6. No threats. This includes threats of violence, exposing personal information or harassment. Any post that expresses a direct, indirect, or veiled threat to anyone - whether it be another member, some other individual, or a group in general–or an incitement to violence–will be dealt with severely, may result in an immediate permanent banning, and may be reported to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
The choice is to keep or remove the language in red above. Regardless of how this vote ends, mod actions and protocols for enforcement of all rules will be determined later.
This vote is open until Monday at 5pm MST (GMT-7)
Include language regarding potential law enforcement contact.
Remove language regarding potential law enforcement contact.
So I wouldn’t really be one to threaten, then, would I? Fuck off.This casting of me as some type of villain is ridiculous and insulting. If I cared to fuck with anyone here I already would have.
I don’t have a ready answer to this excellent question. I do know that “incitement to violence” and “incitement to riot” are both offenses deemed illegal in various US places. I can also assume without doing any research that there is wide variance in how those terms are defined/interpreted.
Leaving my personal views out of this for a moment, I think a statement such as “People in Kentucky should take to the streets” if/when Bevin illegitimately becomes governor would certainly be allowed.
A statement such as “People in Kentucky should take to the streets and riot” (or equivalent words) would probably not be allowed. Of course, there are a great many statements in between those two extremes and where the line is drawn is (ahem) presumably left up to mod judgment. As you know we are facing this exact set of issues in the discussion of Rule 7.
Having said that, I am comfortable with the wording of Rule 6 in this regard as it seems to be used by several other websites as well.
One in-between case is “People in Kentucky should take to the streets. I wouldn’t be surprised if they riot.” Another is “People in Kentucky should take to the streets. I expect x to happen if they riot”, where x is a desirable outcome. I don’t consider that to be advocacy of rioting. I don’t consider pointing out that it might be logical to riot to be advocacy of riot. I can see how a consequentialist thinker might consider those to be the same thing, that saying that rioting would have the best outcome is the same as saying that we should riot, but I don’t think those are the same.
If I were mod both of your in-between statements would be perfectly acceptable under Rule 6. I hope this isn’t too in-the-weeds but I think there are important distinctions between “advocating violence”, “threatening violence” and “inciting violence”.
My understanding is that Rule 6 prohibits threatening violence and inciting violence but does not prohibit solely advocating violence.
Now that I say that I am reconsidering my example statement “People in Kentucky should take to the streets and riot”. I am now not convinced that this statement actually threatens or incites violence/rioting. Upon further review it seems to fall into the advocacy category since it would not reasonably be considered to precipitate immediate and foreseeable violence/rioting.
I think I was confusing Rule 6 and Rule 7 in my mind. It is the proposed Rule 7 that essentially prohibits advocating violence. In fact, the proposed Rule 7 not only prohibits advocating violence but also discussions of violence (in many cases).
Hi folks !!!1! Anyways, and 100% grunching… Let’s chat a little bit about the word ‘violence’.
The word ‘violence’ means breaking things -and- directly harming beings.
If used coherently, ‘violence’ is a term of description, not an ethical judgement.
I really, really think our rules need to reflect these points.
For example, the 100s of activists that were mass arrested at J20 were charged with participating in a violent riot. No beings were harmed (except activists by the cops). The violence referenced was a couple of broken window.
OTOH, breaking up these kinda events by the cops is almost always done violently. Using tear gas, pain-compliance techniques/etc are all violent actions.
Intentionally breaking a window as protest is a violent act, but so is breaking the glass to get to a fire extinguisher during a fire.
Shoving somebody maliciously is a violent act, shoving somebody out of the way of car to keep them from being hit is also a violent act.
Speech can never, in and of itself, be violent (although speech can encourage violent acts).
Even us activists who are overwhelmingly proponents of the general Ghandi/King tradition known as ‘Non-Violence’ will sometimes condone certain forms of violence. For example, at LA 2000, our consensus was ‘non-violence’, except for police barricades.
So…
I think there should be an explicit distinction made between thing-violence and being-violence in our rules.
We should have a discussion regarding: should who is using the violence in question matter in our rules. Cops tear gassing activists is just as violent as activists tear gassing cops.