Moderation Questions and General Chat Thread

I don't buy into this narrative that western cultures are victims of discrimination.

The Italian courts, including the Court of Cassation, let Andreotti off and allowed him to remain in the Senate, despite his obvious and appalling crimes (including probable implication in the Falcone murder) and despite the legal finding that he was, or had been, a leading member of the mafia while Prime Minister. That does look suspiciously like ingrained, institutional, nationwide mafia corruption. False denial of the mafia's influence, and at one time even of its existence, is a well-known Italian trope, criticised in, for instance, the work of Leonardo Sciascia.

Biden and trump both had consistently negative approval ratings. it's a complete farce that those are the only two candidates who have a chance at being "elected".

probably something like 99% of Americans believe neither of them should be president.

but yes, the total sham, the completely repugnant nature of Biden/trump is reflective of the character of USA, and that's why I'm anti usa. it's controlled by elites, not the people.

USA is not a democratic country, not in the sense that it has a govt by the people, for the people... it never has, and it never will have. the govt is made up of elites, and is for elites, exploiting workers, and the planet.

I provided plenty of links and evidence which refutes your claim on the mafias not being ingrained in Italian society and no, the 'Ndrangheta in particular have set up clans all over Italy very much including Northern Italy.

You don't think that Muslims in Arab countries discriminate against Americans? You know, like when they have events where people chant "death to America" and burn the flag?

Can you point out the specific post I made that you think should have received moderator action?

More to the point.

Ok, say the mafia is ingrained in southern Italian culture. Fine, whatever.

It's still not as easy as "Southern Italians should just stop having the mafia today" And killing tens of thousands of random Southern Italian civilians would not be a moral, and probably not a good pragmatic solution.

There are countless examples. I know extremely little about the IRA/troubles. I do know that Ireland has become prosperous, and IRA attacks are not a big issue anymore and that this was done without blowing up every hospital in Ireland and killing Irish indiscriminately until every single one renounced the IRA. If I'm not mistaken, the political face of the IRA still has a lot of public support. And I'd guess few supporters want to set off bombs in English shopping malls even though they "vote for the IRA."

I don't think that's called "discrimination". They want an end to US interference in ME affairs, which has been going on for many decades and has cost hundreds of thousands of ME lives.

What do you think they should be chanting? "Kill more of us please, Uncle Sam"?

I'm not sure anyone would really dispute that fundamentalism, Islamism and religious violence are ingrained problems in many muslim countries. Let alone that someone would be banned for saying this.

In fact, my post about the mafia was to make exactly this point. I made a similar post comparing Hamas to the KKK, which was also ingrained in the culture of the Southern US.

I was not banned, cautioned or even criticized.

I'll say it more explicitly.

Religious extremism is a big problem ingrained in the culture of many Muslim countries.

Let's see what happens.

It's a much more recent phenomenon than the KKK in Southern states, which is therefore more deeply ingrained.

Oh yeah, of course as an American i think The US = the world, so I was originally thinking of the mafia in The US.

That's another example of a violent, oppressive institution that was ingrained in certain cultures, yet it was somehow defeated without killing tons of i
Italian American kids, or everyone who associated with mafia members or thought they were cool. Incredibly, I don’t think the FBI assassinated a single doctor for treating a mob member.

The idea that the only solution to these problems is to wipe out the whole population is just as stupid and unfounded as it is evil.

no ES it's a tad different.

it's that you are not allowed to say GIVEN A POPULATION does X, THEN that population is WORSE in an OBJECTIVE SENSE, so the median human being of that population is measurably not of the same moral value than our median, inferior, rankably worse, not equal, AND this morally justifies not allying with them or allying with their enemies or banning immigration from that country or whatever.

so take your claim and add *and this makes it moral to ban extremists from asylum* or *to deport any religious extremist immigrant* because they are objectively bad human beings.

