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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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I was calling out the problem with the following assertion:

Can you tell me what views you think have been banned?

Namely that if someone believes that a given view is inexpressible without a ban, they are not going to express that view if they don't want to be banned.

As such "no-one has told us that a view has been banned" is irrelevant, as it would be true regardless of if there were any such views (people who don't care about being banned notwithstanding).

And as such your response of "Can you tell me what views you think have been banned?" was disingenuous at best.


For the record there are views that I self-censor here, generally because of the following pattern-match:

[post that gives apparently-valid reasoning leading to a conclusion]
[ban post whose justification appears to be that the conclusion is consensus building of a view, completely ignoring that the reasoning exists]

...from which my takeaway can only be to avoid the particular topic altogether if I do not wish to be banned.

Bonus points if the original post was upvoted and the ban post was downvoted, as - for so long as the site keeps them aggregated and anonymous at least - this is one of the few ways that people can express that a ban wasn't the right call that doesn't result in bringing unnecessary mod attention upon themselves in turn. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down and all that.

[For the record: I am being vague, as I will not state said views, because I do not wish to be banned for stating them.]

And as such your response of "Can you tell me what views you think have been banned?" was disingenuous at best

No, you're being disingenuous. I will explain, though I'm clearly indulging you too much already since you are going in circles.

Let's suppose you're right and there's a "banned view." I assume you comprehend the use/mention distinction. So expressing the banned view would get you banned, but I am telling you directly that "I think expressing < view> has been forbidden" is not a statement that will get you banned, no matter what "< view> " is. For example, I did recently ban someone for suggesting a politician should be assassinated. Fedposting is what you might call a "banned view," but if you asked me about it ("Can I propose assassinating public figures?") I will tell you no but I will not ban you for asking the question.

Your "pattern matching" appears to miss the point of why people get banned. Just to use a few examples: people are allowed to talk about how blacks have lower IQs and criminal tendencies and to suggest that a fucntional black civilization is impossible. People are not allowed to just call blacks animals. If your "valid reasoning" (about black IQs and history) leads to "Therefore we should not coexist with blacks because they're savages", yes, that's a boo outgroup and a broad generalization

Same deal with "Jews history conflict insular clannish blah blah blah" -> Jews bad (all of them).

Note that you could still explicitly ask about any of those topics. ("Can I explain why the Holocaust is a hoax?" "Yes ." "Can I call Jews an inimical parasitical species who are the enemies of all non Jews?" "No." "Can I talk about how much I hate libs?" "If you can stick to specific groups and actions, not just Libs Bad.")

Bluntly, I think you know this and your fear of banning for speaking the double-secret banned topic is performative and fake. You just know what you want to say (probably some variation of "Fuck my enemies") won't be allowed. You claim to sincerely believe there is some view so banned that if you told me what it is, I would immediately ban you for saying it (and that I'm lying when I say I wouldn't.)

I don't believe you actually believe this. There is no Voldemort topic and you know it.

Up/downvotes mean very little in this context. People love "Fuck my enemies" posts, and they do not like when someone who posted a real ripper gets banned. When I warn or ban someone for making inflammatory generalizations about a commonly despised outgroup, I know my mod post will be downvoted. Most people are not principled and I've come to terms with that.

I've indulged you this long because you aroused my curiosity; I am always fascinated when people assert clearly counterfactual things about how they think the mods think. But since you're apparently just going to keep pretending there's some super-duper-secret extra-forbidden topic you can't even type for fear of getting banned, okay, carry on.