# I am troubled by the closing of responses to the News Digest by Abstruse



## D1Tremere (May 24, 2018)

"I’m shutting down the comments here due to a few instances of different posters violating the Forum‘s Inclusiveness Rules." (Dannyalcatraz)
I find this response chilling in multiple ways. While I understand the need to promote inclusion, and to take a zero tolerance stand against trolls who promote discrimination, I do not believe that complete silencing of all discussion is the appropriate response to a complicated and important topic. It comes dangerously close to encouraging a divisive scheme in itself.


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## Umbran (May 25, 2018)

With respect, not all discussion was silenced.  Only discussion *in that thread*.  There's still a whole thread on Harrassment, that covers much the same territory, that is still open and has been for many, may, many pages.


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## Dannyalcatraz (May 25, 2018)

Did I use too big a hammer?  Perhaps.  But the thread was generating enough reports and was moving briskly enough that going case-by-case (my preferred method) would have been a bit like whack a mole.


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## lowkey13 (May 25, 2018)

*Deleted by user*


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## Umbran (May 25, 2018)

Well, it was open at the time I was writing. 

But, the other thread does make the point - there is a point where policing individuals becomes impractical, to the point of possibly being unfair to some of the people in the discussion - that's a point when it is sensible to close a discussion.


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## Rygar (May 25, 2018)

Umbran said:


> Well, it was open at the time I was writing.
> 
> But, the other thread does make the point - there is a point where policing individuals becomes impractical, to the point of possibly being unfair to some of the people in the discussion - that's a point when it is sensible to close a discussion.




That seems to me to be a very targeted and political decision.

The moderation here has a clear bias.  Look at the threads you're referencing.  The first one was closed because people were asserting that the event with Larry was wrong and supporting him, the second one was condemning him.  The first one had 20 posts over the course of two days, the second one had dozens.  The first one was quickly closed, the second one was allowed to stay open.  The difference between the two is that one was trending out of line with the politics of the site, the second was trending inline.  So was it that it was hard to police?

I'm struggling with that.  If the concern was policing people's posts, then why was the second thread allowed to stay open when someone started insinuating that anyone who didn't agree with their list of micro-aggressions was a sexual harasser?  Why was it allowed to stay open when the posters accused anyone who questioned the article of being sexual harassers?

For that matter...




> “Keep it inclusive: EN World is an inclusive community, and we encourage and welcome all people here. To that end, we strive to make it a welcoming place where nobody feels alienated because of who they are. You MAY NOT use the terms "agenda", "ideology", "politics", or "propaganda" in relation to the inclusion of people slightly different to you in gaming products or other media, use pejorative terms such as "social justice warrior" or "virtue signalling" to dismiss the opinions of those you disagree with, or post any message which is discriminatory towards those who differ to you in terms of skin colour, gender, gender identification, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, age, religion, or any other personal attribute. We do not subscribe to the argument that tolerance means that we need to tolerate intolerance or that inclusivity means that we need to include non-inclusiveness.”




Why is the list of criticisms for left wing politics banned on this site, but not a single solitary criticism of center or conservative politics banned?

Why does that rule say "or post any message which is discriminatory towards those who differ to you in terms of skin colour, gender, gender identification, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, age, religion, or any other personal attribute" when this site ran an article and kept a thread open for hundreds of posts based on a Tumblr article "Gaming has a white male terrorist problem"?  The whole sentence needs reworded so that it's clear the site's rule pertains only to non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual posters if that's the kind of site ENWorld wants to be.

Why is it that people can post endless far left political statements without any moderation, but the moment someone posts a Diversity and Comics link they get labelled "Alt-right" and kicked out?  Why doesn't anyone ever get labelled "Far left" and get kicked out when we get endless series of proclamations?

Right now, it looks like the moderation and rules are extremely biased and only people with centrist and conservative politics are subject to moderation, it looks like the "Rules" aren't even followed by the moderators since they don't apply them to condemnations of the "Right" targets.  If that's the kind of site that's wanted, that's fine.  I would strongly recommend renaming the site to "LWWord" or something along those lines to make it clear the content here is politically driven, and update the rules to reflect that.

Otherwise, I'd strongly recommend that the site change it's content and policies to make politics strictly off limits, all politics, including left wing politics.


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## Morrus (May 25, 2018)

I would say it's fair to say that if the inclusiveness stance that I take when running this site is not to your tastes, there may be other sites more suited to your liking. This forum is clearly and deliberately inclusive (and not in the Popper's Paradox sense). I don't think I've exactly been hiding that fact.


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## Eltab (May 25, 2018)

Morrus said:


> I would say it's fair to say that



If you were to add to your list of "moderator trigger terms" 
- 'racism'
- 'misogeny' (sp?)
- 'sexism'
along with 'social justice warriors' and 'virtue signaling', then you could shut off the things from both political sides that begin* the heated arguments.

