I’m going to start off by agreeing with this as written before reiterating my problem with it in practice.
I actually do read, or rather used to read, another forum that has an almost “anything goes” philosophy and lets people openly advocate, e.g., that some races are biologically inferior, and other extreme-right positions (along with extreme-left positions and everything else). It’s a disaster. There’s certain things that you just can’t allow without the board just being overtaken by them. That board doesn’t have a “free exchange of ideas” nor can it even sustain threads on topics that should have nothing to do with race or politics, because once you let people respond to every topic under the sun with “I guess the reason I can’t find an XBox for sale is our Jewish overlords are telling the blacks to steal them all” then the kind of people who find doing so amusing will do it thousands of times. As a result, whatever value I may have found in some older version of that forum is long gone. It’s totally unusable both because of the volume of extremist bullshit and the feedback loop formed by driving away people who don’t want to deal with that kind of thing.
I have no problem with banning that kind of outright racism from this board if it wants to be healthy in the long term. What the people in this thread who do have a problem with the premise are trying to communicate is: We can’t allow a small, vocal faction of unreasonable, disingenuous, hard-left ideologues to define what is “racism” or “conservative” if we are going to ban “racism” or “conservatism” from the board.
I’ll excerpt a post I made in ATMB recently:
Things I have been called a racist for advocating on the board:
*It’s a good policy to forfeit high school football games to punish players for assaulting referees.
*Children are better off when raised by two parents.
*Cartoonists have a free speech right to draw images of Mohammed without being murdered.
*The behavior of an Arab Muslim from Syria is not a good example of “white pathology.”
*School boards in Virginia should follow the law governing magnet school admissions procedures.
*Selective schools in general should not use race as a factor in admissions.
*Advanced students should be able to take calculus in high school.
*Certain decisions about the math curriculum made by the school board in Vancouver (a city with effectively 0 black residents) are not correct.
*Medicare for All would increase wait times for care.
The theme is: anything that dissents from a narrow window of views between Joseph Stalin and Bernie Sanders is conservative and racist, there is no reason anyone would hold said views without being conservative and racist, there is no need to engage the people who hold those views honestly since they’re all conservative and racist, and for good measure, stuff that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with politics at all like the football thread will also be taken over by people accusing those who disagree of being racist, because for some people that’s the only way they can express disagreement about anything.
Again, you can have a forum where about 90% of American opinion is banned, and you can even claim, within that forum, to have at least two subfora dedicated to “good faith debate,” but what you can’t do is prevent the average person from seeing how silly that is or stop the effects it is continuing to have on the existence of a minimum viable population of board posters.