Title: Enforcing opinions with moderation
Reason: User Banned (Permanent): Dictating the terms of reclaiming language. Arguing in favour of using racial slurs, ignoring admin instructions.
The official Resetera policy on the n-word is as follows: "As a policy update, we'd like to clarify a moderation stance on people who police a minority on reclamation of the n-word. This also applies to comments that everyone should be able to use the n-word as well. To be clear, these kind of comments are unacceptable." I don't believe that everyone should use the n-word. I believe that whatever society agrees is acceptable should be equally applied across race, gender and sexual orientation. People with the above opinion have been banned on numerous previous threads in accordance with the above policy. This moderation policy, as applied in several recent threads, is extreme. It is enforcing that one opinion on the subject is allowed, and any others are banned for "arguing in bad faith". In other topics, a range of opinions are acceptable and debatable. For this one, if you don't hold one of the allowed list, you will be banned for expressing it in any way. I have raised this with the senior mods as advised and I recieved a boilerplate response that had nothing to do with the concerns I raised. The idea that the n-word is always acceptable when used by people of a certain skin colour and never acceptable when used by any others is a radical view. It's not enforceable, because skin colour isn't binary and because not all black people are African-American and not all African-Americans have dark skin. Its use in song lyrics, but then to say that people of other colours can't perform those songs, is not a clear and obvious moral situation. The debate is worth having, and is possible to have if moderation instead deals with those comments which actually express racism or are personal attacks. Banning people to enforce a particular opinion is not a just use of moderation ability. Having the opinion that a word shouldn't be divided by race alone does not make one a racist.
Link: https://www.resetera.com/posts/8248429/
Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20180523214522/https://www.resetera.com/threads/enforcing-opinions-with-moderation.44412/
Archive.is (legacy): https://archive.is/P4bCv