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It amazes me that not a one of you sees it, you can read each others comments and still not see the check list of grievances, the repressive tolerance, the exaggeration and hyperbole, the fake outrage and attempt to garner sympathy through emotional manipulation, the appeals to authority and attempts to appeal to the bogey man you lot have created in your own heads.

All for what, because you want to control this space with your political views, that's it, everything else is a lie and a means to that end, you all act like we haven't been here before, seen this exact thing before many times, even on this very forum, it's always the same agitators, the same false arguments and the same excuses, same lies and pretend like we all do not know exactly that all your political views align one way, progs, socialists, etc.

"My politics is not political"
"Don't you care about -group-"
"It's the evil alt right Nazi trolls"
"Arch blah blah blah"
"Communism is not evil, Nazis are worse... Whatabout whatabout whatabout"

Etc. Etc.

I will keep saying it, this is a liberal space, not a socialist one, this is not sigmarxism where you can crush any disenting view by lying and calling us Nazis, this is not Reddit where your echo chamber is promoted and rewarded, if you cannot handle that Dakka has a blanket ban on Nazism and politics, but not what you people label as a Nazi, then leave, set up a new site, invite like minded people and police it with an iron fist as you are want to do, but you won't, because this site is fairly popular and that is why you want to control this space.

I don't hate any of your for doing what is in your nature, I just wish you had some self control, but hey, that's part of the ideology isn't it, the personal is political and any interaction must be seen as a political one.... Sad.

Formosa, it is 10:43 at night here. So I'm tired, and I think you're acting childish. But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

 RaptorusRex wrote:
Formosa, it is 10:43 at night here. So I'm tired, and I think you're acting childish. But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

What did he say that was childish? This is just some dumb cope thread from someone crying about the mods enforcing their policy.

 BertBert wrote:
Thanks for this elaborate answer, it's not often you get to this level of analysis at 5 AM. :thumbs-up:

To be fair, it's only 1130 for me XD

Most users likely see this as a recreational space and simply don't want to bother with this kind of complexity and stress in the first place, which may prompt negative reactions or outright dismissal of what might be a genuine concern. Having one's principles challenged can be pretty stressful, so this reaction is understandable in my view. Now, if we are talking about mods, I'm not sure how to gauge their "centrist" approach. I constantly see red text in places where people got a little too excited, so mods do seem to deliver on reports fairly reliably. There is a human element as well, where all mods may be enforcing the same set of rules, but still have a different threshold on what they would deem offensive (and a rules violation as a result).

My conclusion after years is that this isn't really a problem the moderation team can solve... Well I mean they could 'solve' it in a blunt hammer sort of way but they obviously don't want to do that and that is itself probably just a more extreme form of avoiding the problem. especially when the problem is... What's the word I want here. Non-native to the wargaming space? I mean that in the direct sense. Someone being a fan of the Black Templars is just another Black Templar fan. They're pscyho-crusaders in a universe full of psycho-crusaders and they're the most crusadery of them all! It doesn't raise eyebrows until you show up in a black and red jacket with sig runes on the shoulder, which is when someone might take a double-take and start wondering. It makes its way into this space from the outside and yeah, a lot of people prefer it to stay outside.

But it's not going to stay outside. You might as well expect to never see the color red ever again (sorry Blood Angels fans, but the red has to go ). So this kind of stuff is going to come up whether people like it or not.

I do think the moderation team is very much trapped in an early-90s attitude about speech and the internet that is rapidly becoming unworkable in the present social landscape. The issue is less in whether or not mods respond and more in that moderation on DakkaDakka prefers to be hands-off and make stated no direct opinions about the whats of what posters say and focus on the hows they employ to say it. That can at times feel impersonal and as is often levied against them, tone-deaf. But I doubt that they could resolve these problems even if they took more proactive stances and I doubt they really want to spend all their time navigating an issue that comes here from the outside. The best they could possibly do is adopt a response that feels less dismissive but I'm not even sure that would really work. Perception is a fickle mistress.

The problem comes here from the outside and it'll keep coming. Posters could improve how that problem is tackled by adjusting their own behaviors and expectations, but they probably won't.