You are compiling a body of data on the changes you made.  If it's not working out as you desired, you can tweak the rules again.

P.S. When the 'Harassment at Cons' thread turned away from trying to solve society's problems and looked at on-site actions that could/would help, it brought out helpful ideas.  It kept sliding back though.
Kudos to Umbran for trying to stay on top of it.

* in my experience; there may be other terms.


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## Morrus (May 25, 2018)

Eltab said:


> If you were to add to your list of "moderator trigger terms"
> - 'racism'
> - 'misogeny' (sp?)
> - 'sexism'




If I were trying to arm racists, sexists, and misogynists, I’d do exactly that. But I’m not.


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## Umbran (May 25, 2018)

Rygar said:


> That seems to me to be a very targeted and political decision.




In the sense that it is intended for forward some agenda related to government?  Not in the slightest.  I am not of the opinion that what happens on this website has any impact on real politics.  I am approaching it in terms of keeping the site operating smoothly.



> Why is the list of criticisms for left wing politics banned on this site, but not a single solitary criticism of center or conservative politics banned?




Because, ultimately, it isn't actually about politics.  It is about people being safe when engaging in our shared fandoms.



			
				Rygar said:
			
		

> I would strongly recommend renaming the site to "LWWord" or something along those lines to make it clear the content here is politically driven...




Let us have a reality check on this.  

The current incarnation of the boards has some 7,172,000+ posts on it.  The thread in question has rather shy of 1400 posts.

In that sense, that thread is about _two hundredths of one percent_ of "the content" of the boards.  Even if you were correct, it would be _two hundredths of one percent_ of the content is politically driven.  The other 99.98% of the site is about pretending to be elves, dwarves and sorcerers and stuff, and arguing rather nastily for pages and pages about the rules implications of a tweet.  Unless you want to call the bad Scottish accents some use for dwarves a politically motivated thing, we give Ivory Soap a run for its money.


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## Enkhidu (May 28, 2018)

Morrus said:


> I would say it's fair to say that if the inclusiveness stance that I take when running this site is not to your tastes, there may be other sites more suited to your liking...




To those who disagree with what gets a pass, and what does not, I think that this comment is the most important take away from this thread.

This is most definitely Morrus' party, and as the host he gets to set the rules.


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## Rygar (May 28, 2018)

Enkhidu said:


> To those who disagree with what gets a pass, and what does not, I think that this comment is the most important take away from this thread.
> 
> This is most definitely Morrus' party, and as the host he gets to set the rules.




No disagreement there.  The disagreements are...

1. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but then hosts political content on a regular basis.
2. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but means "No Centrist or Conservative politics" as threads will be permitted to go hundreds of posts of left wing rhetoric and dogma without a single warning, ban, or lock.  But one or two conservative/centrist statements and you're banned from the thread/forum, and the thread will get locked.
3. The site owner frequently claims that the goal of the site is inclusiveness, but then demonstrates otherwise when #2 happens, and when a portion of the users demonstrate extreme hostility towards everyone who isn't in the left wing politics camp without any moderation at all.

In short, the problem isn't that Morrus can run the site the way he chooses, the problem is that he makes claims to have certain policies and then holds only a portion of the community to the policies.  If he actually held to "No politics" he'd have a couple dozen more perma-banned users than he does now.  If he actually held to the rule I quoted earlier, and was actually trying to create an inclusive community, those same accounts would be gone.

Why do you think that the mods couldn't find links to that harassment thread on some "Bad sites" a few weeks ago when they were trying to figure out where the new accounts that seemed to be created only to post on that thread were coming from?  It wasn't because 4chan or Reddit was trying to brigade ENWorld (Reddit didn't even get a thread until the ENWorld thread was days old and the mods had already been searching), it's because more and more people are realizing that this site is *highly* political and that Morrus is going to ban them from posting conservative/centrist opinions, so the existing users are starting to create sock puppets to absorb the bans.

If Morrus wants a left wing politics forum, that's his right, and I support it.  But I will leave, and based on Gallup polls about political leanings it's a safe bet around 75% of the other users will as well.  As I said, it's up to him, but the question that really needs answered right now is...

What's more important?  Your politics or ENWorld being recognized and respected as an RPG/Tabletop news site.  You don't get both.  You can be a politically driven site, or you can be a site everyone respects and recognizes, but you cannot be both.  Because if you choose to drive content by politics then you alienate everyone who holds different political opinions than you.


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## Riley37 (May 28, 2018)

Rygar said:


> The moderation here has a clear bias.




You say that as if it were a complaint or accusation. If you created a website, and moderated it, your site would have bias: your bias. Morrus created a website, and it has a bias: his bias.

Perhaps you might benefit from reading some conservative essays with the idea that the owner of property - whether that property is land, or a ship, or territory in cyberspace - decides what to do with that property. (Whether the government can sometimes intervene, is a question with many answers, depending on whether it's a republican government, an authoritarian government, or something else.) Morrus is the owner. You are not.

