Okay, so something totally different than what you said lol.

You’re welcome to dig up the actual statements and show them to me, to shed some more light. If you don’t feel like doing that, then I don’t feel like doing it on your behalf and we can conclude things there.

When did he say that? Are you sure he didn’t say some totally different and more sensible thing that you’re choosing to wildly exaggerate into that?

I can actually pretty much guarantee that that’s not what he said. I guess I missed some LW politics community drama that he was involved with, so sure maybe my side was wrong initially, but I’m pretty confident that particularly the second part of that is just some kind of trumped-up misinterpretation of what he actually said.

That’s very clearly a troll trying to make anyone who’s against .ml and friends look bad. I can’t tell if the cartoonish over-the-top way they’re doing it is a mistake, because a more subtle believable approach would have stirred the pot more effectively, or a wise decision because people are so simple-minded that they’ll take even that at face value.

Do you think this creates a good image for piefed and detractors of the ‘tankie troika’

I think it creates a bad image, I think that’s why they are doing it.

Let’s try this approach:

I certainly do not see enforcing a safe space as policing identity.

What’s an example I brought up about how Ada could have made the space safer, if only she wasn’t apparently hung up on pronouns as the one and only most critical thing that defines whether or not the space is safe?

Banning them for repeated invalidation of others’ identities is not policing their identity.

My example of gatekeeping actually had nothing to do with PJ (or, for that matter, with policing anyone’s identity specifically). What was the example?

I strongly dislike the “just asking questions” polite veneer of your comments while very intentionally dodging the elephant in the room, which is that the user did wrong for the space they were in, regardless if you agree or not.

Way up at the beginning of the conversation when I brought up a couple of examples (my opinion, for whatever it’s worth, for what the “right way” or an alternative way would have been to approach this whole situation and enforce the rules of the community), did it include PJ getting banned and anyone else who didn’t do the pronouns in the approved way getting banned? What was the critical difference in the two ways of approaching it I modeled (was it banned vs. not banned, or was it something different)?

I’m pretty surprised it’s that low.

Nope, try again. If you want to summarize what I’m claiming is the real issue a little more accurately to anything I actually said, I’d be happy to continue the conversation if you want.

If you genuinely believe they’re the same thing, you’ve got a lot of work to do.

Okey dokey.

This is what I was talking about: You’re taking the role of a teacher talking to a thick or disobedient student, instead of just us having a conversation. I do take that tone too sometimes, but usually it’s when I’m being sarcastic or jerky about something on purpose. It’s not actually how I look at my role vs. the other person in the conversation. This is like I said why I think the “privileged user who tells other users what to do” role is a toxic thing that Lemmy creates for certain people in the interactions.

I feel like I explained pretty clearly what in my opinion the issue is, and you’re just reiterating your favored definitions for all of these words (ignoring anything I had to say about the validity) and again how things really operate… which, okay. I feel like there’s not a lot of point in going back and forth about it, you can just read again the message you just replied to, if you want my answer about this stuff.

The absolutely constant use of the terminology of “misgendering,” “gatekeeping other people’s identities,” “causing deliberate harm,” and things like that, as opposed to “yes you have a point and you don’t seem to be intending harm BUT…” is what makes it different. You can look around the thread and see some examples.

Like I say, I think we’re just not going to see eye to eye on it, which is okay.

I did it again, typed a bunch of tit-for-tat stuff and then deleted it. Here’s my attempt to get to the heart of the matter (partially from elsewhere in this thread):

If blahaj admins would just be straight-up about it, and say “Listen. This dragon person is clearly a troll, and we’re banning them for that reason, but we don’t want to allow people to decide pronouns on a case-by-case basis. In this case, the rule produces a stupid result, but that’s the rule we settled on and we have good reasons not to bend it in any circumstance or have to have long debates about this stuff every week, so please respect it or we will ban you,” I don’t think there would be any kind of issue. That’s a decent and human-to-human interaction that gets across the point and still respects the good reasons for the rule. To me (and maybe you may disagree with this), it seemed like instead of that they said “HOW DARE YOU MISGENDER THIS PERSON YOU TRANSPHOBIA ADJACENT BIGOT” and then went on to (as in the current post) continue to whine about how horrible it was that anyone was trying to point out that (a) the user in question was clearly a transphobic troll (b) blahaj going to bat for them was ridiculous. And, you still constantly talk about how those people were wrong, and bigoted, and shouldn’t be talking that way even off the blahaj instance.

Same for banning PJ. It would be fine if you said “He was kind of pushy about trying to make his point and although he clearly wasn’t coming from any hostile place, we tried explaining the rules and he kept doing it, so we banned him.” But no. It’s “repeatedly and deliberately doing harm,” complaining about him trying to justify himself off-instance after the ban like he is required to just shut up and take it instead of voicing his side of the story, “positioning themselves as the arbiter of other folks validity and identity,” all this apocalyptic stuff.

I mean… aren’t you positioning yourself as the arbiter of other folks’ validity and identity? You positioned yourself as the protector of LGBTQ+ people but you have no problem booting them from your space if they don’t adhere to your precise details of what that means. (Like, for example, protecting the space from obviously-transphobic trolls, I feel like some of them would think you should be proactive about.) When you boot them for not adhering to that, isn’t that… gatekeeping? Or no?