 BlackoCatto wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
Formosa, it is 10:43 at night here. So I'm tired, and I think you're acting childish. But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

What did he say that was childish? This is just some dumb cope threat from someone crying about the mods enforcing their policy.

w/e, man. I think that reading that post as a "threat" or "cope" shows you're determined to read something into it.

At the end of the day, I want a safer community. It's Formosa's right to spout ahistorical crap, but his right to swing his fist ends where it meets my face.

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
Formosa, it is 10:43 at night here. So I'm tired, and I think you're acting childish. But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

What did he say that was childish? This is just some dumb cope threat from someone crying about the mods enforcing their policy.

w/e, man. I think that reading that post as a "threat" or "cope" shows you're determined to read something into it.

At the end of the day, I want a safer community. It's Formosa's right to spout ahistorical crap, but his right to swing his fist ends where it meets my face.

I mean if you are going to be stupid go ahead. There is a forum called ETC for people that want that. Bunch of banned folk over there to take another whiner.

BertBert wrote:

 Polonius wrote:
But... when the actions of the center right to well documented wide spectrum bigots like Arch is to wring their hands over fans being called racist, it shows where their priorities are. and that is to keep things orderly, and polite, and respectful, and if women or people of color feel marginalized by his videos, they should get over it.

Interesting analysis, but what would be the conclusion Dakka (or any online community) should draw from this insight?

That's the rub, right? I think what I would propose would be to focus on behaviors. Not hyperspecific ones, because we all know we're all creative enough to skirt those issues. I think that allowing gaming centric political discussions is both wise and probably inevitiable, but if I were to counsel the moderation team it would be to tighten moderation of those topics going broader. I think we can have a conversation about, say, the insignia worn by a player, but avoid terms like "far right" or "SJW." This is an area were "both sides" can be pretty quick on the draw. I think what surprised me looking through some posting histories is how many thinly veiled, or even overt, comments were made denigrating a political view or "side."

It might be untenable, as it's human nature to draw on the larger political world to make these arguments, but it's also not impossible.

Jerram wrote:Touche, but no I actually do and I should have said one dimensional. I've seen some decent 2d and 3d political maps that I find interesting but I'm drifting off topic. And yes you caught me getting annoyed and using shorthand congratulations.

I wasn't trying to just catch you in a "gotcha," I was making the broader point than when the chips are down, politics is often fairly linear. When it's a question of who has power, that's usually a straight line.



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trexmeyer wrote:
How TF do you go from Insaniak saying essentially that we can't ban fans of Arch outright to DakkaDakka is oppressing women of color?

In a way, this post supports my point. Rather than engage in a nuanced distinction, the instinct is shut down the discussion, by pointing out that it is disruptive, or if that doesn't work, make it so disruptive that the people pointing out the issue are the problem.

Yeah, I'm out. Have fun with this, DakkaDakka. I'm not going to associate with people who think I should be dead or people who think those people are "entitled to their opinion".

The "no politics" rules on forums like this serve only to bottle up the emotions and lets them fester. Sufficient Velocity does just fine.

 LordofHats wrote:
Of course, in my experience talking about complex social issues is hard and most people would rather fall back on stock dismissals in the mistaken notion that a phrase like 'two dimensional' will in itself washes their hands of having to deal with the issue at all. And that just goes back to Polonius' point that 'centrism' often feels like its only goal is to avoid conflict and dismiss apparent sources of discord, rather than resolve issues. That's kind of the place the moderators on DakkaDakka have ended up (though I don't think that's really their fault, it's a byproduct of the times and the moderation approach of the board).

And honestly... it's a wargaming forum, right? For Dakka, keeping things civil is more important than addressing entrench power inequities.

I don't even think the site's approach is wrong. The effort it would take to root out the problem might not be worth it, or it might hurt the community in the long run.

 RaptorusRex wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
Formosa, it is 10:43 at night here. So I'm tired, and I think you're acting childish. But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

What did he say that was childish? This is just some dumb cope threat from someone crying about the mods enforcing their policy.

w/e, man. I think that reading that post as a "threat" or "cope" shows you're determined to read something into it.

