This one requires a bit of background.:
Hexbears keep opening the_dunk_tank posts about our mods and our instance in violation of their own comm rules. That compels me to go in them and try to correct the bad faith disinformation being peddled about us.
In one such thread one commenter made a reply to me ending it with “disengage”, which was a clear indication they didn’t want to engage in discussion any more, which I respected.
Note that there’s no indication of how disengagement works in any sidebars. And even their own Code of Conduct, merely states:
So it appeared to me this is how it works.
Later in the thread, someone kept making bad faith replies and at some point I thought, “I’ll just use this handy disengage rule to avoid being further provoked”. So I did, at which point I was gleefully and summarily banned by the mod with the following comment, to which I couldn’t respond anymore of course.
Now I knew already that plenty of hexbears had a grudge against me for rejecting “left unity”, so they were just looking for an excuse to get rid of me, they finally found enough of a plausible gotcha and all they could think of for the reason was “liberal”. Note that the first person “abusing the disengage rule” was never banned or affected in any way.
Ultimately this led me to being banned from hexbear itself, but that’s a post for another day.
So what do you think? Am I "liberal "enough to deserve a ban for “abusing” an unwritten disengage rule. Power trippin’ mod or nah?
Everything you just said about me was quoted completely out of context, but of course it would be. At least this time you can’t go and remove my comments when I explain my position.
Context One of our users had been reported by a hexbear user for “homophobia” for what seemed to me at the time, a pretty innocuous statement. Here’s what OP had written:
I mean, not to directly play devil’s advocate but I heard plenty of the ‘that’s so gay’ stuff in high school and even then it was commonly understood to mean silly and stupid (ethics of this not discussed here). If you were actually gay no one gave a shit. Are you 100% sure it’s your sexuality they were talking about? Or is that something you assumed because you were self-conscious of it? I am not advocating for either way or saying it wasn’t done in hate, I just want to make sure you’re not putting yourself through undue hardship. [OG post by a dbzer0 user that was reported for homophobia]
Having reviewed the comment thread after a report of homophobia, my stated position was as follows:
It seems to be, as a gay person myself, that this is a perfectly reasonable take and not homophobic at all. He points out the common use of the word ‘gay’ in a common usage in high school. He doesn’t try to justify it ethically, just observes that it occurs, and asks if perhaps the common use of ‘gay’ as a general pejorative may have been the case here, instead of a direct comment on a person’s sexual orientation. So, it seems to me that the one example you provided is by no means a clear example of anything, except perhaps of hexbear users immediately making bad faith assumptions about users not from their instance. […]
I’ll point out here that I at no point argued that it was ok to use the term “gay” as a pejorative, and neither did the user who was reported as being homophobic. It seemed to me the user was simply pointing out that the term is unfortunately in common use as a pejorative, especially in a high school situation, and is often applied to people anyone and everyone, regardless of whether they are gay or not. And looking at their post history, there was absolutely no indication they were homophobic in previous comments, and in fact it indicated the complete opposite. Where the evidence points to a bad-faith interpretation of a user’s comments (as in this example) then we will generally give the user the benefit of the doubt. Again, I don’t apologize for that approach. Serious accusations require substantive evidence, and I found no substance to this report.
In this particular example, the hexbear user chose to “disengage” from the conversation (a classic hit and run job), and so my comment was removed by a hexbear mod, removing any context from the discussion. So, I’m now apparently considered by some hexbear users to be “a homophic mod, hiding behind being gay”, in large part because any contextual information was immediately removed, and I was almost immediately perma-banned (subsequently changed to a temp-ban).
And ever since, I’m branded as homophobic gay man by hexbear trolls everywhere, because haters gotta hate I guess?
Edit: had extended quotes too far