Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 2)

[BIONIC]

Constructive:

I posit that bans for "armchair diagnosis of mental health" as seen in the Trump on the Roof thread are un-useful, and are being enforced in massively bad faith.

Those have been going off for awhile now, I caught one a few weeks ago for saying the same thing about Trump in a different thread. IDK lol

Remember people, we must submit tickets if we would like to raise concerns on moderation. Complaining in this thread wont get you anywhere and will likely be punished as well. Calmly express your concerns via the ticket system.

This sounds like a brilliant way of making sure we can't openly discuss heavy handed moderation and come to a community consensus on unfair judgments, and I'm going to assume that I am allowed to say that in what I am lead to believe is the Constructive Community Discussion.

I'm also going to state openly that I've submitted ticket requests for bans on my own and on others behalfs that have gone ignored so I don't exactly have any faith in it.

Your thoughts and feelings on it are valid and have been echo’d, however we cannot expect the moderators to be right and fair and follow the rules if we do not, and this was a new rule set in place after the Donkey Kong thread fiasco a few weeks back.

So we gotta do our part correctly, if we want/expect them to do their part.

What is this, some kind of community hall monitor gimmick?

People are putting in tickets for the things they want to and also posting here for transparent open discourse which can (when not turned into shit piling) lead to insights about issues and how to resolve them.

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I'm just going to say this, we've been doing those bans for over four years now, at the urging of the broader community. We literally started doing these bans because people advocated for them and found the constant "Biden has dementia" stuff, an attack with right-wing roots that was started over four years ago, ableist. If this sort of ablism is bad when aimed at Biden, and everyone felt it was very much so, then it's bad here too. Just don't use actual illnesses when you think his brain is going, if you think his brain is mush then just say that. There's plenty of room to talk all kinds of shit without going into "well, let's diagnose mental illnesses and use them as a cudgel" because the people who suffer, or have family that suffer, from those illnesses do not appreciate that sort of thing.

I know people are thinking "we're just attacking Trump" but the fact is that by using mental illness as the cudgel when doing so, you are also inadvertently hitting innocent people who agree with you and making them feel like shit. This is also why we don't let people use racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry as a cudgel in these situations: it's just offensive to the people from these groups and signals that we only really care about that stuff when it's coming from the other side. We should care when it comes from our side too. People might say "oh we need to fight dirty" but that doesn't mean we should be ok with embracing bigotry in service of our goals.

I don't personally agree with that policy and I had members of my family suffer with dementia but whatever. I don't give a shit if people say Biden has dementia or Trump has dementia, but if the "broader community" feels otherwise, so be it.

Maybe people should start being more original in finding insults instead. My dad has dementia. It's destroying his life, my mom's life, my sister's life, my life. It's an unending whirlpool of suffering and stress. I don't need you comparing my dad, and others suffering from this absolutely horrible disease that won't end until my dad literally forgets how to eat and breathe, to Trump just because he's taking a walk on the rooftop of his office.

Edit: there's also a massive difference between an earnest "is he alright? He's acting strange lately" and "He's doing something out of character for a president, must be senile, amirite fellow posters, please upvote". Trump deserves to be mocked, but I'm sure there qre plenty of different ways to do that.

And stuff like this is why we started doing it:



It wasn't just because we said "hey, let's start doing this" but because A LOT of members of the community were complaining that a horrible condition that was tearing their families apart was being used as an insult by people who couldn't care less and were just looking for a new way to say something mean to someone that would never hear it.


Just saw this edit and this is literally what we're saying. We just got done talking about how there is a difference between "lol Trump has dementia" and "Trump is acting like my grandpa, who has dementia" and how the two things are not the same. One is just using it as an insult, in the way you are talking about in the second example, and the other is more like the first. All we're really asking is that people don't do the second thing you're talking about. There's a million different ways to mock him here, tons of funny jokes that can be made, instead of weaponizing this.

1. It's not a mental illness.

2. You are desperately out of touch with your own user-base. Most people are not offended by positing that Trump might have dementia, we are not that precious. I have had multiple family members go through neurodegenerative conditions and I would not have wanted them to be the most powerful person in the world in their state prior to them passing. Conversely to compare people commenting on his decline to actual bigotries is deeply offensive.

3. NYT and TheHill have posted opinion pieces about Trump's cognitive decline, are these banned sources now?

Are we able to have the same stance about body shaming? It's unfortunate that threads that make fun of people for their weight or balding or small penis jokes still occur, despite the push for these other areas you've outlined.

Not to mention, we literally have moderation staff commenting on his cognitive decline:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/trump-says-he-took-a-cognitive-test-during-his-physical-and-%E2%80%98got-every-answer-right%E2%80%99.1162959/post-138449727

Are we only allowed to speculate in approved threads?

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Keep up the good work mods!