At the end of the day, I want a safer community. It's Formosa's right to spout ahistorical crap, but his right to swing his fist ends where it meets my face.

Everything I have said is rooted in historical fact, but inconvenient for certain ideological slanted people to hear, but feel free to PM me with citations proving my comments incorrect so you lot do not derail the thread.

 LordofHats wrote:
I do think the moderation team is very much trapped in an early-90s attitude about speech and the internet that is rapidly becoming unworkable in the present social landscape. The issue is less in whether or not mods respond and more in that moderation on DakkaDakka prefers to be hands-off and make stated no direct opinions about the whats of what posters say and focus on the hows they employ to say it. That can at times feel impersonal and as is often levied against them, tone-deaf. But I doubt that they could resolve these problems even if they took more proactive stances and I doubt they really want to spend all their time navigating an issue that comes here from the outside. The best they could possibly do is adopt a response that feels less dismissive but I'm not even sure that would really work. Perception is a fickle mistress.

I don't want to trivialize the behavior, but one of the things that Dakka's rules, and moderators, allow pretty carte blanche on is the right to be supremely annoying. Outside of spam or completely off topic stuff, you can spout obvious nonsense and blatantly inflammatory things in ways that do often trigger responses. And that is very difficult to moderate without just banning people you find annoying.

 Polonius wrote:
And honestly... it's a wargaming forum, right? For Dakka, keeping things civil is more important than addressing entrench power inequities.

There's the argument that the mod team has simply taken the most pragmatic approach to the problem.

It's not going to stay off the board no matter how much anyone wishes it, and my bet is that these topics will only become ubiquitous in their absence if they tried to keep it off the board. It makes sense to toss the general politics threads. They were bitter, regularly derailed by the political equivalent TFGs and still fairly toxic even when that wasn't happening, and didn't really relate to wargaming at all. Some people might enjoy dismissing ETC, but it's shocking learning from the mods there how many reports a very small community can generate when politics are involved (really shocking actually). I can only imagine how flooded the old political megathreads made the mods dashboard or whatever it is they have. Probably a lot, and it was more effort than was worth for something unrelated to wargaming.

But we have memes about female space marines for a reason (and I think they might actually be older than I am?) and we're gonna keep having them, and acting like those questions are the same as broader politics is some rather wishful thinking.

I don't even think the site's approach is wrong.

I think that would depend on what we mean by the site. The mods could take a stricter approach to being on topic, especially as a means of keeping things from spirally into offtopic bitter rants. I think that would also require posters to adjust their approach though and that is so untenable that it is probably impossible. It's kind of like the old 'why can't we all just get along.' We could totally get along, but some people seem really committed to not getting along or in only getting along if it's on their terms (which isn't really getting along, is it?).

 Polonius wrote:

I don't want to trivialize the behavior, but one of the things that Dakka's rules, and moderators, allow pretty carte blanche on is the right to be supremely annoying. Outside of spam or completely off topic stuff, you can spout obvious nonsense and blatantly inflammatory things in ways that do often trigger responses. And that is very difficult to moderate without just banning people you find annoying.

And this is the crux of the issue. When you base your moderation on subjective concepts such as "annoying", it's near impossible to remain consistent. Yes, there are some rather obvious agitators around that could be easily identified and dealt with, but those aside it's all a matter of temperament. Just disallowing certain buzzwords would make things a little easier without changing their approach in a fundamental way.

 LordofHats wrote:
But we have memes about female space marines for a reason (and I think they might actually be older than I am?) and we're gonna keep having them, and acting like those questions are the same as broader politics is some rather wishful thinking.

Good lord. My hot take on FSM is that if you have a strong opinion on them, I'm not listening to it.

I don't even think the site's approach is wrong.

I think that would depend on what we mean by the site. The mods could take a stricter approach to being on topic, especially as a means of keeping things from spirally into offtopic bitter rants. I think that would also require posters to adjust their approach though and that is so untenable that it is probably impossible. It's kind of like the old 'why can't we all just get along.' We could totally get along, but some people seem really committed to not getting along or in only getting along if it's on their terms (which isn't really getting along, is it?).

