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I agree that if this was to be enforced, this is the most light handed and respectful way of doing so. But that's not the topic of my contention. Which pertains to the impetus of the request, especially in light of the moderator comment accompanying it:
Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?
The mod position here is, in my view, just nonsensical. You can be a nazi and argue for the destruction of European jewry, just don't wear the armband when talking about cryptocurrency? Not because nazis are banned... Just because... We don't like people labeling themselves... Even though that's what people have been doing for years...
My point here, if no other, would be that this is an inequal application of the ruleset. You can carry banners, like people have done, you can have your pet issues and mini crusades, like people do, but if your banner is a Swaztika, and if your pet issue is the jews, the mods take extra notice. Compared to topics like, for example, AI, which suffer from all the same issues, there is no similar action.
So, my question following that would be: Why? Why the disparate application of rules? The mods will say something along the lines of 'too much heat' or something else. And my question would be, for who? Who can't handle WotanWolf1488 talking about the housing crisis in Belgium? Who are these users perusing this webspace that need to be protected from '1488'?
In all honesty I don't think they exist. It's just mod bias. They have an aesthetic preference for American 1990's era decorum. There's no justification for it other than that.
Violence. You're describing a violent ideology. David Lane and Adolf Hitler encouraged (understatement...) the assassination of their political opponents. "Not killing people you disagree with" is a pretty good social norm. Its benefits are self-evident: I don't want to disagree with people who advocate for it! Anyone who disagrees with it should be shunned and removed from any discussion space.
I'm not. Or at least I'm not holding them to a different standard I would hold for anyone that supports, for example, Western hegemony in whatever ideological form it expresses itself. The ideological pretense of peace, freedom and democracy didn't save any of the victims of US foreign policy. No matter how much it was repeated in Western propaganda.
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(Former bigdickpepe1488 here.)
Many ideologies advocate violence. Should we also ban usernames such as "bigtitsactblue" or "BLMPawg" on the grounds that the mainstream American left has actual literal militias threatening political opponents with violence and murdering people in the past few years?
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1592288152471109633?cxt=HHwWgoDUwe3o-JgsAAAA https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1592073976180019200?cxt=HHwWgMDU5ZO2l5gsAAAA https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/17/blm-louisville-defends-bailing-out-activist-assass/ https://fox11online.com/on-fox-11/pofficers-shot-at-protest-in-dallas-reports
Amusingly, the perpetrator of the one recent attempt at right wing violence also has the flag of leftist militias on his house.
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This is not a coherent concept. All ideologies, including presumably yours and the one that rules the West, are violent by your standard except radical pacifism.
All you're really doing here is unprincipled exception because you see some ideologies are especially repugnant, which is a wholly moral and hence aesthetic statement.
I think the idea is that the Holocaust has permanently tainted Nazi ideology in anglosphere eyes.
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If a poster can't name himself for people who assassinated their opponents, you'd be complaining about a lot more than Hitler. Even if you restricted it to people responsible for a lot of innocent deaths, you'd be complaining about a lot more than Hitler.
OK, can you name people as notorious for doing assassinations and causing deaths as those two, that it would be acceptable to support?
Hitler isn't really famous for assassinations in the first place, but let's try Stalin or Mao. Che Guevara only killed a few hundred, but you'd think that's enough.
Supporting Stalin, Mao, or Che would be a ban on sight from any site I moderate, and a lot of my local (one-hop federating) Mastodon instances also ban tankies on sight. Unfortunately there are a lot of idiots that support that stuff out there. But, like, fair example.
Can you link your mastodon instance?
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I don't see a lot of Che/Stalin/Mao usernames around here either.
