Though I'd note that when you're discussing a war or violent political conflict, supporting any acts of any side can be construed as supporting violence, so this doesn't look too politically slanted.
You don't need to support Hamas to criticize Israeli action in the region.
"Violent crime, abuse, or fraud", then.
Okay, that looks fine to me.
It's also obviously noncentral to the rule, and I maintain that some degree of vagueness in forum policy is necessary if you want to get stuff done without every policy issue degenerating into unproductive trivia
It makes sense to imagine what the rule actually does in practice. There are certain actions like killing your neighbor where it's perfectly fine to allow moral arguments about why killing your neighbor is bad but still forbid people from advocating killing your neighbor. That's because we have a consensus that killing your neighbor is bad.
If you start banning the advocation of violence in a political debate where one side favors violence and the other isn't you are set up for drama.
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 -- an...
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.