I mean, I'm pretty cynical. I guess I'm supposed to think that allowing threads about what I'll broadly call "Wargaming politics" have some value, in that they're valid topics, but really, how long do they stay productive? For that matter, how often does any conversation have a lot of value after a few pages? I think letting people post their takes, and then shutting it down when the inevitable happens allows everybody to feel better. I guess to put this more directly: what can anybody hope to add to a discussion about a stupid hoodie after the first hour or two?

In a perfect world, maybe people would post about their views in ways that actually change how people think, but people see culture war flashpoints and they are loaded for bear, man.

 Polonius wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I do think the moderation team is very much trapped in an early-90s attitude about speech and the internet that is rapidly becoming unworkable in the present social landscape. The issue is less in whether or not mods respond and more in that moderation on DakkaDakka prefers to be hands-off and make stated no direct opinions about the whats of what posters say and focus on the hows they employ to say it. That can at times feel impersonal and as is often levied against them, tone-deaf. But I doubt that they could resolve these problems even if they took more proactive stances and I doubt they really want to spend all their time navigating an issue that comes here from the outside. The best they could possibly do is adopt a response that feels less dismissive but I'm not even sure that would really work. Perception is a fickle mistress.

I don't want to trivialize the behavior, but one of the things that Dakka's rules, and moderators, allow pretty carte blanche on is the right to be supremely annoying. Outside of spam or completely off topic stuff, you can spout obvious nonsense and blatantly inflammatory things in ways that do often trigger responses. And that is very difficult to moderate without just banning people you find annoying.

I mean, I don't think it's that hard but I'm a broken record on the problem poster topic and still baffled why it's actually a challenge. There's not that many of them, a lot of them bailed of their own volition years ago when the politics megathreads got canned or became way less highstrung (myself included), and at this point if someone is still a consistent source of thread-locks enough that I notice them and remember their names as a lurker on most of the board I don't know why it's that hard to just say this particular person is someone we're better off without. 5 years ago me would almost certainly be in that category admittedly, but yeah. Broken record over here *shrug*

 BertBert wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

I don't want to trivialize the behavior, but one of the things that Dakka's rules, and moderators, allow pretty carte blanche on is the right to be supremely annoying. Outside of spam or completely off topic stuff, you can spout obvious nonsense and blatantly inflammatory things in ways that do often trigger responses. And that is very difficult to moderate without just banning people you find annoying.

And this is the crux of the issue. When you base your moderation on subjective concepts such as "annoying", it's near impossible to remain consistent. Yes, there are some rather obvious agitators around that could be easily identified and dealt with, but those aside it's all a matter of temperament. Just disallowing certain buzzwords would make things a little easier without changing their approach in a fundamental way.

Wargaming also attracts more than it's share of people that are very concrete, or black and white in their thinking. they expect rules to be clear, and that something 1/8" off the line from disallowed is completely fine. That's not how most people interact, and I do think that most of the really obnoxious posters I've seen in my time here have been people with very strong personality traits that make following vaguer social norms very difficult.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
I mean, I don't think it's that hard but I'm a broken record on the problem poster topic and still baffled why it's actually a challenge. There's not that many of them, a lot of them bailed of their own volition years ago when the politics megathreads got canned or became way less highstrung (myself included), and at this point if someone is still a consistent source of thread-locks enough that I notice them and remember their names as a lurker on most of the board I don't know why it's that hard to just say this particular person is someone we're better off without. 5 years ago me would almost certainly be in that category admittedly, but yeah. Broken record over here *shrug*

I think it's a combination of commitment to free speech ideals, a belief that all people can be rehabilitated, and a reluctance to use that level of authority. It's really hard to see how they're good for the community, although they do drive up post counts.

 Polonius wrote:
Good lord. My hot take on FSM is that if you have a strong opinion on them, I'm not listening to it.

Ironically, the topic would probably be less of a minefield if more people just decided not to engage it at all. A lot of topics would. I think a lot of 'strong opinions' on these goofier topics is the byproduct of certain people taking them way too seriously and getting way too worked up. They take something that should be a small one-two hour back and forth and turn it into a life or death struggle that is far more intense than it has any reason to be. If more people simply decided to not engage in a discussion they don't want to deal with (the only time I'm going to agree with the mods on that approach!) they would paradoxically not have to deal with the things they don't want to deal with.

