To those who disagree with what gets a pass, and what does not, I think that this comment is the most important take away from this thread.
This is most definitely Morrus' party, and as the host he gets to set the rules.
I am troubled by the closing of responses to the News Digest by Abstruse
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To those who disagree with what gets a pass, and what does not, I think that this comment is the most important take away from this thread.
This is most definitely Morrus' party, and as the host he gets to set the rules.
No disagreement there. The disagreements are...
1. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but then hosts political content on a regular basis.
2. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but means "No Centrist or Conservative politics" as threads will be permitted to go hundreds of posts of left wing rhetoric and dogma without a single warning, ban, or lock. But one or two conservative/centrist statements and you're banned from the thread/forum, and the thread will get locked.
3. The site owner frequently claims that the goal of the site is inclusiveness, but then demonstrates otherwise when #2 happens, and when a portion of the users demonstrate extreme hostility towards everyone who isn't in the left wing politics camp without any moderation at all.
In short, the problem isn't that Morrus can run the site the way he chooses, the problem is that he makes claims to have certain policies and then holds only a portion of the community to the policies. If he actually held to "No politics" he'd have a couple dozen more perma-banned users than he does now. If he actually held to the rule I quoted earlier, and was actually trying to create an inclusive community, those same accounts would be gone.
Why do you think that the mods couldn't find links to that harassment thread on some "Bad sites" a few weeks ago when they were trying to figure out where the new accounts that seemed to be created only to post on that thread were coming from? It wasn't because 4chan or Reddit was trying to brigade ENWorld (Reddit didn't even get a thread until the ENWorld thread was days old and the mods had already been searching), it's because more and more people are realizing that this site is *highly* political and that Morrus is going to ban them from posting conservative/centrist opinions, so the existing users are starting to create sock puppets to absorb the bans.
If Morrus wants a left wing politics forum, that's his right, and I support it. But I will leave, and based on Gallup polls about political leanings it's a safe bet around 75% of the other users will as well. As I said, it's up to him, but the question that really needs answered right now is...
What's more important? Your politics or ENWorld being recognized and respected as an RPG/Tabletop news site. You don't get both. You can be a politically driven site, or you can be a site everyone respects and recognizes, but you cannot be both. Because if you choose to drive content by politics then you alienate everyone who holds different political opinions than you.
You say that as if it were a complaint or accusation. If you created a website, and moderated it, your site would have bias: your bias. Morrus created a website, and it has a bias: his bias.
Perhaps you might benefit from reading some conservative essays with the idea that the owner of property - whether that property is land, or a ship, or territory in cyberspace - decides what to do with that property. (Whether the government can sometimes intervene, is a question with many answers, depending on whether it's a republican government, an authoritarian government, or something else.) Morrus is the owner. You are not.
Hunh. I looked at "Find latest posts". It looks like you're here to do three things:
1. complain about left wing bias and exclusion of centrists
2. make "get woke go broke" arguments
3. every now and then, as a distant third to 1. and 2., you discuss games.
"Green Ronin is gone. They've just based their future on a political statement and in doing so, just tossed out the majority of their market. Anyone who is conservative is now gone, most males are gone, anyone who is deeply religious is now gone. For what? A meaningless political statement." - Rygar, a year ago. Meanwhile, only last month, Correia and his fans discussed how to harass Green Ronin at cons.
"So your call, are we going to eliminate harassment or microaggressions? Do you have a business plan for how conventions and RPG's survive after eliminating at least 50% of its consumers?" - Rygar, in Harassment
"Conventions and game shops are going to all belly up this year, because eliminating everyone but certain subsets of left wing politics isn't going to leave enough people to continue, but we can do that." - Rygar, in Harassment
"Comics sales tanked after going this route, I've seen figures as high as a 91% drop touted..." - Rygar, in Race thread
"The problem there is that beyond some relative simple and common rules, harassment policies generally end up being trivial to exploit for gain or a legal liability.
Since a lot of harassment uses a very loose definition of the term which gives advantage to the accuser, widespread implementation of these policies can and will end up being tools. Want to win the Magic/Pokémon/Board Game tournament? Have friends watch the competition and then accuse your greatest threat(s) of harassment. People cheat at these events *constantly*, this is a better tool than any other they can use today.
In a similar vein, these venues will risk being targets for lawsuits with today's loose definitions being used. What is termed harassment by many people on the internet is very different than what the law considers to be harassment. The Honey Badgers lawsuit is a good example. I doubt most conventions can survive more than two or three of these events."
So you're saying cons will go out of business because they have anti-harassment policies, right? Just like Marvel Comics, just like Green Ronin?
How close are you, Rygar, to frightening Morrus with predictions of economic doom?
1. The only political threads that don’t get closed ASAP are those that directly involve the hobby.
2. The only time conservative viewpoints get silenced is when they use the current insults du jour for those not as conservative as they are. If you don’t use the dog whistles, the mods won’t shut you down.
3. This is Karl Popper’s Tolerance Paradox. And basically, no group is required to be so tolerant as to be tolerant of everything.
CapnZapp
Legend
Wanting to run a gamer site free of right-wing politics is a completely natural thing.
Morrus owes you nothing. He needs to do nothing.
Allowing politics but cleaning out right-wing extremism (that goes under the deceptively neutral name "conservativism" in the US) is a perfectly reasonable stance to take that needs no elaboration.
Welcome to Europe.
Your repeated attempts to discredit inclusiveness and anti-harassment policies as politics are getting a bit tiresome. I need you to stop doing that.
I want to be clear. I’m not interested in political opinions; I don’t care who you voted for in your country; I am trying to maintain an inclusive community which doesn’t make women, people of colour, and other groups which are frequently discriminated against, feel unwelcome. I don’t want my fellow gamers coming to this site and seeing comments which belittle or exclude their identity. This is not politics, it’s human decency. If you are going to constantly continue to undermine those efforts, you’ll be asked to leave.
And this is not open to debate. This is an inclusive community. If you consider inclusiveness to be “politics” that’s on you.
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