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You have some grounds on principle but there also should be some level "obnoxiously poor taste" filter. This is a forum that values the ability for diverse perspectives to come forward productively and attempts to not censor for viewpoint, it is not an absolutist free speech platform. There are probably effortful and yet still glaringly pro nazi usernames that I would be very willing to defend. BigDickPepe1488 is not that username. It is a name that can only be constructed to be maximally obnoxious to some group of people, and the standard here is no more obnoxious than necessary. Being maximally obnoxious to people does not add to the ability for diverse perspectives to come together productively.
I don't disagree, I just don't like people maintaining the pretense of objectivity when it comes to rules and mods when that is simply not the case. And the case is instead that we are collectively adhering to some boomer social justice aesthetics that demonize a 100-year-old political figure ahead of everything else because we've seen a lot about that guy on TV.
It just seems so absurd in relation to how much people like chastising 'conservatism' for being 'progressive-liberalism just 10 years out of date' when the majority of people seem content to play by the exact same 'conservative' ruleset when they are in power.
The Motte, AKA Conservareddit. 10 years out of date.
For what it's worth, I've never claimed our rules are objective. I don't think rules of this sort even can be purely objective, barring someone building a text-parsing AI and defining the rules in terms of the text-parsing AI.
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Okay then, tell us why we shouldn't demonize Hitler? Because even eliding over things like the Holocaust or the near-conquest of Europe, if you take the most overly-charitable view of Hitler, all you see is a guy who riled people up, picked fights his country couldn't and shouldn't have, and then proceeded to lose so badly that he didn't even have the courage to face his people about the loss, let alone the wrath of two superpowers coming to tear down his government.
If anything, even National Socialists wouldn't (and didn't) want to identify with a loser, and there are indeed few things as bad as being seen as the loser by history. Even Confederacy aesthetics and revanchism from American Southerners is pitiable by comparison--Nazis only have copium.
Because Hitler was fighting for a truth that would in the long run reduce the amount of human suffering by a magnitude far greater than anything that has come after him.
That's not the most charitable view of Hitler. I am sure you can steelman Hitler better than that.
Why? Most National Socialists I know identify a great deal with flawed figures like Hitler and Goebbels.
Is this just 'boo outgroup' or were you trying to make a point? Because if you are trying to make a point it's not very salient considering all the losers of wars. I mean, I find the struggle of jews during the war far more pitiable than anything else. According to them they just lined themselves up to a slaughter house that was staffed by other jews who participated directly in slaughtering their co-ethnics because they thought it would buy them life. That's a level far lower than Hitler and friends banding together to fight those they think are their enemies to their dying breath in the name of their co-ethnics. You can argue that the result was the same but in that case I'd say that the option Hitler took displayed far superior moral character.
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To be fair, yes the Nazis lost, but they also won a lot. People are good at ignoring or rationalising the bad parts as long as the good ones are memorable enough.
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This seems like quite a thing to draw out of not wanting our standards for discourse to include blatant and known trolling names. Objective isn't the right word for what the moderation of this place is going for, which is consistently content neutral but tone policing. No one accidentally names themselves "BigDickPepe1488", I'd go even further than the moderators here in saying that the "BigDickPepe" portion itself ought to be disallowed but I have idiosyncratic feelings about the range of usernames that make me cringe which include many of the ones at use here.
No, actually I think we have pretty good reasons to dislike that political figure. Feel free to make an effort post if you think our opinions on him are wrong and blue pilled. But that's not even what is at issue here, we have rules about being unnecessarily obnoxious that such a name trivially violates, if it helps to appeal to equal treatment something like KillAllChristians would also deserve to be moderated.
I must have missed it 10 years ago when Hitler references were really big with the red tribe and blue tribe was barely censoring them.
It's not.
That's not the case. From Amadan:
Mods are not content neutral.
And we have a pretty good reason to dislike Genghis Khan, that doesn't mean we place him as a central figure for our moral compass. Nor do we constantly fret about potential Mongol hordes when someone erects a gigantic statue of the guy in Mongolia. In fact, most users have pretty good reasons to dislike what they dislike. But that's not the point. The point is that some likes and dislikes are more equal than others because of mod subjectivity.
