I don't see how the post I just wrote could be considered trolling or inflammatory.Estarossa said:
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Serious The Politics Thread
- Thread starter Oglemi
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What I can’t understand is, if you are finding the same people being moderated over, and over again, or complained about, in this topic, then why not restrict their access (and for clarity I mean this across both sides of the divide in opinion)?
This feels I am afraid more about stopping any discussion of Gaza than anything to do with the discussion being had and who’s having it. Particularly when the staff have said openly to restrict the discussion to the US Election (a nonsense, as I said above, given that you can’t just decouple the Palestinians because you feel like it).
The main problem is this is called a Politics thread. That encompasses so many things. It sounds like the mods would rather this instead be a “US Presidential Race” thread. If that’s the case, I agree with what was previously stated in that the thread itself should be split up. People who want to (responsibly) discuss the conflict in the Middle East should have an avenue to do so somewhere, and if they cannot do it responsibly then that avenue (thread) can be locked. I believe though that some people who engage in aggressive arguments pertaining to some of these topics may instead simply choose not to view the split thread since it is of less interest to them, and instead continue posting in the other one.
Yes, people are precisely voicing their grievances with this. Outside of like a few people most people seem to find "discuss American electoral politics" as basically doing nothing but looking at daily update numbers for an election that wont happen until it happens anyway. Just close the thread now if we can only talk about Dems vs Republicans in America, especially if this courtesy only extends until the election happens and the thread closes anyway. If this is the direction things are being taken, the useful life of this thread is already passed.
disappointed by the attempted restriction to only usamerican politics. where am i meant to posthumously roast alex salmond now?
Yeah but your posts are wild so I'm kind of glad you're back. Join us as we sing while this ship sinks.
Unban Boo while we're at it. Everyone should be together for the end of
I don't think now is the time to be joking and laughing about the fact that discussion about an ongoing holocaust conducted by the U.S. and Israel is now being restricted
Yeah it is. This is a Pokémon forum politics thread. People taking it too seriously is why it's such a cesspool. This forum is better off without it.
Voted early in Texas! Good bye and good fucking riddance Ted
Early voting results look promising but early / mail in votes are usually Democrat. I lived in Texas for a few years and was constantly disappointed by his existence. I really hope this is the end of Ted.
I just want to state that despite being quite removed from lilyhollow ’s views, and being an insufficiently informed bystander somewhere in the middle, their deleted sources were worth the read, and I find their arguments much more compelling than the sneering posts of the thread’s liberals clearly showing intellectual disinterest.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israeli-soldiers-ptsd-suicide-intl/index.html
Here is a CNN article about how we should feel bad for genocidal Israeli soldiers.
Remember depraved articles like this when you consider whether to believe the narrative of western media or governments in the future.
Here is a CNN article about how we should feel bad for genocidal Israeli soldiers.
CNN said:
Remember depraved articles like this when you consider whether to believe the narrative of western media or governments in the future.
I don't think this is an argument in good faith. You would not say this about any of the the other serious topics in Congregation of the Masses. It also downplays the seriousness of any of your own posts in this thread and implies they are not serious because it's under the umbrella of a Pokemon forum. Serious topics deserve to be treated seriously no matter where they are discussed.
I welcome our Old Gen overlord in ABR.
We can turn the thread into a politics version of Smogon Classic tournament— 5 topics, 3 to win, you get to stay in the post-worthy user viability rankings.
while i dont rly get the value of "debating about hamas" (the palestinian resistance, hamas or otherwise, def does not gaf what euroamerikan "opinions" are posted online about them, if u are planning to travel to gaza then u def shouldnt be talking abt hamas bc surveillance and if u arent then wtf does it matter what u "think about hamas") and will not engage in that, i do think that the question that was brought up here and in a few other adjacent posts is important to address.
