I think that if you had you might not need clarification. But he was banned for trolling with his antisemitic views, not his antisemitism or anti-Israeli views themselves.
To get you started on the reading of the threads:
The banning for those statements quoted just seems way over the top. It is an opinion and not one just held by trolls at all.
We’re missing a racist troll… truly, it is a sad day.
Anybody who is reads for comprehension really shouldn’t have much of a problem figuring the issue out. It wasn’t even that Sevastopol was a racist against Jews or bigoted against Israelis, the board’s prohibitions against hate speech might as well not exist. It’s that he constantly trolled on those subjects. One has only to see his constant refrain whereby he claimed that those who disagreed with him were the ones who viewed Jews/Israelis as subhuman in order to understand why the Warnings, suspension and eventual banning took place. Rather obviously, Sevastopol was trolling in an attempt to get his racist/bigoted nonsense out there, and doing so in a smarmy, dishonest, inflammatory manner so that by merely disagreeing with him, you thereby must agree that Jews/Israelis are subhuman.
And on to specific nonsense:
No. Although people like to hop up on the cross, trolling isn’t allowed about other subjects, either. And you admit you don’t understand the context, don’t grok the semantic content of Sevastopol’s trolling, but you’d like to suggest that maybe there’s a double standard and let’s debate that.
Do you really not see the flaws in that reasoning?
Just as you seem to have not comprehended Sevastopol’s comments, you seem to have missed the semantic value of Alessan’s, too. His statement was simply that Isrealis tend to be distrustful of other nations and don’t place any value on the label “civilized nations” as that club includes more than a few that’ve got a bloody history where Jews are concerned. If you want to view that as “inflammatory” and “insulting”, you’re more than welcome to, but it’s rather obviously not trolling. That is why you don’t see an admonishment. Likewise, just because something annoys you is not grounds for a Warning. The fact that Sevastpol was engaging in racist/bigoted trolling, however, is.
No. But again, there is evidently a timeshare deal on crosses.
Please note that this is someone who was cautioned and warned and Warned and Suspended and then warned and Warned again on top of it.
For most people being told something needs correcting once is usually all it takes.
Formal warnings over an 18 month period:
Reason: Trolling
Reason: Failure to follow a moderator’s instructions
Reason: Trolling
Reason: Failure to follow a moderator’s instructions
Reason: Being a jerk
Reason: Failure to follow a moderator’s instructions
Suspension is normally the next to last stop on the ban bus. He kept riding until the end of the line.
“Israel is committing crimes against humanity” or “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is inhumane” are opinions held by lots of people. Sevastopol wasn’t banned for having those opinions. He was warned repeatedly for the way he expressed those opinions (and he said those kinds of things plenty of other times). Examples:
He wasn’t warned for that, but after I told him he needed to stop, he continued:
He was warned for that post. He was also warned for this post:
He got a mod note for this one:
Which is when I made the post Crazyhorse quoted. He then continued in the same vein and got a warning for this post:
And this one:
He was suspended shortly after that. I quoted his last two posts in the announcement thread, but you can see they’re the exact same kind of stuff:
Sevastopol’s usual defense for these posts was that he was just he was just illustrating that Israelis doing things other people were being allowed to do or being held to a lower standard. I didn’t believe that explanation and I don’t think most other people who read his posts on a regular basis believed it either. The comments were simply too inflammatory for me to find that plausible. If you read more of his posts, you see he was often injecting criticism of all Jews into threads about Israel. If he was really only making those comments as a rhetorical device, it would have been easy enough to stop doing it after he was repeatedly warned for it. He did not stop at all. You can see he was banned for posts that were exactly like the ones he was warned for previous. The reason he didn’t stop is that the comparisons of Israelis to animals and Judaism to an evil cult were the point of the posts, not a figure of speech.
Thank you for that response Marley and Tuba, paints a much better picture.
Meh, the banning he got over this one is as stupid as the one he recently got.
I dont share any of his views, but you can shit pretty much all day long on Palestinians or Arabs (or Iranians) here, in the same way he is supposed to have shitted on Israelis or Jews, and never get a warning or mod note for that.
I dont believe in shit contests, but if they are not to happen on the Dope, then the ammo has to be taken from all hands.
I certainly won’t miss Sevvy if for no other reason than I never got the sense he gave two shits about the Palestinians or their cause but simply supported them because their enemies were Jews or Israelis but I’ll agree with CZ that many people make similar comments all the time regarding Muslims or Arabs without receiving the kind of attention.
Also, I’ve never understood the board’s toleration of all the anti-black racists who constantly troll the board with claims that blacks are dumber than whites.
It’s hard to say since it’s pretty unusual for people to obsess over other groups the way people obsess over Israel and the Jews.
For example, is there anyone who constantly whines about US military support for the UK? Who constantly insinuates that people of British descent exercise undue influence over the US government? Who accuses Britain of “crimes against humanity” while ignoring far worse behavior by other countries? Who pretty clearly has a problem with British people of any citizenship?
Seems to me that such a person would be pretty quickly written off as insane. So it’s possible that in some ways there is actually more tolerance for criticism of Israel and the Jews than of other groups.
