Sure. But claiming he was never under attack is just as ridiculous.

The guy accused me of trying to find his personal information and said the police were monitoring the liberals on webdip for trying to hunt him down.

The guy is a fucking lunatic and does not deserve respect equal to everyone else on this site.

Nothing can excuse bad behavior, I agree. As Eden said on a previous page though it doesn't excuse folks who antagonized him. Both sides are to blame, obviously. Kansas, sorry that it came to this. As a Conservative on this website you have to be very careful.

Boohoohoo

why Is everyone so polarized on this issue?
A privately owned organization made a decision to disallow a patron based on their behavior. If this were a restaurant or a store this would be a non-issue with no after thought.

@bo: I'm not attacking the mod team or y'all's decision. I expressed my surprise that nothing else happened, that's not a criticism of what was done. I think not silencing was appropriate.


"The guy is a fucking lunatic and does not deserve respect equal to everyone else on this site."

There's an important distinction not being made here. You don't have to respect someone or what they say to abide by the forum's rules and ideal of creating a discussion area where people can hold civil debates over controversial subjects.
I lost respect for the snowflake hypocrisy that Fluminator pointed out earlier in the thread.
But despite thinking the combination of thin-skinned behavior and antagonism wasn't respectable, I didn't seek to provoke the guy. People can claim it's because of political bias, as bb already did, but take Ogion as a left-wing example and you'll see that I don't provoke or attack him. If I see him saying something ludicrous in the forum, and feel like responding, I call him out for it and debate him, but I don't harass him or start threads to mock him. It's certainly not out of respect for Ogion's behavior, which I routinely find absolutely repugnant, but rather for the decorum that the moderators and admins want on the forum, and in the interest of keeping conversations as reasonable and civil as possible.
I think this is how you're supposed to handle people as volatile as KB. You don't go out of your way to provoke him as people did, and it's not out of respect for them specifically, but out of respect for the values of this community, chief among which is supposed to be an attempt at reasoned and civil discourse.

I think we as a community failed to live up to these values in the sum of our interactions with KB. I think he didn't make things easy on us to live up to them, but I also think that doesn't really matter... it's on US to be better and live up to our values, not anybody else.
Hence I support Octavious's initial sentiment: the ban was warranted and the result of KB's own actions, but we could have done better to uphold our goal of reasoned and civil discourse in our collective interactions with him.

No offence, Condescension, but I wouldn't put it past you. You do kinda' come off as one of those rabid anarcho-communist antifa types.

"why Is everyone so polarized on this issue?
A privately owned organization made a decision to disallow a patron based on their behavior. If this were a restaurant or a store this would be a non-issue with no after thought."

That's easy. We have a forum that explicitly seeks to foster civilized and reasonable discussion. This particular user failed to do this in a multitude of interactions, and got banned. That's not the part that's causing discussion.
What's causing discussion is that a lot of those interactions were two-way failures, and some posters in this thread are okay with that, because KB expressed conservative views and was an asshole about it.
The split is between people who acknowledge that there were two-way failures and want our community to do better, and people who are fine with those failures because KB was a conservative asshole.

That was actually a very reasonable response President Eden. I have no argument there. I think I find myself caught between my morale responsibility to stand up for people and my ethics which defend a business owners right to do as they please within the confines of the law. Maybe it would smart for the moderator team to go and put a punishment on those who antagonized him? Maybe a points fine? Or a temporary silence?

I think a retroactive punishment wouldn't really do any good. I am also skeptical of having to involve the moderators further, as I can only imagine they've done more than their fair share of playing "parent" in adjudicating arguments and disagreements involving KB, and doubtless been subject to unfair vitriol from KB himself.

Let's just try to be better in the future, that's all I would really ask. Doesn't matter their political preferences or how nice they are, we can all be respectful and maintain an environment of civilized discussion.

To be banned for spoken word on a diplomacy site when the whole purpose is to use words to battle others regardless if they are truth or a lie is a bit strange to me.

Can someone be banned for using the chainsaw strategy inside the game. Or it is only against the rules to use it on the forum. Either way if that guy stayed, there would be a chance to repair what was broken and we would have one diplomat more. Maybe banning for a day or a week would be better thing to do. That way punishment could have chance to influence him and perhaps make him learn something.

Plus ça change.

He was harassing users via private messages, out of game.

Again, the mute button was created for a reason.

Sometimes a pre-emptive mute against repeat offenders is warranted. Why make everyone else learn the hard way when one person is the problem?

What a ridiculous solution. So he's allowed to privately and publicly harass people and your solution is to have the people he's verbally abusing mute him?

The burden of political correctness must always be placed squarely on the victims.

This mute button sidebar is an amusing look into the difference in outlook on forum decorum from the pre- and post- Wild West forum userbase.

I don't envy the mods' job on this front at all.

muting is so hard I know lol

When you mute people you often miss the contexts of threads, you miss the terrible things people might be saying about you, etc

Don't you want to miss the terrible things people are saying?

I agree about the thread context. That is the main reason why I don't mute people anymore, aside from just not feeling the need to do it.

I think its funny how certain individuals are, in effect, victim shaming. When a guy rapes a chick - its considered poor taste to claim the girl was "asking for it" because of her behaviour, clothing or whatever, but a FORUM nutcase troll can go to town, but its the fellow forum participants who brought it on.

Bad behaviour is bad behaviour - blaming other participants in threads for the offenders actions is BS.

I have to say one of the reasons I rarely participate in your forum discussions is the sheer number and noise level of sermons from the mount - all who are convinced they are right and everyone else wrong. Ogion is a prime example. In that atmosphere - fuck the forum I got better things to do.

But seriously, don't legitimise KansasBoyds action by blaming "baiters" its no different from any other kind of victim shaming.

Here endeth the sermon.

/me moonwalks out.

No. I would personally rather respond to the terrible things people might be saying about me.

Wusti, your comparison to rape is off-base because rape is a black-and-white action where there's a clear wrongdoer and victim.
This isn't the case here. No one has claimed that KB was an innocent victim and I believe everyone posting would consider him to be mostly at fault for the high number of incidents that occurred involving him. But he *was* also attacked by other users and that contributed to an environment of hostility which we want to avoid. All I and people arguing like me are saying is that it wasn't 100-0 KB's fault; more like 95-5 or 90-10, and that we should work to reduce that 5-10 to 0.

"Wusti, your comparison to rape is off-base because rape is a black-and-white action where there's a clear wrongdoer and victim."

You still voted for trump. Apparently it was a grey area

https://i.imgur.com/WKWoups.png

I'd probably say 60/40 but then I try to keep my nose clean and stay out of pointless drama, so my understanding of the specifics are pretty vague.

I have to say the moderation here is massively better than at playdip where the mods just kind of laugh at racists and homophobic slurs routinely

Demon, I understand that we have different viewpoints on forum decorum, and I respect where you're coming from and why you feel that way.

But how likely is it that you'll miss the context of many threads? How often did the krellins, KBs, and mapleleafs of the world actually contribute? And how often do they go on serious tirades against people who don't engage with them? For example, if Ogion never had an in depth discussion with KB, and never directly interacted them (but had KB muted), KB would've maybe taken shots at opinions he posted, but it would've never escalated into everything serious. Problem children need feedback to escalate. Sit them down in a room by themselves and they'll throw a quick temper tantrum and tire themselves out. Do you get what I'm saying? If you never interact with the troll, they'll never get angry enough to the point where they say terrible things with you.