most indigenous rebellions throughout history did not "adhere to the standards of international law." for those in the "us", the slave rebellion credited to Nat Turner tended to treat any white person in the community as a 'valid' target, and killed/'murdered' around 60 white people in this process; basically whatever white people were 'in their path'. the first person killed in the rebellion at harpers ferry associated with John Brown was actually a free black person, who tried to intervene not knowing what was happening. obv i am less knowledgeable about history elsewhere but, eg in the haitian revolution, while undoubtedly the most vicious (and genocidal) massacres were carried out by the french in retaliation as collective punishment against all black people in haiti for daring to rebel, the anti-colonial resistance was not "sunshine and rainbows" and certainly included some actions that would not fall within today's "international law." tbc obv there is no "equating" genocidal collective punishment by french settlers and slaveowners or the military that then came to back them up, and tactics of the resistance that were viewed as necessary to defeat an enemy that obviously had no limits in the violence it had committed and was willing to further commit to preserve race slavery in (what we now know as) haiti.
as far as i know the warsaw ghetto uprising did not include attacks on 'civilian' members of the nazi party, but this is just a reflection of circumstance due to the structure of those ghettos; there were no nazi civilians in/around the warsaw ghetto bc it was segregated, and it was ofc secured by pigs not civilians. speaking as someone who grew up in a family (on one side) of descendants of sho'ah survivors, i certainly never had the impression that either my grandma who was a survivor or anyone else in her/my family felt that nazi civilians in any way 'deserved' to be spared. anyone who stayed in germany and was not a part of the resistance was essentially considered a collaborator.
here is one example of norman finklestein discussing the experiences and feelings of his parents living in the warsaw ghetto and living with the knowledge that the nazi party was in process of sending them to their deaths. (obv i dont rly share his politics in general, i think he can be v economic-reductionist for example, but i dont feel such disagreements are of relevance here.) he recalls his memory of his mother saying to him: "if we were going to die, we were going to take some of them with us."
'frontier raids' target colonizers who are nearby, bc that is who they are able to target. many colonial genocides present similar historical patterns of 'frontier raids' attempting at a small scale to violently resist colonialism and a brutal explicitly genocidal collective-punishment retaliation by the colonizers that the colonized would dare to attack them. see eg, here an academic comparative analysis of these patterns across various colonial genocides.
as btw finklestein notes in the above video, none of us know the internal assessment(s) of hamas or any other palestinian resistance organization of the october 7 prisonbreak. (ofc any potential self criticisms or regrets would not primarily be because of ~euroamerikan humanist panic over a couple hundred israeli settlers, but in terms of the material conditions of the 2 million palestinians in gaza as well as the genocidal escalations in the west bank, against palestinians within '48-palestine, and now lebanon.) i rly dont think it is our place to be "debating" the "morality" of the october 7 rebellion, but i do think it is important to be honest about the history of slave rebellions and other decolonization struggles, instead of whitewashing them, or revising their histories into a "dinner party" as 'leftists' of certain ideological leanings might say lol. again to quote fanon from The Wretched of the Earth, "National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon."
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as an aside, i agree with donphan fan that it would be fine for this thread to be community moderated / collectively self-moderated. after all, after all smogon moderators do not necessarily have any particular or specialized "expertise" on politics, they can make mistakes just as any of us can. while the option to ban certain users or delete certain posts is def useful to have here sometimes (tho there are downsides too esp in the case of 'controversial' bans on users), i dont think that it is a ~necessity for the thread to be functional. boo was around and slandering people and such for quite a while before they finally got threadbanned, we found ways to deal with it (calling them out every time they posted lies about someone, etc.)
i cant imagine that smogon will even consider allowing this (or any) forum thread to be explicitly unmoderated, so idt this is an actual option on the table, but if im wrong and it is an option then i def would be open to it on my end. (ofc i cant speak for others)
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bring back mikedawg or riot
I was originally gonna reply to donphan fan saying something about how community moderation would be an awful idea considering the number of straight up hate crime posts that get posted here but to be honest the actual moderation doesn't stop that from happening either since for some reason smogon-at-large doesn't like handing out bans on first offenses to racists, homophobes, transphobes, etc., so I suppose it's not really an issue of who moderates the thread, just smogon's general leniency toward awful people until they rack up a big rap sheet
Anyway, even as someone who has tried to distance from this thread after the multiple bigoted comments directed at me I think it's fucking absurd to try to restrict this thread to only US electoral politics and/or close it. First of all, the USA impacts the entire rest of the world whenever it does anything, like it or not, which means most things are relevant to US electoral politics and vice-versa, and second, it seems asinine to give the USA special privilege in that regard. It would be way better to just ban the problematic users making bad, uninformed arguments in this thread (the fardins of the world who just come here to say the most juvenile uninformed takes and refuse to learn) and have some actual standards regarding post quality. Every time I engage in this thread I feel like I'm flipping a coin as to whether some random is going to make a bigoted comment at me or decide to point-by-point nitpick everything I have ever said with the end goal of coming around to "do you condemn Hamas? do you hate Jewish people?" and I think the fact that those people feel safe in doing so is an issue.
