Ban politics from the discord

[69andahalf]

I've found from years of being an extremely online guy that rules like this rarely work out and become more of a bludgeon people use to shut down discussions they don't like.

I've been in discussions and communities where labeling things "politics"  is used as a bludgeon to silence people, especially non-normative folk whose entire lives have been forced into being political.

There is a certain degree of irony in claiming that rules banning political discussion are used to shut down discussions by "bludgeoning/silencing people" with them. You don't need rules to do this, specific members of the admin team have been doing this for a long, long time already by simply bullying anyone they don't agree with, be it political or otherwise. I'd say people could go check the admin complaint regarding this but, of course, the thread detailing these complaints has since been hidden away, so make of that what you will.

The fact of the matter is, no amount of mediation from the admin team will ever solve any problems, since they themselve are involved, as many of the community members have rightly pointed out. They're not above the same level of vitriol that they attempt to put themselves above. Most admins won't talk about it—and frankly I don't blame them—but they have all seen the extremely childish and bullying behaviour of specific members of the admin team in the admin channels. I'll not name names here, but I also raised these concerns to Popecrunch in a letter in March which I have never received a reply to.

There's a common trend in these threads where the admin team feigns ignorance of an issue and pretends it came out of the blue. Quite frankly, as you can see in what I have said above, not only has the issue of toxic political discussion been known for a long time, but also the impacts of personal attacks. They can claim it was a "failing" on their part that they'll rectify with new rules, but the fact of the matter is, this issue has been ignored for years.

Ask yourself this, why after all that has happened with admins leaving, are they just discovering that personal attacks should be banned? Everyone who left expressed the anger and frustration over personal attacks, but it was played off with, "Oh, we're an safe and welcoming community who doesn't support personal attacks. We'll just add a conflict resolution system and that will solve all our problems!" Sorry to say, but after years of the same people flinging the same shit without consequence, don't be surprised when people get sick of it. I don't blame the non-admins in this thread for not having a shred of faith that the admins would actually enforce any new rules they create that don't serve their own personal opinions.

I'd also like to touch on the idea that politics cannot be effectively banned in a community. Quite frankly, this is inherently bullshit (which, ironically, is used here to shut down the discussion of banning politics). I, too, have been part of many communities in my time and none have ever had as much issue with politics as Goonstation does.

The fact of the matter is that everyone who's not fresh off the turnip wagon fucking knows what a political discussion is. Hiding behind the idea that, "Oh, it's a slippery slope that might shut down important discussions!" is just a blatant lie and emblematic of the same willful ignorance that pervades the upper ranks of the admin team and their friends. They don't want to enforce it, because that would mean they'd also be held to those same standards. This is why these rules could never properly or fairly be enforced, because the people enforcing them are the same people who are causing the issue in the first place.

Don't let them lie and pretend this came out of nowhere, they've known about it for a long time.