You don't need to support Hamas to criticize Israeli action in the region.
No, but -- to move back to something a little less topical -- you may recall that criticism of American action in Afghanistan and Iraq circa 2001 - 2011 was seen in certain circles as implicit support of Islamist violence. It wasn't, of course, but if you're trying to avoid drama you need to take perception into account as much as reality.
In this case, though, the spirit of the rule is less "avoid political drama" -- we have a weaker norm against politics for that -- and more "don't advocate things that make us look like we're all about to go Ted Kaczynski on someone's ass", which is why I feel that discussing war in its context is noncentral.
No, but -- to move back to something a little less topical -- you may recall that criticism of American action in Afghanistan and Iraq circa 2001 - 2011 was seen in certain circles as implicit support of Islamist violence
If you start banning people on forum for positions that they don't explicitly argue but that you think they argue implicitly because of tribal associations than you have problems.
It wasn't, of course
Yes. It wasn't by any reasonable rational standard that a forum moderator is supposed to use to make moderating decisions. Don't let y...
Since the episode with Eugine_Nier, I have received three private messages from different people asking me to investigate various cases of suspected mass downvoting. And to be quite honest, I don't want to deal with this. Eugine's case was relatively clear-cut, since he had engaged in systematic downvoting of a massive scale, but the new situations are a lot fuzzier and I'm not sure of what exactly the rules should be (what counts as a permitted use of the downvote system and what doesn't?).
At least one person has also privately contacted me and offered to carry out moderator duties if I don't want them, but even if I told them yes (on what basis? why them and not someone else?), I don't know what kind of policy I should tell them to enforce. I only happened to be appointed a moderator because I was in the list of top 10 posters at a particular time, and I don't feel like I should have any particular authority to make the rules. Nor do I feel like I have any good idea of what the rules should be, or who would be the right person to enforce them.
In any case, I don't want to be doing this job, nor do I particularly feel like being responsible for figuring out who should, or how, or what the heck. I've already started visiting LW less often because I dread having new investigation requests to deal with. So if you folks could be so kind as to figure it out without my involvement? If there's a clear consensus that someone in particular should deal with this, I can give them mod powers, or something.