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Notes -
Everyone kept saying that; it was never true.
I see how you would se e it that way, but surely you can see how "we have investigated ourselves, and found us free of any bias" might ring hollow to anyone on the outside.
I will say that there came a point where y'all got fed up with him, and it didn't take long for him to start stacking up bans after that.
Sure. People will believe what they want to believe. I've given up trying to convince anyone who goes on the "You're biased and you're too stupid/dishonest to acknowledge it" attack.
Come on, it's not an attack. Bias is not connected to being stupid, and while it's arguably a form of dishonesty, it requires more or less saintly levels of humility to grow past it, so it's unfair to expect anyone to be unbiased, and I never implied otherwise.
I do not think the mods were giving him a pass. I think he either had or developed a method of posting that was quite negative for the community, but very subtly so. It's one of the reasons I'm dedicating effort to actually arguing a position in detail in this thread, because what actually happened was much, much more complicated than "obviously bad poster gets away with it".
As someone unsympathetic to his general positions, it wasn't hard to pick up that something fucky was going on. But as I've mentioned elsewhere, I spent years, plural trying to have conversations with him, until I finally started getting a handle on how his schtick worked. It seems to me that the mods had a similar problem, and I really do think you need to understand what he's doing to mod him properly; otherwise, you're just banning a controversial but effortful poster because you don't like them, which is exactly the accusation being made here.
Yeah, maybe "bias" is the wrong for it. I can get on board with "there was fuckery afoot, that is hart to put one's finger on".
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