[note to mods: THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT I THINK WOULD BE AN ILLEGITIMATE CONTENT HERE I AM NOT MAKING THE ABOVE CLAIM]

that position would not be defensible or arguable in this forum

Andreotti got off because of the statute of limitations (which in Italy bizarelly keeps running with a trial ongoing).

he wasn't implicated in Falcone murder in trials.

and the anti Italian claim by Washoe wasn't "there is a lot of mafia", it was that more than 80% of Italians support it (that was because I claimed than in polls 80% of west bank Palestinians support Hamas).

that is a racist claim (under the forum definition of racism) because it's blatantly false, it's literally saying the vast majority of Italians lack any basic morals

define ingrained quantitatively.

for me it means that a substantial number of people, high single digit percentage as a very minimum, deal in that.

and even that would be low for something actually ingrained, 20-25% minimum looks more reasonable right?

now we aren't close to 100k mafioso in Italy, and even if you add collaborators (people who deal with them knowing they are mafiosos because they gain from it) you don't reach a million.

which would be 1.6% of the population.

ingrained the ****?

if a country of 60m people has 1m religious extremists and 12m hating them actively and 47m disliking them a lot, would that country be defined as ingrained in religious extremism?

you know that heavy, extreme criticism of Christianity is far less censored than heavy criticism of Islam in basically every leftwing circle.

everyone knows that, why do you deny objective truths?

if this Washoe tweet isn't racism, it means you can insult Italians with absolutely no limit and it's never racism.

btw having a "clan" or 7 in a city of one million people doesn't mean it's "deeply ingrained" lol.

you need it to control 10-20-30% of GDP on most relevant cities to claim that. it doesn't make a tenth of that outside some areas of the south

Still doesn't make much sense.

I'd be surprised if it was against forum rules to say that an immigrant who is affiliated with Isisis should be deported (they'd be lucky).

I'd be surprised if it was against forum rules to say an immigrant affiliated with the mafia should be deported.

It might be against forum rules to say all Muslims should be deported as Muslims are more likely to be in Isis than non Muslims, therby making them worse people on average.

If so, it should be against forum rules to say all Italians should be deported because they are more likely to be mafia than non Italians, making them worse people on average.

I doubt it's even against forum rules to say that countries should manage their immigration policies to prevent Islamism becoming a big problem.

I really believe that they should do so. I
would'nt want European countries to have to deal with the problems we face from religious extremism. Let's see if i get in trouble.

Can you two take this conversation to a different thread?

If anyone makes the argument that the Italian “population is measurably not of the same moral value than our median, inferior, rankably worse, not equal” as human beings, I promise to moderate that too. Luckily no one has done that. 🙄

Let me understand if I get it properly, so as long as that argument isn't made explicitly you can make up completely unsubstantiated very negative claims about a human group without repercussions in this forum?

Like Washoe could wake up tomorrow and claim 92% of Catholics are pedophiles and that would be allowed?

I think you are more than capable of understanding this rule. It might help if you viewed the above as a guideline instead of a game to win.

Damn so all the while Victor was allowed to call people genocide lovers, I could have been calling all Catholics pedophile lovers.
Missed opportunity there...

Also don't see why Mets got a timeout that eventually led to his one week ban. I know it was based on his past body of work but Jal likes to wind him up.

Since multiple posters have asked now, I want to be transparent about my decisions. So as it relates to metsandfinsfan:

On 5/12, I began moderating the I/P thread and posted as follows:

On 5/13, I gave mets a warning for violating the rules.

On 5/15, I gave mets a warning for violating the rules.

On 5/16, I gave mets a timeout for violating the rules.

On 5/17, I gave mets a timeout for getting into an extended personal back and forth with Microbet.

On 5/20, I gave mets a timeout for getting into an extended personal back and forth with PointlessWords that included posts like these:

[/quote]

I should have banned him, but he offered to take a voluntary 7 day break, so I let him.

On 5/28, immediately upon returning, I gave mets a timeout for linking to an article with a racist cartoon and making bigoted statements against Palestinians and Muslims.

On 6/5, I asked mets to calm down after making these posts:

He became argumentative and I gave him a 1 day ban.

Today I gave mets a timeout for getting into yet another personal back and forth, this time with jalfrezi:

Mets was warned on 5/20 after his meltdown that his next violation would be a 30 day ban. I have not done that, despite the numerous infractions since then. The above also does not reflect the constant bombardments of extremely rude PMs or the repeated arguments moved to the moderation thread, nor the complaints that I have handled on mets' own behalf.

I've frankly had enough of making a special case for him. I wasn't posting this because I was concerned that if I actually enumerated all of the actual bullshit, then another mod would simply nuke him when I am doing everything I can to simply get him to cooperate with the forum guidelines. But c'est la vie.

I don't know how else to explain to someone that *personal attacks and extended sniping* are NOT ALLOWED. I've been as permissive as possible.

This gave me a good long laugh.

Now you’re going to talk about cartoons of religious figures, aren’t you?