(January 12, 2019 at 6:07 pm)Yonadav Wrote: I am the first person to be banned from AD.
I posted on Amazon Discussions for something like 12 years. Amazon was a strange place where the mods started to aggressively ban discussants for incomprehensible reasons. Despite that, I was posting there all the way until they closed the forums without ever being banned myself.
Despite being religious, I went over to The Thinking Atheist with the rest of the Amazon crew who were atheists that aggressively trolled Amazon's Religion Forum. We were family. We had been arguing with each other for many years, I stuck with them.
TTA shutdown and I went with the TTA and Amazon refugees to a new home founded by us, called Atheist Discussion. I went there knowing that I was very likely to be the first to get banned. I knew that AD was going to be moderated by thin skinned people, and that they were nursing grudges against me. They are thin skinned people who will be vindictive with those who disagree with them. They have an illiberal mindset, and I am liberal. I'll say pretty much anything that I want to say, and I respect everyone else's right to do the same. Illiberal people aren't like that. They will say anything that they want to say, and then they will be vindictive with anyone who says anything that they disapprove of. So being an outspoken liberal in a forum that was being moderated by illiberal people, I knew that I was going to be banned.
The illiberals trolled pretty much any thread that I started, no matter how much they liked the topic. They just wanted to derail my discussions, no matter what I was trying to discuss. Shit hit the fan when they started trolling a discussion that I titled 'AOC!' I described who AOC is in my initial post. She is the recently elected congresswoman who is being called AOC all over the news media. She is the hardcore progressive who is promoting single payer healthcare, The Green New Deal, and even universal basic income.
The moderators started trolling the discussion, complaining about me naming the thread AOC. They made up a new rule on the spot, claiming that acronyms were 'disrupting the smooth operation of the forum'. We were all veterans of a bazillion discussions with acronyms in the titles. No one had ever said anything about it before. I told them that the rule was petty, and that I would use acronyms as I pleased. I told them that they were trolling my discussion, and that if they want to make a new rule, then we should go discuss it in the forum rules and suggestions section. They continued to troll my thread, threatening consequences if I didn't stop using acronyms.
I went to the forum rules and suggestion section and started a thread about how petty rules were going to ruin the forum. I pointed out that traffic had died down quite a bit in our forum, and pretty soon it was just going to be a handful of petty moderators vapidly affirming each other, and no one was going to want to talk to them. The forum is pretty quickly becoming a little social club of about 12 people in lockstep with each other, new members are not finding us to be very interesting, and discussion is a bit on the vapid side. But the moderators interpret everything in the most negative possible way. Could it be that I was genuinely trying to discuss the issue of how petty rules were going to destroy the forum in a section of the forum that existed specifically to discuss these types of things? Might I have genuinely wanted them to stop trolling my discussion, and take their grievance with me to a part of the forum that exist specifically for that purpose? NO! By moving their issue with me into the appropriate section of the forum, I was disrespecting them!
One person who was not a moderator did actually try to discuss the issue with me, when I moved the argument to the appropriate section of the forum. She asked me if I was objecting to the rule because it was objectively petty, or because I didn't like being told what to do. I told her that I don't like to use the word objective, but I was objecting on the grounds that the mods were harassing me with a new petty rule that they had made up on the spot. I told her that the mods had made rules that I complied with because those rules weren't petty. I gave the example of a mod making a rule that we shouldn't have multiple discussion about basically the same thing. I complied with that rule, because it was not petty. We don't need 20 different discussions about how Trump is as dumb as a box of rocks. Discuss Trump in a single thread about Trump. That is sensible. "Acronyms annoy me so you can't use them" is petty.
I did make it abundantly clear that I would not comply with the petty aggression. I acknowledged that I was not the owner of the forum, and that the owner could do as they pleased, but I would also say anything that I wanted and the worst that they can do is kick me off of the forum. The mods could have been adult enough to acknowledge that they were being a bit petty. But they have big and fragile egos. That I was challenging their authority was their one and only concern. They banned me, and in their message about why I was banned they called me a twatty cunt. Uh yeah, OK. I stood up for my right to free speech and they took a hard stand on authoritarianism.
I never objected to the endless insults that they directed at me. I always believed that they had a right to insult me if that is what they wanted to do. I am pretty good with insults myself, so I sometimes returned fire. They never forgave me for that.
So now I'm here. I just wanted to share my story about woefully not up to the task the mods are over at AD. They're running a little clique over there, and their skin is way too thin for the forum to ever be all that interesting to many people.
How are you all doing here? Are you liberal atheists or illiberal atheists?
There' s atheists here???
I thought we were all lapsed Jedi's......
