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.
The post in question.
I clicked into this thread on a whim. I don’t know you or anyone involved in that thread. I don’t know anything about the substance of the original topic in that thread. What I see in that thread begins with you posting an aggressive, insulting reply to the original post. The OP replied to you in a neutral and reasonable tone disagreeing with your initial accusation. Your next response is what got removed, and from what I can see here, it was once again an inflammatory and disproportionate escalation. Yes, I’m familiar with the expression you used. No, I don’t believe you intended it to be taken strictly literally. No, I also don’t believe you chose that specific expression without the intent to escalate and provoke. It is only after your comments that earned you a ban that I see anyone engaging with you in an adversarial way.
What I see from you in this thread is an unwillingness to self-reflect and an absence of humility. You seem to demand that everyone evaluate your words based on how you claim to have intended them, but evaluate everyone else’s words based on perceived slights as only you infer them. Anyone whose review of that facts fails to align with your subjective personal experience is immediately accused by you of engaging in an intentionally dishonest conspiracy against you for some unknowable reason.
Again, I don’t know you, I’m not invested in this, and I don’t intend to engage with you about it. I would encourage someone in your position to take a break and reflect on what about your recent behavior might be causing everyone I see in this thread and the linked thread to have the same shared negative experience interacting with you.
An offhand remark mocking redditors? Come on. You’re coming in and seeing what you want to see. That comment is perfectly normal.
This is where you show yourself up. She attacked me, completely out of nowhere, that’s what happened. You show your lack of honesty here. It’s very hard to take you seriously now. This is where anyone discussing this falls down. Nobody is willing to be honest about this part. Two admins tried to lie about it and skip over it as if it didn’t happen, it’s the exact crux of the issue. You just tried to paint over it as a neutral and reasonable tone. You’re insulting my, and all other readers’ intelligence with this shameless lying. Do you think anyone is really fooled by this?
I’ve read through this and the other thread.
The issue in the original thread is that you said something insensitive about someone who is clearly writing English as a second language, mixing multiple languages, or is perhaps dyslexic. It’s not mere misspellings in the screenshot. It seems to be an obvious mixture of two languages or unrecognisable misspellings.
We know it’s the former, now. From the context that was always more likely. The OP spoke of the screenshot as if it was intelligible, suggesting the unknown words were knowable to someone familiar with at least one of the regions in question.
Saying anything negative about either ESL-English or dyslexia, etc, is going to rile people up. Given how clear it was one of these options, it’s easy to understand why someone who spotted the ESL factor would respond to you with the implications of what you said. If someone would make such a comment about someone mixing two given languages, would they also mock other aspects of other languages or uses of English? The user responding to you was probably upset that you would comment on the language at all, and subsequently followed the logic through in their response. From that perspective, they weren’t loaded questions. The questions followed directly from your words.
Your response may be a common response to someone asking loaded questions. I’ve heard the phrase before. The problem is threefold. First, the response to you about other foreign languages written in the alphabet was almost certainly not loaded questioning (or trolling), for the reasons above.
Second, following from the first, your idiomatic response reads as doubling down on the message in your first comment, reinforcing it and it’s problems.
Third, you can’t expect international or ESL speakers to understand idioms and phrases like the one you used. Such words will be read literally. And the literal reading of the phrase you used doesn’t sound great. Assuming that English speakers from around the globe will understand idioms that are well known but mainly to native speakers of a particular location will lead to miscommunications like this one.
Then to the point about racism. If someone has interpreted the initial exchange as I’ve sketched above, what other conclusion are they to draw? You made a comment about the English skills of an international or ESL speaker, albeit framed as website-specific but that seems irrelevant. That comes off as racist. (If not that, then an insensitive comment about someone who may be dyslexic, which is not racism but ableism.)Then you gave the impression of doubling down on your initial message rather than reflecting on it’s real implications.
I don’t think you’ll like this interpretation but it and others’ responses flow from that first comment you made about the language in the screenshot.
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.
You know you are allowed to just delete your account or not come back after a ban.
I also fail to see how you did not have the right to reply, you have just thrown a massive tantrum, a reply one might say, and you where allowed to do it, an admin has not come here to remove or ban or even so much as supress a single one of your comments
second I fail to see the relivence of the feminim comment are you saying none of the admin understand feminism? what is your evidence for this? is this Marxist Feminism or Liberal Feminism?
Just about to. Thought I’d try to help you improve before I do.
I was banned for weeks remember? Even shit sites like reddit gives you a chance to respond and plead your case. Do you honestly, with all the knee-jerk bans you enforce, think you’re never wrong?
I am impressed with this, it’s honestly better than I expected.
The fact that there was a popular post on here with multiple people fantasising about sex with underage girls is a real cultural problem you have here. Anime is a hive of these people and you need to clamp down on it. This entire thing is rooted in one paedophile bearing a grudge about their underage porn being criticised. Cartoon or not, this is a very real problem. It’s illegal in Japan to produce, distribute, and possess porn with actual children, but unfortunately there are no such laws that apply to cartoons. This is the origin of much of these tiny girl/massive boobs porn. It’s not cute, it’s sick and has actual damaging consequenses in the real world. It should not be normalised. It’s full of excuse making tropes like “she only looks like a child but she’s ackshually totally hundreds of years old!”. The genre has long had a problematic relationship with not only gender and racial representations but specifically the sexualisation of minors. Sometimes this is something annoying but relatively minor like revealing costumes or ridiculous boob jiggles, while other times it’s something more actively harmful, like adults preying on minors or stories that treat sexual assault as funny or romantic.
If you take nothing else away from this then start thinking about what is going on with lemmygrad and its “I can’t believe it’s not porn”, porn.
Oh fuck off and delete your account already, save us the click. I told you several times we don’t delete comments or ban and you insulted me over it every chance you got by convincing yourself I was trying to threaten you or ban you, and the moment you realize people aren’t following along in your attempts to wreck this community you change your discourse completely.
Go back to reddit you’ll fit better there. Bye.