I guess to put this more directly: what can anybody hope to add to a discussion about a stupid hoodie after the first hour or two?

Probably not much, but I think that we have to ask the question is kind of the problem. People don't let these things go easily and I think threads like this one come up because the topic usually doesn't resolve itself after a thread lock. It just sits and lingers until it comes up again. Which I think is unavoidable, but could be handled more tactfully than it is from a moderation perspective and more considerately from the POV of the average poster.

In a perfect world, maybe people would post about their views in ways that actually change how people think

I'd honestly settle for a so-so world where people post in a way that develops a topic rather than tries to shut it down. That would be nice

 Polonius wrote:

In a way, this post supports my point. Rather than engage in a nuanced distinction, the instinct is shut down the discussion, by pointing out that it is disruptive, or if that doesn't work, make it so disruptive that the people pointing out the issue are the problem.

Yes, because this is quite literally not the place for nuanced discussion. That was banned years ago when politics was banned from the OT. There are thousands of other places for you to discuss that. You are actively engaging in that same sort of bad faith arguments that you accuse others of using.

Is it a stupid policy for Dakka? I would say yes. There is a host of issues with just 40K and WHFB when it comes to issues of racism and sexism and I'm not referring to the community, I'm referring to the actual product. Nearly every single example of female characters within both settings was originally hyper-sexualized to a degree that is completely unacceptable in modern western society. That is all irrelevant. If the site owner and mod team decide that politics are a no go then they are no go. You can piss and moan about it or you can move on with your life.

Again, because apparently it needs to be spelled out for you. Nazism is EVIL. Racism is EVIL. Sexism is EVIL. No one is against you on that save a few nutters lurking in the shadows. When they surface, they should be banned.

trexmeyer wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

In a way, this post supports my point. Rather than engage in a nuanced distinction, the instinct is shut down the discussion, by pointing out that it is disruptive, or if that doesn't work, make it so disruptive that the people pointing out the issue are the problem.

Yes, because this is quite literally not the place for nuanced discussion. That was banned years ago when politics was banned from the OT. There are thousands of other places for you to discuss that. You are actively engaging in that same sort of bad faith arguments that you accuse others of using.

Is it a stupid policy for Dakka? I would say yes. There is a host of issues with just 40K and WHFB when it comes to issues of racism and sexism and I'm not referring to the community, I'm referring to the actual product. Nearly every single example of female characters within both settings was originally hyper-sexualized to a degree that is completely unacceptable in modern western society. That is all irrelevant. If the site owner and mod team decide that politics are a no go then they are no go. You can piss and moan about it or you can move on with your life.

Again, because apparently it needs to be spelled out for you. Nazism is EVIL. Racism is EVIL. Sexism is EVIL. No one is against you on that save a few nutters lurking in the shadows. When they surface, they should be banned.

I.... genuinely do not understand how even the most motivated reasoning can come up with that reaction to my post. I have literally said that I do not even think Dakka is doing anything wrong.

I appreciate that you've shown your true colors. You are either being willfully obtuse or much, much worse.

You accuse me of shutting down the discussion. I offer a defense and your response is, "Well, I don't know how I triggered that."

Really? Are you really going to play that game?

You accused me of being a fascist supporter and you are surprised I responded to you?

 Polonius wrote:

There is a very charming aspect to centrism in that they do see that people are rarely cartoonish in their views, and that political views, like anything else, can be nuanced...

This is actually quite a good illustration of the difficulty of discerning someone's political leanings from their behaviour online. In the past few weeks, I've had two separate posters accuse me of being inexcusably woke due to over-moderating right-wing posters, a post accusing me of being a Nazi sympathiser due to not doing enough to moderate right wing posters, and now a post labelling me a centrist for same.

 posermcbogus wrote:
I think maybe, and I'm sure I'm not alone here, that it might be an idea for the mods to have a more in-depth review of what they think of this, especially given the hard stance GW has taken lately, and with regards to being able to better identify dog-whistle signpost-y crap, and make it clear that racist exterminationist extremism is not something to be tolerated here.

