Here is the big one.
First draft and results of the vote:
Again too open to interpretation/enforcement by mods
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Yesterday I had the epiphany that I still wanāt to make guillotine posts. I am against violent rhetoric in general though. No idea if this means I am hypocritical or if there can be any coherent rule that allows the violent rhetoric I like but disallows the one I donāt like.
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The opinions of morons should have zero impact on our rules.
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Pretty much what I said in the rule 6 thread.
Advocating illegal acts of violence should be āworthy of a moderatorās attentionā, but itās fine to urge people to go on demos/uprisings otherwise.
Saying that youād be glad if some terrible person suffered isnāt equivalent to advocating it.
Just like with rule 6, I recommend we start with stuff we can agree on around the perimeter (if thereās any such stuff) and work in. Stuff like āplz die of a heartattackā is something I personally donāt love seeing but it is not gray area to me. Wishing for somebodyās natural demise should be allowed unless I suppose itās turned into a form of LC trolling.
Next time he releases his annual physical and you say #TeamPlaque and get 40 likes, thatās fine imo.
On the way not fine end of the spectrum are posts that play around with the scenario of the killing/execution of somebody, often explicitly stating what the violence will be. For example āIf the President of Zembla resisted leaving office, he would likely get shotā or āIf the President of Zembla went trick or treating dressed as zombie Mr. T, a white cop on patrol may mistake him for a threat and draw his weaponā; not feeling particularly creative atm and I have things to do today, but yeah the point is you can have as jokey or as hypothetical a setup as you want but if the punchline is your political enemy dies by violence, that should be moderated/deleted/warnings and so on.
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I completely and utterly disagree with this. How in the world is a post āIf the President of Zembia resisted leaving office, he would likely be shotā something that should not be allowed on a politics forum (our politics forum)? I am truly dumbfounded that anybody thinks that.
āThe only way the US will ever get meaningful gun control is if 20 Republican Senators have children killed in school shootings.ā That is a vibrant way of expressing a particular sentiment about gun control and who is currently preventing gun control legislation in the US.
We already have a rule (Rule 6, under discussion next door) which prohibits posts making threats and inciting violence. This rule is WAAAAAAAAAAY too vague and subject to moderator judgment (aka abuse).
What is being communicated by that post? Is anybody unclear about what would happen to the President of Zembla when he is no longer the legal occupant of the office? He would leave, and if he didnāt leave, he would be arrested/removed, and if he resisted arrest, he would get aggressively subdued, and if he reached for a gun, he could get shot. Seems to me that otherwise pointless posts about heads of state getting killed do not belong on a politics forum.
āThe only way the US will ever get meaningful gun control is if 20 Republican Senators have children killed in school shootings.ā That is a vibrant way of expressing a particular sentiment about gun control and who is currently preventing gun control legislation in the US.
Itās going to be basically impossible to state a rule that covers gray area posts, although imo this is not a gray area post. Itās basically fine since itās targeting Republican apathy/lack of empathy, something that may change if they were victims of a tragedy that happens way too often to other families.
Now, if the post was āThe only way the US will ever get meaningful gun control is if 20 Republican Senators were killed in a plane crashā it would be right on the line of something I may want moderated. Yes, there is no explicit call for violence, yes many people die in plane crashes, but itās an otherwise pointless scenario in which your political opponents die to facilitate your own political priorities.
Iām open to the idea that depending on how rule 6 hashes out, it may turn out that this rule is not needed. Iām also probably fine with removing all the mean things a moderator will do to a poster if they violate this rule. But Iād like the rule to communicate that you as a poster are in a problem area when you start posting about violent scenarios where your political enemies get killed. Your posts may get flagged, they will receive more scrutiny, and if theyāre pointless or too egregious then moderation is called for.
But how is this way too vague when determining what bad faith trolling is and what is a personal attack is are both much more vague and more prevalent? I tried to make the rule a decent amount less vague by limiting this rule to posts that āentertain the demise or serious harmingā which is a small subset of posts. I originally had something about āheads of state where some of us liveā because I have in mind limiting potentially legally problematic posts; I donāt know here, thatās why I hope @lawbros will chime in, I donāt think itās legal here (US) to edgelord around killing/harming members of the government, or at least it could expose you to a chitchat with someone with a badge.
