The things that are done in this space are themselves political and if you want to be immune to critique for your direction of power and the power relations in this thread then step down from moderating and enjoy your retirement. The personal is political, too, and as several other people have pointed out, that includes who gets moderated and how and when and how intensely. My first interaction in this thread was writing a rather long 3-paragraph post, and because I used the word "insufferable" about someone's opinion one time you deleted a third of it and threatened me with a ban from the thread if I did anything else you deemed problematic. Meanwhile, boo constantly attacked others for months getting only warnings and warnings and finally an infract here and there, MrHands outright admits she's trolling and not having a good faith discussion, and that one feraligatr trump guy is a blatant one-liner troll. It's very obvious that the moderation comes down harder on genuine radical left-wing politics that don't fall neatly into milquetoast liberalism - are you so thin-skinned you can't handle juoean being critical of the moderation structure at all when everything she's been saying is well-informed and well-argued? My assumption about you from your limited posting and when you choose to step in is that you skew liberal (decidedly not far-left but also obviously not a fascist) - aren't you people all about "marketplace of ideas" and "debate" and whatever? That seems to be your ideal of what this thread is, and despite her distaste for it she did the exact thing that you ostensibly want this thread to be about, except she was also critical of the way moderation on this site is structured and the uneven and heavy-handed use of it in this thread and other threads (including the other politics thread and various other spaces).
Please tell me where the "tribunal" and "cabal" are, by the way, I'm genuinely curious. You've been met with hostility toward your actions, not you personally - I could not give less of a fuck about you in either direction, personally, and every time I've seen awyp post has been fine, so idk why they're being dragged into this. People are saying your actions are misguided or wrong and asking for a different action. If that's so awful and untenable, you better close the thread, because I have bad news for you about what is going to happen in a thread that is explicitly about politics every single time you say or do anything, ever, regardless of where it's aimed at. I don't know any simpler or more direct way to state the problem people have than this: the moderation is unevenly applied, stifles good discussion any time there's a hint of passion or emotion behind it, lets people who are more aligned with mainstream western politics (neoliberal politics) have far more leeway, and has a fantasy ideal of what a "politics thread" should be that has no real-world applicability and somehow expects us to disentangle very real -isms people experience everywhere, including on this site and in this thread, from the theoretical politics you want to "allow" us to discuss. juoean repeatedly pointed to actual real experiences that happened to real people while using this site and you're essentially dismissing them as not worth discussing. I find the use of the word "tribunal" especially interesting when she was talking about the processes and contexts - as far as I recall, there was no point that she was calling for your resignation or whatever else you mean to imply with that word choice, she was simply pointing out the actions of moderation in a system that facilitates moderation being applied in this way.
Smogon's a big site and nobody has any illusions about the fact that it has to maintain some degree of "neutrality" (it's a facade, but whatever) and being a space where "politics" don't exist outside of a dedicated thread, so then you have to define politics as being stuff like elections and world leaders and specific big social issues, so then this thread becomes a bunch of circlejerk discussion about federal policy and elections and whatever while we pretend that politics is all up there, over our heads, and not a part of everyday life and every single interaction that happens between people. If juoean wasn't banned she could probably come up with some better and more directly applicable idea in all this text I just dumped that probably will be dissected without actually getting at what I'm trying to say, but my TLDR is that her contributions were good, criticisms of structures on Smogon are fine, actually, including right here, and if you disagree with that then your thread is just a sports thread but for politics, where people argue about who's going to win and by what amount and far-off things that none of us have any tangible influence on. Critiquing what is actually done on this site is an opportunity for the site and the people on it to be better, and how we interact with others radiates outwards and impacts still more people. The way all this was handled is starkly negative and I can feel that impact in how I respond to you, but I'm going to try to change that tone at the end of this. Do you really not want things to be better than that? I'd like them to be better than that instead of maintaining some illusory civility and distance from the subjects at hand. I would actually like things to improve in one little space I'm in instead of 100% of attention having to go toward bemoaning world leaders and genocides and fighting off fascist apologia, and I hope we could actually make that part of the space.