I think we’re probably just not going to see eye to eye on this. I specifically didn’t want to get dragged into this whole tarpit of tribal bitterness, but then I waded into it deliberately on purpose, so that’s on me I guess.

I actually wrote and then just deleted some stuff, because what’s the point. I feel like I’ve said what I had to say on it and you have a differing point of view. All good. I’ll leave only the thing I think gets to the heart of it:

If blahaj admins would just be straight-up about it, and say “Listen. This dragon person is clearly a troll, and we’re banning them for that reason, but we don’t want to allow people to decide pronouns on a case-by-case basis. In this case, the rule produces a stupid result, but that’s the rule we settled on and we have good reasons not to bend it in any circumstance or have to have long debates about this stuff every week, so please respect it or we will ban you,” I don’t think there would be any kind of issue. That’s a decent and human-to-human way of defining the interaction that gets across the point and still respects their good reasons for the rule. To me (and maybe you may disagree with this), it seemed like instead of that they said “HOW DARE YOU MISGENDER THIS PERSON YOU TRANSPHOBIA ADJACENT BIGOT” and then went on to (as in the current post) continue to whine about how horrible it was that anyone was trying to point out that (a) the user in question was clearly a transphobic troll (b) going to bat for them was ridiculous. And, they constantly talk about how those people were wrong, and bigoted, and shouldn’t be talking that way even off the blahaj instance.

That’s my take on it, I don’t think I want to go back and forth about it much much more, you’re welcome to the final word if you like.

Fair enough, but it’s just not impacting blahaj users. It’s not like a private forum on a server somewhere. You’re participating in a big intertwined network, but then reserving the right to run some sections of it according to these super-strict (and to me pretty arbitrary) rules, and so you’re winding up with a situation where blahaj people can talk to off-blahaj people, on some blahaj community, and some off-blahaj person can see it and respond reasonably and then get attacked, falsely accused of being transphobic, and then have it escalate into this thing where (for example, in this exact post) they’re getting kicked off being allowed to run their own forums on some whole different instance, because now they’re officially “bad” with the way they violated the dictates of the blahaj lords as part of the evidence.

If blahaj was its own private area, then sure. “Only come here if you’re okay with the rules.” That makes sense. But they’re participating in a shared network, storing their messages on other people’s servers, having posts replicated into random other sections for random people to see them, but then retreating to the “but this part of the space is MINE!” standpoint when anyone tries to raise any kind of objection to how they set up the rules for it. And also leveling this bigotry accusation if anyone doesn’t obey how they want the interaction to go.

Lol

Because I explain the reasons for what I think, and then people can decide for themselves whether it makes sense. I don’t really have to be anybody (and, indeed, I am not) for it to sway people.

There’s a whole other contingent that likes to fall back on “but I am (this identity)!” or “well I’m the moderator of (wherever)” to justify their stuff. Or, like this person, just AHAHAHAHAHA instead of reasons. I like my way better.

Because Americans are louder and tend not to confine their activities to the country-specific forums

IDK man. If your hardware doesn’t work on the stock kernels + firmware + etc, I don’t feel like it’s the distro makers’ problem to make some extra changes to try to make it work.

If they want to to make a smoother experience for their users (which is a common Ubuntu thing), then great. But they’re not “supposed” to.

Yes. That’s one of the problems with the “I am lord and master of this domain, and all will obey me and my nutty definitions of words like ‘transphobia’ into some wild alternate reality” model. Human interaction doesn’t need to work that way, even if it gets more comfortable when you’re aligned with the lord and master to do it that way.

Personally I think that two things are going on here: One, the whole Lemmy model where people are divided into the lords who must be obeyed no matter how arbitrary their rules, and the people who must obey, breeds and normalizes some toxic models of interaction. And, two, basically 100% of Lemmy is already queer-friendly and trans-friendly, and so an instance that wants to “stand out” as a particularly queer-friendly instance has to keep ratcheting up the level of overt queer-friendliness of the rules of their instance until they’re again in a position of giving other people a hard time for not being queer-friendly enough. And so the inevitable conclusion is that the rules have to include things like “dragon is a gender!” and “questioning certain things I say is transphobia even when it’s not!”

Like I say, in my opinion, the whole thing is fuckin’ ridiculous. I have heard the same from queer people who have been drummed out of blahaj for exactly the same reasons (basically, having and stating opinions that aren’t the official lord-and-master opinion.) In my opinion that makes for a bad model for an instance. It’s got nothing to do with the identity of the people who are making the rules that way for the instance, it has to do with the nature of the interactions that it causes.

You’re welcome to your opinion.

People are allowed to argue on the internet, no?

We seem to have moved the goalsposts from “he’s abusive” to “he was banned from blahaj which as everyone knows means he definitely actually did something” to “he argues about politics how dare.”

“When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” -Tim Snyder

For as much as I respect Snyder I don’t think that’s actually true. People fighting for our own freedom against the US government has been a very frequent feature of US history. But, something has definitely come when we reach that point, yes.

edit: goodness, that’s a long reply and from just skimming the start of it, it seems you went to a lot of trouble to make a strawman. Too bad I ain’t reading allat, you take care now.

Apology accepted, you too

Look below, we’re discussing it with links and examples. Maybe “harassing” is a stretch, but they’re definitely singling him out for insults, accusations, and moderator actions in a way that to me is wildly un-called for.