That was my impression as well. If he did care in the least about the Palestinian cause, he was incredibly blind to the damage caused to it by the sort of bigotry he espoused.
Those who argue for the Palestinians’ side should be profoundly grateful for his absence. I participate on debates on Israel/Palestine much less these days, but I’ll sort of miss Sevastopol’s unique brand of venomous lunacy.
Of course, I am compelled to tell you this by the Agency.*
If there are any posters gleefully engaging in comparable long-term bigoted nastiness under the guise of foreign or domestic policy concerns, I wouldn’t object to their receiving similar Board sanction. However I don’t think there are.
*a shadowy organization that Sevastopol once postulated as directing the comments of his adversaries in Dope threads about Israel.
We don’t usually consult very old warnings these days - and we didn’t do so here either - but this is a good illustration of what we’re talking about.
Ah yes, the good ol “it’s totally reasonable to want to destroy Judaism by fire, but that doesn’t much assist, wink wink, nudge nudge”. That belongs in Sev’s Greatest His.
Anyways:
I’m sure that the mods/admins can correct me, but the Warnings, suspension and banning weren’t really for hate speech. Hate speech here is amorphous and ephemeral, and almost never used as a metric. “Blacks are mentally and culturally inferior to whites”, while bigoted and disgusting, is not against the rules. “blacks are mentally and culturally inferior to whites, oh, and niggers.” would get someone Warned. (I think)
So Sev wasn’t shown the door for hating Jews or hating Israelis. He was shown the door for trolling. So “Islam is an awful religion and you can’t trust Muslims” would be idiotic bigotry, but not actionable. “The only reason you could possibly think that we shouldn’t exclude Muslims from public service is that you must figure that they’re both inherently morally defective but too stupid to act on their villainous nature. Otherwise, you’d agree with me that we need to keep them out of public service.” would be over the line.
And as Sev was almost a pathological liar when it came to issues of Jews, Judaism and Israel, I’d also doubt that he even believed most of the nonsense he was spewing, like about how Jews show their “evil cult” membership by spewing things that they know aren’t true, simply out of “Jewish solidarity.” It was pretty much just another attempt to troll Jews by calling them clannish, deceptive manipulators.
IMO.
I didn’t find Alessan’s comment off the wall because it’s true - at least, as far as history is concerned, and I thought that’s what he was getting at. Of course, if your modern-day interpretation of a ‘civilized nation’ is Gaza, well, it’s still true. People sometimes paint Israel as a bunch of barbarians who love to torture innocent civilized Palestinians for sport.
Plenty of racist and bigoted speech is tolerated. I HATE IT that you can say blacks are inferior, that Mexicans are lazy, that Muslims NEED to assimilate or else they’re being rude (or not American), etc.
Most of the time, you get a Warning yourself (well, I have for this) if you tell someone they are being anti-Semetic, racist, bigoted, etc. Even if they are. Even if it’s true. So no, I don’t see an Israel double-standard here. But since I’m Jewish, I’m sure my opinion will be taken with a grain of salt. 
I found that comment, out of curiosity.
If anyone suggests that Palestinians are “brute quadrupeds” who belong to an “evil cult” and that they should be “exterminated with fire,” I would hope that they would be banned quickly, a lot more quickly than the ~7 years it took to ban Sevastopol.
I’d be curious to see examples of this–particularly posted in the manner that Sevastopol tended to express his views. There are a lot of posters who are impassioned for or against Israel or Palestine, but I do not recall posts that simply referred to Palestinians as though they were vermin in the manner of Sevastopol’s comments about Israel or about Jews.
Actually, reviewing his last half dozen Warnings, he was never Warned for hate speech. His Warnings tended to follow the line where he would post off topic comments such as that Jews who were lying were acknowledging their Jewishness by telling lies. He would be told to stop that sort of trolling, then insist on repeating it and receive a Warning for ignoring Mod instructions. If you have instances where anyone has repeatedly claimed that Palestinians expressed their solidarity as a group by telling lies, I’d be interested in seeing them. (Heck, I’d be curious to see one instance.)
Most partisans in the Middle East debates focus on how they perceive “the other side” to be in violation of various laws, either international or natural, and how, in their opinions, the “bad guys” are lying about their true intentions. Identifying the side against which one posted as a group that should be wiped from the Earth or as people who explicitly lie in order to demonstrate solidarity with their evil cohort was pretty much unique to Sevastopol. And even then, he was not Modded for his statements, but for injecting them into threads where they could only be viewed as trolling or for continuing to repeat such claims after being told he was out of line.
Show me a violation of the rules, please. In other words, “Cite”?
In my observation, bigotry is tolerated here (barely, and only to the degree it should be, in the interest of ‘free speech, on OUR DAMN BOARD’, and no further). As long as you don’t go into trolling or hate speech, and back off immediately when a mod note comes down on you, thus avoiding “Ignoring Mod Instructions” as an offense because of your bigotry. The people you allude to (I can think of two user names off the top of my head) seem to be smart enough to do that, and back off when a mod note comes their way. Sevastopol wasn’t that smart. Hence, the “Banhammer”. I’m not seeing a problem with this ban. And if I were a mod, I wouldn’t ban the two I thought of, either.
As far as I know, there was really only one poster who did that, and he was recently banned.