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Half a dozen kids beating up another kid in the playground. Happens every day for two weeks. Principle decides that they can stop all of these disturbances by just dispelling the one kid getting beat up. After all, that's less disruptive than dispelling six kids, or seven.
If you're aware of the pattern and the community it leaves you with after pursuing it iteratively for years, and are accepting that intentionally as still the best solution to a hard problem, fine.
If you're not aware of it and the community it produces, you kind of need to be.
Not sure how far this metaphor stretches.
Some degree of roughhousing is expected here. But once one kid pulls a knife, nothing good will come of it. So the school policy punishes knife-wielding harder than it punishes fistfights, even though the most desperate kid probably isn’t the one who started it.
That’s melodramatic, but I’m trying to distinguish between choosing to punish the one student because it’s easier and choosing it because it’s fair. Yes, the student is denied his great equalizer, because the world where everyone pulls a knife is worse.
I don’t like it either, recognizing the perverse incentives. My consolation is that the bullies don’t have a great track record with knives, even when they aren’t being threatened. That gives me some hope that the system will continue to select for a better community in the long run.
The point is that one side has disseminated rulebreaking, because there are a lot of them. Hlynka had concentrated rulebreaking, because there was one of him. Take the bottom percentile of shitty posts distributed across a dozen people and always direct them towards Hlynka. If he were to respond in kind, he'd eventually eat a permaban while the others would take a day here or there.
I've studiously ignored every single one of the threads he would get involved in, so you and the other mods know the situation much better than me. That being said, the forum is a worse place without Hlynka. This is how you end up with conformity and groupthink even with neutral and fairly-applied rules.
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