EDIT: Two responses from admins who dishonestly reframed the events of my ban and apparently refuse to explain it. Apparently “long time users” get different treatment.
EDIT2: The reason was finally given that “Have you stopped beating your wife?” in response to someone trying to put words in your mouth and ask loaded questions is a banworthy set of words. Incredible I know.
I would like explanation for the thinking that led to me being recently banned and branded a racist.
I was randomly attacked by a bad faith troll who later let slip that she was bearing a grudge based on some other encounter from 8 months ago. The attack consisted of an attempt to paint me as a racist for this simple and honest reading error.
I am a principled Marxist Leninist, active in real life and any reading of my contributions will support this and refute this slur on my character.
I can, at most, stretch to forgiving the ridiculous idea that I was the one being “toxic” here, and not simply holding up a mirror to the toxicity of the troll who attacked me for an innocent mistake, fantasised about me doing hypothetical racist things, asked me loaded questions and tried to put words in my mouth to fool credulous onlookers.
What I cannot ever accept is the allegation that I somehow engaged in “racism” anywhere in this interchange or in any of my other comments in the years I’ve participated on here. I deserve an explanation as to what you think you saw as racist in any of my comments.
I expect a complete apology, a clearing of my name and censure against my attacker and abuser. Those involved shamed themselves with their actions. You have an opportunity to make amends and undo that injustice you’ve inflicted.
I run a large ML forum with weekly views of tens of thousands and I recognise exactly the temptations you’ve allowed yourselves to succumb to of abusing your power for a false sense of righteousness based on petty bullying and unfair treatment. I know that I’m not the only one who’s been a victim of this on lemmygrad.
The contributors to this forum deserve better moderation and better judgement from the admins in general. The current process of banning people without right of reply is abusive and dishonourable. That can be a separate discussion.
Thanks for the post. I appreciate the effort that it must have taken. This will be my last comment on the matter as I don’t have any expectation anymore of a fair hearing. If I’ve come across as cranky and self righteous in this thread, well that’s because I’m righteously aggrieved.
The fact that the only responses before yours were completely unable to justify my treatment without lies of omission and dishonest reframings of a very simple cut and dried short thread tells the whole story. In the end the given reason for my ban was for using a phrase to defend myself. A phrase that others, including you agree is commonplace. Me being labelled a racist without basis and told to “eat soft shit” is still unaddressed. This type of abuse is allowed apparently and tacitly endorsed by you.
Now I’m given a convoluted, contrived “threefold” excuse for a ban, that adds ableism and some kind of English speaking chauvinism to the other already dismissed baseless idpol based attacks, racism and transphobia. We’ve come a long way from sequences of misinterpreted characters. I guess homophobia or misogyny were too awkward to shoehorn in too?
Obviously the only other people in the thread who are going to chime in are just there to get their own boot in and join in the kicking of someone who was attacked, because it’s easy prey. Like I said before it’s simply Just World/Victim Blaming mindset. I’ve no doubt that many others are looking on in disbelief at what’s gone on here. In the original thread someone has a deleted comment that I assume is pointing out that the phrase I was banned for was innocuous in itself. That they felt the need to then delete their own comment is telling.
There’s nothing that could have been said to me that you couldn’t just ignore or make light of as you so chose. Which is why I picked that title for this post. No level of abuse, “eat soft shit” etc… Now it’s not even my words that are being used to hang me, it’s daydreams about possible motivations and … hey I don’t really care anymore.
I’ll leave some advice before I go about community building and how you should learn from this.
When you have a collection of generally well meaning people and you have a small number of those with power over them, these incidents are inevitable. Eventually as there’s nothing real to police, people are just going to magnify and find new things to be falsely self-righteous about. Standards are elastic and applied selectively. Rules are made up on the spot, the cop mentality of circling the wagons and protecting each other from revolts are a timeless classic of all fora.
Now I don’t in principle have an issue with the “heavy handed” moderation, but it needs to have trustworthy people with cool heads doing it. And it needs to be reasonably consistent. What are you even trying to achieve with your ban-first policy? What is the purpose of these bans? Punishment? Deterrence? This is just another reddit clone, except this time the people being harassed are comrades. You’ve corralled a large number of ML and adjacents into one panopticon that you’d expect would be a paradise of teaching and learning, but you have powers over people and those buttons aren’t going to push themselves. Instead of policing real wreckers, trolls and idiots, you’re finding minuscule issues like this one with which to feel smugly superior. I know exactly the temptation. I could go on at length on this topic. The skills needed to build a healthy community are not the same skills needed to understand theory, and not the same as the skills needed to run and maintain websites. You have something rotten in your admin culture. You have nothing original in this website. All of reddit’s issues have been ported wholesale to here. Mods as eternal royalty with no oversight of their abuses. Admins roam the halls looking for random tone to police, and purity breathalysing discussions. I can give you examples but you know this already. This project will fail if you continue with this behaviour. The Matthew Miller treatment from people appealing their bans… Again I could go on for pages about the issues you have. People will get sick of it soon enough while you play choosing beggars for good contributors. We’re here for the Yogthos posts and the odd interesting snippet of theory from someone you’ll probably attack and drive away after some time.
The golden days of ML r/genzhou of the past few years is gone and this is a very poor imitation. The serious problem of open (and underground) paedophilia that’s tolerated here (while simple expressions are banworthy) is a disgrace. There are multiple instances of this. This is my attacker fantasising about sex acts with fourteen year olds who can’t consent. Insert your own alternative descriptions. Does their sensitivity about their cartoon sexualised kids make more sense now? They clearly had me tagged and decided to try to set a trap and do some perfomative outrage that you fell for. You can pretend that you weren’t aware of this and the other instances of child pornography on the site. The fact that adult porn is banned here, even feminist porn, and this (that they openly admit to viewing as porn) is allowed, is nothing short of shocking. It’s potentially very damaging to lemmygrad. I know admins have seen their bio with a little girl putting something in her mouth and orgasming. It’s an entire genre, “ahegao face”. So there’s a serious cultural issue going on in general. Nobody, male, female, trans either gets to indulge in paedophile fantasies on even the shittiest of web fora. Get your shit together.
I was going to make another post about this so we could have a big discussion but I don’t trust you enough to allow it. It will be interesting to see how you deal with this, since we know how low your bar is for bans. It’s important that you deal with it openly in the light because I’ll need to approach it from another angle if you try to cover it up. It needs to be dealt with appropriately and comprehensively. It’s not even your only major issue. You should add a feminist onto the admin team. No, a real one.
You can ban me now if you like, or I’ll delete my account in a couple of days, just to give you the right of reply that you denied me.
