ones who are more complicated than just politically conservative/liberal that I respect (the Holy Post people), even though I might strongly disagree with them on many things--people you can have respectful and civil discussion with, who are also in agreement on the most fundamental fundamentals (for example, all of these people are anti-MAGA and anti-Trump and pro-democracy, pro-basic human rights, pro-kindness, anti-racist, etc.). I feel like we've lost a lot of Shipmates over the years who were in these categories, and I miss that.
Sounds like you're nostalgic for the glory days of J. Arthur Crank!
And I hear ya. FWIW, though, I don't know if the question of banning or not banning "identitarian" groups(*) is gonna make a difference to whether or not, for example, people from the Lincoln Project show up here. I doubt too many of THEM are thinking "Gee, I'm not sure if I wanna participate on a board where the MAGA viewpoint is shut out."
(*) "Identitarianism" being, I think, what people are really talking about when they posit a distinction between, say, MAGA and the Republican Party, to the moral disadvantage of the former. Mutatis mutandis for various other pairings.
Agree. But was there ever an explicit "Nazi ban" policy?
If the admins can ban fascism, they can ban sexism. Reading this sentence when the leading Democratic candidate for California governor will have to bow out of the race because of credible allegations of sexual assault is just exhausting. The ship's sexism problem is way worse than its fascism problem. Because religion, of course, but also because the Ship is left-leaning, and Christianity's deeply rooted sexism is all the more reason to take that stand.
Doublethink, Admin