Hunh. I looked at "Find latest posts". It looks like you're here to do three things:
1. complain about left wing bias and exclusion of centrists
2. make "get woke go broke" arguments
3. every now and then, as a distant third to 1. and 2., you discuss games.

"Green Ronin is gone. They've just based their future on a political statement and in doing so, just tossed out the majority of their market. Anyone who is conservative is now gone, most males are gone, anyone who is deeply religious is now gone. For what? A meaningless political statement." - Rygar, a year ago. Meanwhile, only last month, Correia and his fans discussed how to harass Green Ronin at cons.

"So your call, are we going to eliminate harassment or microaggressions? Do you have a business plan for how conventions and RPG's survive after eliminating at least 50% of its consumers?" - Rygar, in Harassment

"Conventions and game shops are going to all belly up this year, because eliminating everyone but certain subsets of left wing politics isn't going to leave enough people to continue, but we can do that." - Rygar, in Harassment

"Comics sales tanked after going this route, I've seen figures as high as a 91% drop touted..." - Rygar, in Race thread

"The problem there is that beyond some relative simple and common rules, harassment policies generally end up being trivial to exploit for gain or a legal liability.
Since a lot of harassment uses a very loose definition of the term which gives advantage to the accuser, widespread implementation of these policies can and will end up being tools. Want to win the Magic/Pokémon/Board Game tournament? Have friends watch the competition and then accuse your greatest threat(s) of harassment. People cheat at these events *constantly*, this is a better tool than any other they can use today.
In a similar vein, these venues will risk being targets for lawsuits with today's loose definitions being used. What is termed harassment by many people on the internet is very different than what the law considers to be harassment. The Honey Badgers lawsuit is a good example. I doubt most conventions can survive more than two or three of these events."

So you're saying cons will go out of business because they have anti-harassment policies, right? Just like Marvel Comics, just like Green Ronin?

How close are you, Rygar, to frightening Morrus with predictions of economic doom?


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## Dannyalcatraz (May 28, 2018)

> 1. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but then hosts political content on a regular basis.
> 2. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but means "No Centrist or Conservative politics" as threads will be permitted to go hundreds of posts of left wing rhetoric and dogma without a single warning, ban, or lock. But one or two conservative/centrist statements and you're banned from the thread/forum, and the thread will get locked.
> 3. The site owner frequently claims that the goal of the site is inclusiveness, but then demonstrates otherwise when #2 happens, and when a portion of the users demonstrate extreme hostility towards everyone who isn't in the left wing politics camp without any moderation at all.




1. The only political threads that don’t get closed ASAP are those that directly involve the hobby.
2. The only time conservative viewpoints get silenced is when they use the current insults du jour for those not as conservative as they are.  If you don’t use the dog whistles, the mods won’t shut you down.
3. This is Karl Popper’s Tolerance Paradox.  And basically, no group is required to be so tolerant as to be tolerant of _everything._


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## CapnZapp (May 28, 2018)

Rygar said:


> No disagreement there.  The disagreements are...
> 
> 1. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but then hosts political content on a regular basis.
> 2. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but means "No Centrist or Conservative politics" as threads will be permitted to go hundreds of posts of left wing rhetoric and dogma without a single warning, ban, or lock.  But one or two conservative/centrist statements and you're banned from the thread/forum, and the thread will get locked.
> ...



Wanting to run a gamer site free of right-wing politics is a completely natural thing.

Morrus owes you nothing. He needs to do nothing.

Allowing politics but cleaning out right-wing extremism (that goes under the deceptively neutral name "conservativism" in the US) is a perfectly reasonable stance to take that needs no elaboration.

Welcome to Europe.


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## Morrus (May 28, 2018)

Rygar said:


> No disagreement there.  The disagreements are...
> 
> 1. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but then hosts political content on a regular basis.
> 2. The site owner frequently claims "No politics" but means "No Centrist or Conservative politics" as threads will be permitted to go hundreds of posts of left wing rhetoric and dogma without a single warning, ban, or lock.  But one or two conservative/centrist statements and you're banned from the thread/forum, and the thread will get locked.
> ...




Your repeated attempts to discredit inclusiveness and anti-harassment policies as politics are getting a bit tiresome. I need you to stop doing that. 

I want to be clear. I’m not interested in political opinions; I don’t care who you voted for in your country; I am trying to maintain an inclusive community which doesn’t make women, people of colour, and other groups which are frequently discriminated against, feel unwelcome. I don’t want my fellow gamers  coming to this site and seeing comments which belittle or exclude their identity. This is not politics, it’s human decency. If you are going to constantly continue to undermine those efforts, you’ll be asked to leave. 

And this is not open to debate. This is an inclusive community. If you consider inclusiveness to be “politics” that’s on you.


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