There are other things worth talking about in here besides Gaza, too. It's not the only genocide or settler-colonial project in the world right now and I do wish they weren't just brief sidebars to everyone fighting over whether X or Y act is terrorism and if terrorism is bad (irrelevant moralistic discussion). I do think there should be a space for said discussion even on Smogon because as discussed before, all of this political stuff tangibly manifests in how the site operates and how the users interact - before I ever posted in this thread I was still getting randomly attacked on Discord and PS! for saying anything in support of Palestine, such as in my Discord bio, by Smogon users, even people I'd never once interacted with. Separate from this I get creepy comments for being a woman and for being trans. Every time there's a country/region-based tour there's justifiably discussion about how regions are divided and what regions should be allowed, and there's also been plenty of incidents around stuff like, for example, the NatDex Tera vote and people going on whole anti-Chinese crusades as a result. All kinds of awful shit like this happens, and I think there's value in a space where people experiencing that are slightly more centered than usual on this site. The LGBTQ+ thread or wherever else can capture some of that experience of marginalization but far from all of it - I've talked before about feeling alienated from a lot of that community because many of the queer people on here are white and have very different experiences from me with coming out and having an accepting family or community, for example.
Ultimately this was a lot more than I thought I was gonna write but I guess there's a high chance this is getting locked anyway so may as well dump thoughts for a bit. I would have liked to see this thread be more of the thing I was arguing with Oglemi about before, where some of these things can also lead into discussions of how these problems manifest on this site and actually address them as well as educating people about things they think they know about but really don't (a huge part of the discussion re: Palestine was just people regurgitating whatever their local news tells them is true - X is a terrorist, Y is bad because the IOF and US intelligence reported they do Z bad thing). I would also have liked to see the people who come in here and act like they're oppressed for having a contrary view while making snarky jabs at people and regurgitating incredibly basic propaganda just get banned instead of getting to inflame the thread then claim they're getting dogpiled for their contrary opinion instead of for their open aggression and refusal to engage, leading directly into outside observers going "wow, the thread is so hostile, must be a characteristic of all political discussion rather than the specific users intentionally inflaming it!"
Anyway, thanks to the people who worked to combat the misinformation and occasional straight-up bigotry getting posted in the thread. I often felt obligated to post here because I didn't want to let misinfo and IOF propaganda just stand unchallenged or inadequately challenged but people like myzozoa, juoea, S.A.C. Martin, Divine Retribution, and lilyhollow made me feel better that I didn't always have to be the one to do it, which was a nice change of pace. Fingers crossed that this post won't bring down additional bullshit on my head, I'm super tired of it.
Anyway, even as someone who has tried to distance from this thread after the multiple bigoted comments directed at me I think it's fucking absurd to try to restrict this thread to only US electoral politics and/or close it. First of all, the USA impacts the entire rest of the world whenever it does anything, like it or not, which means most things are relevant to US electoral politics and vice-versa, and second, it seems asinine to give the USA special privilege in that regard. It would be way better to just ban the problematic users making bad, uninformed arguments in this thread (the fardins of the world who just come here to say the most juvenile uninformed takes and refuse to learn) and have some actual standards regarding post quality. Every time I engage in this thread I feel like I'm flipping a coin as to whether some random is going to make a bigoted comment at me or decide to point-by-point nitpick everything I have ever said with the end goal of coming around to "do you condemn Hamas? do you hate Jewish people?" and I think the fact that those people feel safe in doing so is an issue.