I thank you for your long and meaningful reply. I am still 100% diametrically opposed to your view, but reasonable people can have fundamental disagreements.
I will repeat one point of disagreement since you brought it up. Ideally forum rules and moderator protocols are two related but separate items. To me there is an important distinction between a moderator using judgment as to whether a post violates a clearly-specified (bright line) forum rule on the one hand and a moderator using judgment as to whether a post is āover the lineā hypothesized by a poorly-specified vague forum rule.
All analogies are terrible and here is another. One town has a sign posting the speed limit of 55 miles per hour and its police officers ticket anyone they think is going over 55 miles per hour (maybe their speed-reading equipment is far from perfect and they have to use judgment). Another town has a sign saying Donāt Speed and its police officers ticket anyone they feel is āspeedingā.
Every rule/law that is so vague that nobody really knows what is allowed/disallowed invites āabuseā by those tasked with enforcing the rule/law.
I am fundamentally against this rule in any flavor (in case that hasnāt been made clear yet), but if the community wants a rule in this realm I would encourage making the rule as specific as possible.
Iāll leave it here then, but it seems to follow from your post that there canāt be rules about moderating personal attacks or trolling either, at least to me each of these involves vaguer judgment calls than the line Iām trying to draw here, which is just: donāt joke/troll/woolgather about your political enemies getting killed, itās low content, not impossible that it could be mistaken for intent, and makes a quarter of our posters very uncomfortable.
As I said in the other thread:
I think this should be about discussions of illegal violence. I should be able to entertain the idea of a war that leads to the demise of certain people. I should be able to entertain the idea of shooting people for trespassing in houses that may or may not be white on the outside if they donāt vacate the premises when they should. Discussions and advocacy of legal violence should be permitted.
If we go by Brandenburg v. Ohio, abstract advocacy of violence and other illegal activity is constitutionally protected speech. The government can only punish speech that fails the imminent lawless action test. Not only does the speech have to advocate immediate lawless action and not just at some indefinite time in the future, but it also must be likely to induce such action.
Yeah, to be safe, Iād rather go by the British Treason Act 1351 which made it a crime to ācompass or imagineā the death of the King.
You do you though.
Trumpās not a king.
United States Code Title 18, Section 871 sees it a bit differently.
Watts v US ruled in favor of an 18-year-old black man who said:
They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J. They are not going to make me kill my black brothers.
The case differentiated between a true threat and political hyperbole, although I suppose it might be decided differently by the Courtās current composition. The line for what is legal in the United States probably exists beyond where most posters want to draw the line for what is allowed on this site. I think everyone agrees that all speech that is illegal should not be permitted on this site. The question is how much legal speech should nevertheless be banned here.
Except most of us arenāt lawyers and/or arenāt particularly eager to go before the Supreme Court to litigate whether the posts here are true threats or political hyperbole, so yeah the line should be pretty far away from one step short of illegal.
Logically that doesnāt follow.
If people are all worried about illegal posts (or the ābleeding edgeā just short of illegal posts), Rule 6 is where they should be prohibited. Letās not muddy the water by bringing that issue into Rule 7 if we donāt have to.
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Are you addressing my post? Maybe my read is wrong but you donāt seem interested in having a more extended discussion with me, which is of course totally cool, but ālogically that doesnāt followā is just kind of a drive-by if you donāt care about the response. Whatās illogical about being conservative with respect to violent posts, given that the edgiest violent posts may cross a legal or investigatory standard that I know exists but am not an expert about?
This is of course not to say that bleeding edge illegal posts are the only concern here. Iām trying to respect not litigating past remarks but something like joking/not joking about ethnically cleansing your political enemies is almost certainly not close to illegal, but something Iād like moderated.
I didnāt compile the rules. I didnāt write rule 6 and I did not decide to include rule 6 and rule 7 together. I said already there may be overlap between rule 6 and rule 7. I wrote rule 7 as a draft to start a discussion, not as something ready to be voted on as is. So far, it looks like I have failed to spark a discussion about it, but Iām not about to start @'ing people to weigh in, although I hope more people do.