It's something that we've discussed behind the scenes before, and in light of the current conversations and general state of the world is certainly something that is worth more discussion. The problem that is being highlighted here though isn't just that Nazis should be kicked out, but that some posters feel that more should be done about people they perceive as Nazi-adjacent... which is much more difficult to police effectively and fairly.

The other issue raised in here was about threads being 'allowed' to wander off topic, and in an ideal world that would certainly be watched over more closely... But it relies on posters doing the right thing and not continuing to respond to off-topic tangents. However large and active the moderation team is, they can't be watching every thread in real time. Hot button topics in particular can move very quickly, and if by the time a moderator sees a report people have dog-piled on each other for four pages, unless it's a really worthwhile topic of conversation there's a very good chance we're just going to lock it rather than work through multiple pages of people acting out to figure out how much of it needs to be deleted or who was actually responsible for the whole mess. So if you (general forum 'you', not anyone specifically) want to improve the chances of 'agitators' being dealt with effectively, stop spending multiple pages screaming at them and then complaining that the thread was locked. Report the problem post and leave it for us to deal with it instead of responding to it.

Note that the above is not intended to dismiss anyone's concerns with certain behaviours or attitudes. I absolutely understand why some posters in particular feel very strongly about this topic, and how that informs their reaction to perceived issues. But you can't fix those issues by calling people names and participating in the derailment of threads.

 insaniak wrote:
Note that the above is not intended to dismiss anyone's concerns with certain behaviours or attitudes. I absolutely understand why some posters in particular feel very strongly about this topic, and how that informs their reaction to perceived issues. But you can't fix those issues by calling people names and participating in the derailment of threads.

I took a look at the initial Spanish Tournament discussion, much of the early pages seem to discuss what symbols, exactly, were present (the consensus seems to be Franco era stuff), and how they would handle having to play such a player. Soon, several posters did weigh in very quickly to point out that they'd like to see all political shirts banned, specifically citing Che Guevara and Soviet symbols. Another poster flew in off the top rope making a bunch of straw man arguments and helpfully pointed out that maybe they should also ban Islamic clothing due to 9/11. Then some comments started to basically say, "hey, maybe defending this guy says something about you" Other posters kept repeatedly pointing out "communist countries killed lots of people too!" Some people pointed out that fascist overlap with BT, and that drew a slew of "now we're banning BT too!" type posts. One person asked why people keep bringing up communists, and the next response was "people keep calling everybody Nazis" even though nobody had (although the thread had been moderated, so maybe those posts were deleted). By page five people were openly citing Antifa as a hate group. One person pointed out that whaboutism is just being too intellectually weak to accept that, apparently, communists were bad too? I'm not sure I followed that one. Lots of people saying "People are calling me a Nazi," not a lot of actually, you know, calling anybody a Nazi, aside from the dude who showed up wearing a Franco shirt, who is apparently a known neo-fascist.

the thread is still up if anybody wants to check my work, but there were a LOT of people who seemed offended that only Nazi stuff is banned, some people with, let's just tactfully say "hardline" views of Islam and Antifa, an enormous amount of strawmen, and grandstanding, and an extremely high "complaining about accusations of being a Nazi" to "actual accusations of being a Nazi" ratio.

So, the thread was, in many ways, productive. I think there were some good points about how to handle it, what the responsibilities of the TO were, if a person who felt offended should concede rather than play. And then... a steady stream of derailment, virtually all from a position of at least mild sympathy towards Facism, either in it being singled out (even though the reasons are extremely obvious) or becaue there was a lot of concern about people just saying "you're a Nazi" when that, at least that I saw, didn't happen.

So, what I saw, at least in that thread, so a concerted effort to drown out discussion of if Wearing Fascist gear to a tournament is okay by swamping it with a referendum on, I guess, communist dictatorships. I think that if the efforts to derail conversations are so strongly one sided, and that derailment is allowed, than, the OP does have a point.

 RaptorusRex wrote:
Sufficient Velocity does just fine.

