What would make you more sure? What more do you feel needed to be seen from Starving Artist in order to give him a fair chance?
Starving Artist spent a great deal of time and effort around here making himself pretty much universally despised. I don’t see what’s “mob rule vibe” about multiple expressions of approval when a universally despised poster finally gets banned.
If you believe he was banned due to mob rule, then I’m guessing you don’t see the misogyny.
We are thanking the mods for removing a blight upon our community that made a lot of us uncomfortable. He didn’t make you uncomfortable, or make you feel like a wiser choice would be “leave” rather than “stay.”
Oh, I don’t know, perhaps a statement from the mods along the lines of “quit wasting your time with calling for some posters’ banning, if you have a problem, report it and we’ll decide, but we don’t ban people due to popular demand” (if that’s actually true) or perhaps better yet, a rule against advocating for the banning of posters, possibly outside of particular forums (just spitballing ideas here).
It just seems a little unseemly to have various posters of a particular political persuasion cry out with various forms of “ban him” against a poster of another political persuasion, and then the mods come along a couple of days later and do choose to ban him. Doesn’t look good for the cameras.
He wasn’t banned because of his political affiliation. He was banned because his attitude toward women.
Had a ‘liberal’ poster been spouting such misogynistic crap (and I am under no misapprehension: There are plenty of liberal arseholes out there too) I would duly call out their behaviour as well and would applaud their banning.
:dubious: “A couple of days later”? You’re new around here, comparatively, but posters have been repeatedly advocating Starving Artist’s banning since at least 2012, if not 2008.
A post by Mr. Svinlesha from that 2008 thread illustrates how persistently Starving Artist’s been using the same old deceptive gimmicks for a decade or more:
I confess that I had some concern before learning about the warnings. I can’t say I do now.
Not saying this is why he is banned. But if he was banned for being a shit debater while simultaneously trampling all over hot button issues connected with Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, then seeing him go doesn’t sound awful. Especially when he was given ample chance to present his case.
I’m not claiming that there’s been a shift in mod policy w.r.t SA. But it’s been becoming clear over the past few years that on the internet and after a certain point attention becomes a scarce resource. So if the board took a few baby steps in that direction, towards denying platform for certain views after a certain span of time, I don’t know whether I’d object. I would have 6 years ago. But that was then.
I’m not sure how you could make such a request if you have been paying any attention at all. We have said things along these lines many many times in this forum. We don’t ban people on the basis of their unpopularity, or how many times they have been Pitted. If we did so, Starving Artist would have been banned a decade ago. And quite a few other posters would have been banned a long time ago as well.
You seem to be under the false impression that extreme and offensive misogyny is a political persuasion.
Starving Artist was warned and suspended right away. Of course, when someone behaves in an extremely jerkish manner, people are likely to call for sanctions. Our decision was reached after several days of discussions,and our reasons are given in some detail in Jonathan Chance’s banning announcement. If you believe we are misrepresenting the process, I guess nothing I can say can persuade you otherwise. But we do not ban people just because other posters advocate it.
I think this might be described as SA’s William Orville Hicks moment. A shit-stirrer can get so caught up in the effort to keep their shit-stirring juuuuuust within the letter of the law that they forget that it’s nonetheless quite apparent that what they’re doing is stirring the shit.
But at some point, the authorities who are trying to promote something more constructive lose their patience with the constant stirring of the shit, and boot the shit-stirrer out.
Society is evolving towards more acceptance and inclusiveness of people who are not straight white males.
Way too many straight white males are fighting too hard to keep their #1 position thinking, wrongly, that if others become more equal to them they somehow diminish.
This is the opposite of reality.
When everyone is on an equal footing then society will become fuller and richer and an overall better place to exist in.
Each generation is becoming more tolerant of people different from themselves.
The older straight white males are not liking this change because it is different from how it was for them.
