So I try to make heads or tails of this situation. I got randomly banned from a community where I posted a youtube video showing something from a Convention. Then I wanted to post a question today but realised that I couldn't since I was banned. That community is sadly the biggest of all Star Citizen communities (the next one would be from lemmy.world)
I took a look at the Mod log and see the following line in it:
So no clean up of violating comments or posts, just a strict out ban.
The community has a pretty standard ruleset:
further, the moderator @[email protected] hasn't posted anything since a year, so what gives here, or was it some other mod that was able to declare the ban?
This has nothing to do with the community. The modlog shows that you were banned site-wide from lemmy.ml, which is implemented by a ban from each individual community individually (so despite how this says it was done by a "mod", it was actually an admin):
Removed Comment So they are doing a China? by [email protected] reason: Rule 1
It is an unwritten rule that you are not allowed to criticize China there. Or Russia. Or anything else that they do not like.
If you are a mod from lemmy.ml reading this, go fuck yourself ban me.
You know, at those times I'm really glad that I've stopped moderating comms there. I closed one down, migrated another, but nobody can blame me for condoning this shit.
Hey folks, I just had an amazing idea: a drinking game. Drink a sip when someone gets banned from lemmy.ml, under rule #1, for criticising either Russia or China. Two sips if there's no reasonable way to interpret it as criticism against the populations, only against the State or corporations.
...nah, bad idea. You'll ruin your livers.
Serious now. After checking the modlog, it's clearly a PTB (power-tripping bastards) case. The nearest of something bigoted that I could find in the modlog was
Conspiracy theorists, Populists and Putin Dick sucker will run with this for sure.
This is bad not because you're criticising Putin, or Trump, but because of the expression itself. Even then, it's more of a "Watch your language, you're being homophobic", not grounds for a month long ban. And let us not fool ourselves, this likely had zero impact on your ban.
Devils advocate: sucking dicks isn't inherently gay (women exist), and "sucking someone's dick" figuratively is a colloquial albeit explicit term for "sucking up" to someone, or "kissing ass."
Saying "blah blah sucking putin's dick" is homophobic (gay) is like saying "blah blah eating MTG's box" is homophobic (lesbian).
The catch is that this only works to insult Trump because it's seen as insulting on first place, and it's only insulting because [homo|bi] men and women are seen as "less" than heterosexual men.
Well, there was something about encouraging assassination, though it was two months ago. Possibly the admins were noticing a pattern of behavior and just decided to hell with it.
So imho the chief issues here are perhaps more related to transparency, explaining what happened - OP had no idea even? - and why (as in precisely which rule), rather than trying to guess if it was justified or not, especially since we can no longer see all the linked stuff (unless someone has admin privileges and wants to look).
Edit: also, I just had... significantly more than a sip, of 70 proof whiskey, so apparently I knew that you were going to say this? Yeah... we'll go with that:-).
I saw that entry. It was in lemmy.world, not .ml, and given the target of the joke I don't think that the .ml team would care about it.
So imho the chief issues here are perhaps more related to transparency [...]
Yup, pretty much. They never communicate properly who is removing the content / banning the user, and why. And they clearly don't want to. (Perhaps the .ml admins are waiting for the devs to implement transparency features into Lemmy /s)
I was banned for saying Cuba was communist with no value judgment of either the nation or the political system. AFAIK they are the only truly communist nation remaining.
I was banned for saying Cuba was communist with no value judgment of either the nation or the political system. AFAIK they are the only truly communist nation remaining.
Emphasis mine. That is not how it looks like in the original context:
You're clearly casting a value judgment over the Cuban political system, and defending US intervention in other countries.
With that out of the way, it's yet another case of rule #1 (no bigotry) being used to prevent people from criticising the admins' views, because they can't be arsed to list in the rules "5. Don't criticise our political views here."
Side note. I do not want to engage on the discussion of capitalism/socialism/communism here, as it falls outside the scope of this community. However:
Communists distinguish between "socialism" and "communism", as two sequential economic systems. Cuba's regime is socialist, not communist. Since this conflation shows that you aren't communist, it further reinforces reading your comment as casting a negative judgement over the Cuban regime.
What you're calling "nation" there is "country". For Cuba it doesn't make much of a difference, but for other countries it does.
IMO even in this case, he's not criticizing them for sucking dick, he's criticizing them for sucking Putin's dick. Those two things are not the same - one is potentially homophobic (if directed at male users), but the other is more of an indictment of users who are happy to swallow Putin's constant stream of disinformation than it is a criticism of anyone's sexuality. I get that some folks have trouble parsing the difference though.