There are other things worth talking about in here besides Gaza, too. It's not the only genocide or settler-colonial project in the world right now and I do wish they weren't just brief sidebars to everyone fighting over whether X or Y act is terrorism and if terrorism is bad (irrelevant moralistic discussion). I do think there should be a space for said discussion even on Smogon because as discussed before, all of this political stuff tangibly manifests in how the site operates and how the users interact - before I ever posted in this thread I was still getting randomly attacked on Discord and PS! for saying anything in support of Palestine, such as in my Discord bio, by Smogon users, even people I'd never once interacted with. Separate from this I get creepy comments for being a woman and for being trans. Every time there's a country/region-based tour there's justifiably discussion about how regions are divided and what regions should be allowed, and there's also been plenty of incidents around stuff like, for example, the NatDex Tera vote and people going on whole anti-Chinese crusades as a result. All kinds of awful shit like this happens, and I think there's value in a space where people experiencing that are slightly more centered than usual on this site. The LGBTQ+ thread or wherever else can capture some of that experience of marginalization but far from all of it - I've talked before about feeling alienated from a lot of that community because many of the queer people on here are white and have very different experiences from me with coming out and having an accepting family or community, for example.
Ultimately this was a lot more than I thought I was gonna write but I guess there's a high chance this is getting locked anyway so may as well dump thoughts for a bit. I would have liked to see this thread be more of the thing I was arguing with Oglemi about before, where some of these things can also lead into discussions of how these problems manifest on this site and actually address them as well as educating people about things they think they know about but really don't (a huge part of the discussion re: Palestine was just people regurgitating whatever their local news tells them is true - X is a terrorist, Y is bad because the IOF and US intelligence reported they do Z bad thing). I would also have liked to see the people who come in here and act like they're oppressed for having a contrary view while making snarky jabs at people and regurgitating incredibly basic propaganda just get banned instead of getting to inflame the thread then claim they're getting dogpiled for their contrary opinion instead of for their open aggression and refusal to engage, leading directly into outside observers going "wow, the thread is so hostile, must be a characteristic of all political discussion rather than the specific users intentionally inflaming it!"
Anyway, thanks to the people who worked to combat the misinformation and occasional straight-up bigotry getting posted in the thread. I often felt obligated to post here because I didn't want to let misinfo and IOF propaganda just stand unchallenged or inadequately challenged but people like myzozoa, juoea, S.A.C. Martin, Divine Retribution, and lilyhollow made me feel better that I didn't always have to be the one to do it, which was a nice change of pace. Fingers crossed that this post won't bring down additional bullshit on my head, I'm super tired of it.
I wasn't on this site long enough to see the original politics thread but this shitshow of a thread made me realize why the original got shut down. So many of you people are so ridiculous and unable to hold an actual debate or discussion it's ridiculous. If I don't have anything to say, I simply don't talk. I don't resort to bigotry or hate speech for no reason other than to view myself as better than someone else on a competitive pokemon forum or to just spit hot air and hear myself talk.
Good riddance.
Good riddance.
Please read the post literally above yours. Please, for the love of god.
Have to say I am incredibly disappointed in the mod team today. I have reached out privately and publicly, asked kindly and with patience, and the unwillingness to do the most basic of things which is restrict the worst offenders causing most of the strife is just infuriating.
If anything, I would like to have that community team instead of the mods suggested above, because it might actually get us a better quality of discussion if people were more alert that their posts are being scrutinised more heavily.
At the end of the day, banning Palestine/Gaza/Israel and restricting everything to just the US election is, with respect, two fingers up at the first amendment and is unconstitutional. I’m British and I’m aware of that: why aren’t the majority of Americans in this thread getting more angry at the censorship?
I suspect the answer is - they would prefer to not have the mirror held up which shows the thousands of dead children in a wasteland of fire and dust. For shame.
This forum is not governed by the Constitution. Also, free speech in the Constitution only pertains to government banning it. Smogon is not the government (though sometimes it feels like it). It’s a private forum that can be moderated as they see fit.
That being said, the easiest and simplest solution from the beginning was to have a separate thread for US Elections, and I think we missed the mark tremendously by not doing this months ago.
no need to ask me twice
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