You don't actually have specific rules on this, as the mods have said. What you feel deserves to be moderated has no relevance to anything since you are not a mod and the mods apply their rules subjectively. And though I am sure the mods would step in for something obvious like that, it's not the point. The point was that when there is ambiguity, the rulings are not consistent.
You are missing the point. The reason why so many lament 'conservatism' and label it as being '10 years out of date liberals' is not primarily because of the content of their beliefs. It's because of where these beliefs come from. It's because of the 'conservatives' complete lack of contextual awareness and understanding. These 'conservatives' don't know where their views come from or why. They don't see themselves as the end result of the culture wars of the generations that came before. They instead see themselves as being stalwarts in an ongoing battle that they are genuinely fighting to win. Instead of recognizing that all of their firmly held beliefs are just the undertow of those who are actually in charge. And that their 'conservative' inheritance is just the white flag of their predecessors.
We have specific rules, just not an exhaustive list of ways to break them. No stealing is a specific rule even if it doesn't explicitly state all the possible methods of theft.
I think maybe you're harboring the false belief that this is intended to be a conservative forum. It is intended to be a be a forum that takes all and encourages difficult conversations. In practice as conservatives lack many options for these conversations there ends up being many conservatives and conversations involving conservatives. But the fundamental values of wanting conversations like this are liberal.
In the same way that 'Don't piss off the admin' is a specific rule but not really. The actual rule is 'no symbolism or possibly implied meaning relating to sexism, racism, homophobia, or transphobia, and especially not any sort of neo-nazism in usernames'. But saying that doesn't meet the aesthetic preference of the mods. Kind of like how many 'conservatives' would say that they don't have a problem with gays getting married 'since the state shouldn't be involved in such affairs anyway'. Instead of just saying 'Yes, I support gay rights'.
The criticism of 'conservatism' I was referencing was referenced precisely because so many people who use this webspace levy it against 'conservatives', or are at least aware of it, when the topic comes up. I mentioned this because the same lamentable lack of self-awareness and context is just that no matter where it expresses itself.
I don't understand why you think I am harboring in a false belief about this webspace. The point was not that its users hold 'conservative' opinions. The point was that the mods are engaging in the pattern of behavior that, in a different context, many recognize to be lamentable.
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I think the mods are hoping to attract more people and seeing obvious references to Nazism detracts from that objective
If that's the case, why don't they say that? Just be open about the angle of the slippery slope we are going to be sliding on.
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Because Adolf Hitler was the greatest enemy of white people in all history, anyone who cares about "continued existence of white people" should condemn him ten times stronger than mainstream normie history does.
Because one nazi attracts another, and mods do not want this site to become nazi sewer, more than enough of such places on the internets.
Those alleged fact is irrelevant to the context of the argument. It's not the job of the mods to enforce that everyone subscribe to the 'correct' theory of white supremacy.
If the nazis follow the rules as they are enforced on everyone else, why would this place become a sewer?
Because people coming here will see discussions full of people named like "WolfLair1488" "AuschwitzOvenMaster" "ShowerHead88" "ZyklonFan" etc... and give this place wide berth.
There are many nazi places on the world wide web, there is no need for one more, while this site is supposed to be unique.
That's wrong. Read the thread.
You are not allowed to talk about how much you love gassing jews, you are not allowed to discuss things in a vulgar way if you are not making a point with it. But you are allowed to talk about and advocate for National Socialism and White nationalism.
This place would be far more unique if it did allow those kinds of names, given the fact that the number of places and the number of places that matter that ban such names dwarfs those who don't.
But that's neither here nor there.
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Part of the rules is that the more controversial the statement, the more supporting thought needs to go into defending it. "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
Having a username state a partisan and inflammatory statement is the opposite of proactively providing evidence for it. It's just a username, it's not a complete argument that people can respond to and tear apart. It's a way to shit post.
