RWarehall: And what about when the minorities act as poorly as their so-called bigots? Should they be equally banned? Or given a free pass?
This is the part you and Telika don't get. Telika throws out the strawman of someone proclaiming "Refugees are subhuman cannibal terrorist liar criminals", yet show me were all these supposedly vast number of posts actually are.
The reality is someone says something like, "I don't think refugees should be allowed in my country because they don't know our language and won't fit in", then someone like Telika goes in and called them a racist fuck. Or like you, someone uses the word "Tranny" and you are calling them homophobic and want to get them banned.
Both of you are guilty of gross exaggeration.
Unlike the one who goes "I don't think refugees should be allowed in my country because they don't know our language and won't fit in", right ?
In practice, these arguments would trigger (the
first times) a naively honest discussion, naively decontructing it from every angle. But as all the implicits get peeled off, one by one, you end up with the underlying core, "these foreigners, they are not worthy of surviving at the cost of being within my (compatriot's) range of view or at the cost of a fraction of our financial comfort". And, deeper, the reasons why "they aren't" (as opposed to "us"). And this is where a moderator would have to cut the bullshit.
And I'm specifying "the first times", because after a while, after so many repeated times, going down the whole path becomes useless. Everything is (consciously or unconsciously, depending on the degree of denial and superficiality) contained in the original statement, and good faith misconception stopping short from "they are not as worthy of support as us" (like, "oh wait, i would not be saying this about myself if we was a refugee, so i was being silly") turns out extremely rare. People who do not consider "them" as "inferior" usually don't end up defending the "they would not fit" argument in the first place, especially not with all our available information. So, beyond the formal peeling that is required before moderating straightforward racist statements, there is the human level of getting used to recognise these racisms with all their rationalizing wrappings around. The implicits in a statements say a lot already, and are valid grounds for personal antipathies.
And this is
when there are even wrappings around. Because yeah, you have the occasional Kingsbradley (we're talking Golden Dawn supporter, here) who's explicit at first contact, proudly clamoring the beliefs that most racists still don't dare to formulate cynically ("i am not racist but these people..."). That said, you're amusingly leaving out the Mexicans-are-rapists "strawman", because, hey, who would ever claim this openly, and who would ever proudly elect someone on that platform, right ?
Thing is, if there was some shaming moderation about coarse expressions of racism, most of these shy rationalizations would be disappearing, as they would not stand scrutiny and discussions. There would always be the arbitrary question of acceptability threshold, but the threshold argument ("hey as no limit is objective, let's set none"), while making sense in more absolute contexts (the infinity of death penalty), is a fallacy when it comes to tame progressive responses such as forum moderation. Just like it doesn't destroy our whole legal system - which is consciously based on arbitrary negociable thresholds, with nihilism as sole alternative. In that sense, claiming that racist propaganda should be allowed in order to not debate borderline cases is a dishonest point solely in favor of racist proaganda.
But, seriously, all of this is moot. My orginal point was precisely that no moderation would/could take place on GOG (it would now, by nature, threaten too many forumgoers and too many precious enemies-of-my-enemies-are-my-friends). And one symptom of it is that the discussion isn't even about defining the threshold. Only about using it as an excuse to justify everything.
We're, on this very forum, in a cultural environment where Donald Trump is considered "a moderate". And that is precisely my point. Antiracist moderation would be devastating in such an environment. And this suffices to explain the terrifyied backlash against the very idea of the idea of the hypothesis of its possibility.