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Notes -
You misunderstand me if you think I'm interested in rules lawyering. What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order. So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.
The commitment is to the foundation:
The rules are crafted in service of that, moderation is conducted with it mind, and where the rules and the foundation might seem to conflict, the foundation trumps.
I mean, one of the very first rules is "be kind," so banishing assholes is definitely also rules-based. Of course the rules are not self-enforcing and the mod team is not a calculator, we aren't always perfectly predictable and we aren't always right. But the vast majority of our users seem to get on just fine. In general if it looks like you're even trying to follow the rules, you'll be fine. It's the people that go looking for just how far they can go without getting banned, who tend to be the biggest problem.
In principle, it's fine to ask questions about the rules, and discuss them when it seems warranted to do so. But in practice, the vast majority of the time I get questions about the rules, it is from people who are looking for ways around the foundation itself, rather than ways to understand and follow the rules better. (Weirdly, it's also almost always from people who are obsessed with Jews for some reason, including one particularly persistent troll who has rolled literally dozens of alts at this point--like, think of the good such a person could do if they directed their efforts toward literally anything else! But this just seems to be an all-too-predictable symptom of the age.)
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