Long and Tedious Path to the Truth

Really a whole group said this? Was there a petition? Can you cite the posts where an entire group signed onto this?

Sure, just pointing out there are people who are actually hurt by the unvaccinated in ways other than having COVID transmitted to them or being emotionally harmed.

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I can’t wear hats, my head is too big. Plus it would be a disservice to deny people my great hair.

scrolls through a hundred posts of uselessness

HOLY FUCK IT’S RISKY

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Not enough people are talking about this!

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We all have to do our part

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I’ve never had another forum nor PM group to talk poorly about users here, sorry!

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Right, but at the same time, just today, Keed made what I thought were some thoughtful and sincere posts, and you accused him of “nuance trolling.” That’s the kind of immediate hostility I’m talking about that I just don’t think will ever be reconciled because there’s too much bad blood to get past.

But again, my point is that it’s not “one group.” It’s both of them (of course “group” here is defined pretty loosely, but you know what I mean). For every time, for example, jalfrezi posts something out of line, I can find something out of line directed toward him that seems to be excused, like zara calling him an alcoholic. You find someone on one side defending the use of the c-word, I find someone on the other side mocking the idea that women’s stories of sexual assault should be taken seriously. For every person who ended up leaving and who comes back and posts something confrontational (or just posting, honestly), I can find someone engaging with them for no reason but to inflame and antagonize them. “For every Jbro, a jman,” if you will.

And personally, I have been disappointed by some of the overarching decisions. I thought Chad was correct in his dispute with Wookie over ikes (I don’t know if this is the case but it felt like scant few other people felt that way), and I was disappointed by Wookie’s stance. I think it sends the message that the feelings of a white guy who’s said bigoted things in the past are more important than the feelings of the people who were targets of that bigotry. I don’t think that’s the message you want to send unless you want this to be a place of white guys with reactionary streaks; I thought the whole point of splitting this off from 2p2 was so it wouldn’t be that.

So, I’m generally not invested because I don’t have a lot of affection for 2p2 and its spinoff communities from the way I was repeatedly treated on there, and because I’ve seen some of that carry over here immediately, and I’m done trying to force a community to accommodate me if they don’t want to. I have communities where I genuinely feel like I belong, and where I don’t, I don’t participate or only participate insofar as I get something from it.

I’ve been told that my own grievances with how certain people have treated me here aren’t actually how it happened or how they are. I think all we are is our actions, so that doesn’t jive with me and it seems like a way to excuse behavior from certain people for whatever reason. In that sense I do get where the people who left are coming from, even if I think they often cause or exacerbate the problems with their own behavior, and by and large they would be better off just leaving and letting it go because they’re not going to get what they want from this place.

In general, I think there’s been poor behavior on both “sides” of this argument and I think there’s too much bad history to ever resolve it. If you do want to resolve it and try to hold this place together, it’s going to take a lot of honest self-reflection all around, probably some period of reconciliation, a lot of apologies. And as of today I don’t see much inclination from anyone to do any of those things.

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Wont there be a thread to discuss mod nominations? Seems like a better place to cover this?

The early conversation in the nomination thread seemed to veer off to discussing bans and areas where moderation could improve in general so I split it off and called it “On Improving Moderation” to facilitate that conversation. I didn’t split the posts off (and I don’t think anyone is claiming that I did) to stifle criticism of Wookie’s nomination but Wookie did choose to respond to criticisms in this thread and not to say keeed’s post in the nomination thread so this kind of became the de facto thread for that discussion, along with a few others.

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Four more beers! Four more beers!

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I meant this btw. Without qualifiers let me just apologize to you and to @anon10396289(and everyone else here for that matter). I’ve tried to ignore all this for months. Yesterday I failed at that and I wish I hadn’t.

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Happy Holidays all!

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The ultimate irony in all this is that my frustration is with the bickering rather than any specific poster. And yet I can’t help myself from engaging in it at times and being the exact thing i don’t like.

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Conflict is engaging, habits are hard to break, and long-held impressions of people more so.

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And making it worse. Because I really don’t think I was doing anything like “bickering” until you showed up. Then I definitely was.

I’m not trying to start anything here and I accept and am grateful for your apology. But I’m just making the point that if you do want to improve things you need to start by giving others the benefit of the doubt.

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I think more than a few people thought that JT created this thread to stir up drama because I split the posts out starting with one of his, so I’m at least partially to blame for how bickery this thread was yesterday.

Sorry.

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NGL Wookie hasn’t been mod and drama level seems the same to me. And I never search it out.