Go an express any non-left wing opinion at SV and see how far you get, but that's drifting way off topic, so I'll walk away from that...

 insaniak wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

There is a very charming aspect to centrism in that they do see that people are rarely cartoonish in their views, and that political views, like anything else, can be nuanced...

This is actually quite a good illustration of the difficulty of discerning someone's political leanings from their behaviour online. In the past few weeks, I've had two separate posters accuse me of being inexcusably woke due to over-moderating right-wing posters, a post accusing me of being a Nazi sympathiser due to not doing enough to moderate right wing posters, and now a post labelling me a centrist for same.

I should have been clearer. I wasn't really assessing you as being centrist, but rather stating that I think the ideal that both sides are closer, or have more in common, is a centrist one, as opposed to the more toxic views of the other extremes which tend to demonize their foes. It's a genuinely good thing, because humanizing people you disagree with is essential to working with them. The flip side to that is to understand that the worst evils done, in any society, at any time, weren't done only by the monsters. They were mostly done by normal people who just accepted it.

 RaptorusRex wrote:
But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

Do keep in mind that this whole kerfuffle began when a certain member of Dakka - one who seems to see imaginary Nazis everywhere he goes - ended his post with "Sent to a journalist". That's basically a threat against the website as a whole; "Enact my will, or I will make this into a bigger deal!". That's one step away from "I will contact your employer!".

That's attempting to gain a position of power to dictate moderation. And it's a very dangerous one.

 posermcbogus wrote:
Nazis are awful, and no one should put up with them trying to colonize their hobby space. IDK why this is so hard for some of you.

I tend to think the numbers of actual problematic Nazis are small, like, next to none, and the number of people who get labelled Nazis for simply disagreeing with a particular viewpoint is far greater. Ironically, it's become a way of dehumanising people by some.

I'm happy to say "Nazis are bad, lets not support Nazis", but I become cautious when we start talking about how we should deal with Nazis because of how easily someone can become labelled as one.

I think the smarter approach is to address behaviours and actions, rather than trying to address Nazis and then trying to figure out who is a Nazi.

Im not sure if im adding much but.
Over the past couple of years, alot of geek spaces have come to be known to be outright hostile to anyone that isnt, well, a Cis/Het/Male.
Its been swept under the rug for quite too long. And the reason alot of us, including me, are passionate is because we want to enjoy the hobby too, but when people who are outright hostle to you existence and want you dead are given the ability to participate in it aswell and are allowed to express their views,it becomes unappealing to be in the hobby.
and with the radicalization pipeline in full effect, mods have to be very vigilant IMO of spotting these people pretty fast and banning.

I hardly ever see people labelled as nazis on this board.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

Do keep in mind that this whole kerfuffle began when a certain member of Dakka - one who seems to see imaginary Nazis everywhere he goes - ended his post with "Sent to a journalist". That's basically a threat against the website as a whole; "Enact my will, or I will make this into a bigger deal!". That's one step away from "I will contact your employer!".

That's attempting to gain a position of power to dictate moderation. And it's a very dangerous one.

Glad I wasn't the only one that noticed that


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
Formosa, it is 10:43 at night here. So I'm tired, and I think you're acting childish. But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

I'm talking to the members, not the mods, also this isn't power dynamics 101, I have a voice and as long as I adhere to the rules I can use it, not everything is about "power" old chap.

 Formosa wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
But what position of power do you have to dictate moderation? None. You can only suggest. Same as the rest of us.

Do keep in mind that this whole kerfuffle began when a certain member of Dakka - one who seems to see imaginary Nazis everywhere he goes - ended his post with "Sent to a journalist". That's basically a threat against the website as a whole; "Enact my will, or I will make this into a bigger deal!". That's one step away from "I will contact your employer!".

That's attempting to gain a position of power to dictate moderation. And it's a very dangerous one.

Glad I wasn't the only one that noticed that

I'm surprised the thread didn't just get locked and deleted at that point, and a message to the OP sent saying if any journalists want a discussion with the administration team they're welcome to contact them directly, but the opinions of posters within the forum does not represent the stance of the site administrators any more than an anonymous youtube video represents the stance of google.