Posted October 14, 2016
low rated
What we're left with ("left with", tehehehe) afterwards, in any case, is how Trump and his cohorts have shifted the normal/middle marker even further into right wing extremism territory. And that in a country that – from our perspective at least – only had far right wing parties to begin with. Those are different battles though and they're likely fought on different ground.
So I hope I can disagree with Breja here, though I am all too familiar with his train of thought; it did pass mine as well. But I still keep thinking that America doesn't "need" a Donald Trump to wake up; and I definitely think that Trump wouldn't be "a totally impotent evil". That's basically what the German people thought 80 years ago before they voted, and they were wrong. And the price for their certainly effective wakeup call was too damn high.
One of the debates that we'll likely keep having for quite some time is the censorship vs. trolling conundrum, as wonderfully exemplified right here just these last days.
When you approach a basically ludicrous topic (or rather: topics) such as this, there are two ways open to you. You either just insult, ridicule, disrupt, distract or even threaten, which means you're not really engaging the topic; or you can actually take a look at the arguments presented and make your case why you think they're ridiculous.
If you do the latter, which I much prefer, you may come to the conclusion that the discussion is inappropriate in the chosen surroundings. In this case, that it is against forum rules. Which hasn't got shit to do with "censorship", but only with the assumption that by their own standards, GOG would not want to host this discussion on their forum. It remains their choice after all.
When e.g. TinyE trolls a thread to oblivion, even if I absolutely disapprove of the topic, it's still a problematic approach that is, for a reason, forbidden in sensibly moderated forums. But if he's finding the discussion to be against forum rules, he's been grappling with the subject matter first – that's better, much better!
I believe we will all be taking a very good look at those standards in future years. We will create new, more precise definitions about unwanted proceedings on the internet. And give those names that don't have anything to do with fairytale creatures. It may mean that we'll explicitly discourage disruptions of the nature mentioned above, it may mean that universal and hyperbolic application of words like e.g. "harassment" or "censorship" may become increasingly less common as we work together to fill these words with actual meaning.
Eventually, I have the hope that precision of terminology has the power of cutting into conspiracy theory at least a bit. Though, of course, with contradictio in adiecto running wild from "Hillary the rapist" to "non-profit CETA", that hope is definitely somewhat naive. :|
