Once again, I don't believe that NI was banned for being a liberal. As far as I can tell, he was banned for acting like a petulant child, turning every thread he participates in into an outlet for his own personal issues and using Trump as a lightning rod. Other anti-social behaviours that were likely contributing factors included:
- Making wide, sweeping generalisations about groups he doesn't like then ducking out of the conversation and claiming to be too busy to respond whenever it deviates from his already established narrative.
- Frequent use of BOLD ITALICS CAPS to speak down to people when he otherwise can't articulate a valid argument.
- Utilising blatant lying as a debate tactic (and thinking he's clever enough to get away with it / not respecting the intelligence of others).
- Never fronting up and constantly playing the victim when confronted on these behaviours.
Furthermore, I would argue that he's most definitely not a liberal -- he's quite clearly an authoritarian given his love of big government and advocacy for concentrating vast political power in the hands of a few social media corporations.
Corrik
I don't often see you posting in the politics sub (though when you do, I generally appreciate your views), and given that NI almost never posts outside of it, I must question how familiar you are with his history of behaviour there. Frankly, calling him a representative of the left should be offensive to anyone who sees themself as a rational leftist as he is way down in the ideological left section of the political horseshoe. The first time I noticed something was up with him was when he missed this extremely obvious joke in order to feign outrage on behalf of a group:
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/fifa...ing-world-cup-matches.1463698/#post-253335143. It may seem innocuous, but it betrayed his defective thought processes; it showed that his immediate reaction is to take offense, thus blinding him to humour or, more simply, an opinion that differs from his own.
I see NI's banning as an inflection point for GAF because he demonstrates many of the behaviours that turned oldGAF into an authoritarian bubble. Multiply him by a dozen and give him moderator power and you have Resetera. He has been just subtle enough to skirt the rules for the better part of a year but finally overstepped the line and this is our opportunity to say, as a community, "no, these behaviours are unacceptable". I have previously said that I would be more disappointed than celebratory if he got banned, and I am indeed disappointed because he has shown not an ounce of introspection or accountability following his deplorable behaviour in the recent Covington and Smollett threads. He did make a few comments that seemed to show that he was open to feedback and improvement when those narratives rapidly shifted away from his already established ones, though I now see those as insincere "gestures of goodwill", as he likes to call them, because he immediately reverted back to his old ways. In fact, this is another anti-social behaviour that I missed from the list above: his deceptive way of throwing out tokenistic gestures that he doesn't genuinely mean just so that he can point back to them later and handwave away any criticism.
What you guys (
Yoshi
Corrik
Rentahamster
) are doing here is what we have through our various political discussions over the past ~15 months established to be at the root of many of our current_year social problems: you are using equality of outcome as your barometer for equality. NI being "on the left", as dubious a claim as that is, is not a valid reason to allow him to practice the anti-social behaviours listed above. The same goes for any of the other recently banned "leftists" like luigimario, BraveOne, Gander, Hesemonni, Brizzady, DaForest, Dude Abides, TekNav, EscapeArtist, mustardman, Neon Noire, TayTay, Do Make Say Think, Dragonburn, Cauliflower of Love, Phoenix RISING, and others. These are not leftists; these are overgrown children LARPing as leftists who were banned for their behaviour, and you should be embarrassed if you see them as representative of your own politics. Moderate on behaviour, not spurious claims of political alignment, and let the pieces fall where they may. Surely that must be the key lesson we learned as a community from the events of October 2017?