...
I shouldn't need to say anything else but in the spirit of clarity: A point I made some effort in making was that the ruleset was not applied equally. And that the mods are just enforcing their own bias when attributing 'inflammation' and 'partisanship'. This bias is not in line with any objective reason or knowledge. It's just the social justice of the 1990's, as advertised on TV. I don't see why, when not beholden to reddit, the mods enforce that everyone be beholden to their partisan view of the world.
What stance do you think I hold, based on the tagline, that would qualify as partisan or inflammatory? We have several people here who could probably be described as such, from atheists who meditate for 4 hours a day to full blown Catholic monarchists. I am neither, but it amuses me to describe myself this way.
Calling yourself a reactionary means a lot of things to a lot of different people and it would get you banned in a lot of places. Same with traditionalism.
So it's just a shit post that doesn't subjectively irk the mods as much.
The comment you replied to was making the point that the ruleset was not objective. That it was instead just the mod team asserting their aesthetic preference. The mods have now said exactly that. You are just wrong in your prior assertion about the rules.
You still didn't call out a single stance that I hold which can be gleaned by the tagline. "Reactionary" just means someone who believes that, for at least one topic, some group in the past did things slightly better than they way they are now. The definition of the word itself is anodyne.
For example, the thing I am most reactionary about is that I believe we did a lot of child-rearing better in the past. We've slaughtered nature and kept kids in an electronic bubble, preventing them from calming down or encountering something transcendent. More kids have never existed due to car seat regulations than lives saved by car seat regulations.. Parents used to be able to send small children to be entertained by groups of other small children, playfully existing outside while the mother did economically useful tasks, such as textile production and food processing. Instead, we have created a system that maximally stresses out parents while preventing kids from thriving.
Were you able to guess any of that by my tagline? Meanwhile, the username with 1488 in it tells me the poster is arguing when creating their username some variation of "the Holocaust didn't really happen the way people think, but the Jews deserved it anyways." There isn't really a wide range of possibilities there.
My tagline is not, "Repeal Car Seat Regulations." That would be myself making a provocative argument in a place people wouldn't be able to counter-argue.
I don't think the Mods said exactly that they are "asserting their aesthetic preference." That is not in the mod chain I can see at least. Ctrl+F "aesthetic" doesn't come up with any hits. Instead, it looks like you are badly misinterpreting them.
Reactionary means what I as a pretend mod believe it to mean. Just like the mods here believe that the 88 in 1488 stands for Heil Hitler and not the 88 Precepts. There is nothing viscerally objectionable to either. You can argue, like I tried, that there exists ample wiggle room in both 14 and 88 for it not to mean what you assert it must. But those arguments were not had and simply ignored in favor of mod subjectivity. Which, in your case, would be something along the lines of 'misogynist incel wants to chain women to the home'. It's not fun when your positions are reduced from their actual state to something along the lines of
But that's what we have from more people than just the mods, I guess.
What you are doing here is exactly what I was trying to do when I asked the mods to clarify their ruling. The mods did not clarify the ruling on the terms of my arguments. They just told me to stick a sock in it. If you want a genuine response from me, as a pretend mod, to all the stuff you wrote its: lmao, banned.
To give a copy paste response to what I got, just with changed labels:
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I didn't say that they said that. I said that this is what they are doing. What they said is what is quoted above. I'd appreciate you extend some charity in interpretation here. If you can't understand what I mean by 'aesthetic' you can just ask. The reason I used that term is because the mods have no way of knowing what the person intends, nor what the effect the persons actions will have. What they do know, however, is that they want their website to look like something. And, as we can tell by their actions, that something doesn't look like 1488 regardless of any argument made or reason given. It's not about the content, it's about the look and feel. It's not based on reason; it's based on subjective preference.
You can argue that there can be value in the choice regardless of that, and I'd agree. But that's not relevant to the contention being made.
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