Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment - Violations, misuse, and other issues

Yeah, that's... pretty terrible.

there's plenty of reasons for non-Americans to dislike Americans.

That is indeed pretty bad. I'd argue for a cut myself.

It's freaking out over what's basically just an edgy joke... and it's not well explained as to how the joke even worked, which is what DMOS is supposed to be about.

As an American I don't mind someone feeling offended over a Twin Towers joke but JFC, cut the xenophobe bit. That blatantly violates our hate speech policy.

It says "he superimposes the French Council over the plane that struck the Twin Towers" which IMO has enough context to at least explain the moment that put the troper off. For some people, any joke about 9/11 in any context is too much.

Edited by mightymewtron on Aug 1st 2022 at 1:43:22 PM

I'd understand the offense more if I knew what the joke even really was. That, combined with the fact that it brings up another work at the same time, makes this whole entry a muddled mess that can't stay focused on the actual dethroning moment.

Yeah, TBH I want to cut that just because it's incomprehensible (though I assume it makes more sense if you know the source material) - my first assumption when I just skimmed over it was that the person was ranting about it being xenophobic towards the French.

I was rereading some Web Original DMOS and there's one under Jimquisition relating to politics which is... iffy? Not 'this is outrageous!' iffy but misleading enough that it rubs me the wrong way and not sure if it deserves to be brought up or not. There's a Jimquisition named 'Why The Five Nights At Freddy's Guy Sucks' because it was discovered that Scott Cawthon was donating thousands of dollars to the campaigns of Trump, Mitch McConnell and other Republicans. The DMOS entry is this.

"The Dethroning Moment of Suck for me that had resulted in me unsubscribing from the Jimquisition involves the video titled "Why The Five Nights at Freddy's Guy Sucks". With a title like that, you would think that they had a good reason for bashing the Five Nights at Freddy's creator. However, their reasons boiled down to just one: Scott had donated money to politicians that Jim hated because they were against Jim's own political views."

The thing is, J. S. Sterling goes into a great amount of detail in the video outlining that relating to figures like McConnell and Trump who, uh, let's say, may have committed actions which may have negatively effected the lives of certain minority groups, you cannot write those off as just a disagreement of political views. So the DMOS feels like... not a lie, but very much not the whole truth either. It reminds me of when we were talking about Stonetoss ages ago and some people would describe him as just a webcomic artist with controversial politics, when in reality he was an openly anti-semitic holocaust denier at best. This is not as dramatic as that, but I feel like the DMOS is misleading in its reductiveness. But it also could be fine and I'm just reading too much into it.

EDIT: Checked the history page and this and another entry used to be a little bit worse but they had sections deleted by another troper. The entry below the Five Nights one, which was also related to James Stephanie's politics, used to speculate on what they believed was obvious subtext in Sterling's message based on "knowing their status as a loud and proud liberal".

Edited by Elmo3000 on Aug 3rd 2022 at 11:01:36 AM

Part of the problem with the Stonetoss thing is that work pages are meant to some extent as representing the "official" view of the site. DMOS, by definition, is individual. I mean, I'm perfectly comfortable describing the Republican Party in general as a fascist, authoritarian, racist entity and have done so many times in the OTC sub-forum, but TV Tropes isn't doing so anywhere. So yeah, I wouldn't reword what someone else is saying on this site if it's only meant to be speaking for themselves.

Yeah, that's just one person's opinion that they don't even go into detail on, unlike the "xenophobia" example above.

The issue with Stonetoss was a complicated one because of the nature of the creator meant that we couldn't openly call a Nazi comic a Nazi comic, so our only choice was to delete it entirely. It wasn't that people refused to acknowledge that the comic was propaganda, it was that Stonetoss himself did, so we had to either tiptoe around it or commit what could be considered libel just to talk about the comic's content.

That doesn't mean we don't keep other blatantly alt-right works up (Like Victoria, The Turner Diaries, and Ethnic Cleansing). It also doesn't mean we can't let people have their opinions, especially if they don't go into detail about what politicians Steph disagrees with.

Like Nrj, I have no problem saying that anybody in their right minds should be opposed to the American Republican party at this point because of how backwards their views are. That doesn't mean I don't think people should be allowed to have the opposite opinion though, especially when expressed rather vaguely in the most subjective corner of our site.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 3rd 2022 at 7:22:27 AM

Stonetoss doesn't self-identify as a Nazi, nor has he ever been a member of his country's equivalent of the Nazi Party.

There are no grounds whatsoever to call him a Nazi without instantly losing the argument.

And that's why the page was impossible to maintain.

Yes. Like if he was open about the bigotry sure?

But the fact its obfuscated meant we were in a shitty position of either whitewashing his stuff which would also promote it(his page in fact did that) or you know moving outside into ROCEDJ breaking.

Let's not turn this into another "why did Stonetoss get cut" discussion; I only brought it up because Elmo did, and we should focus more on the subject at hand (the DMOS entry).

With how much DMOS entries keep getting brought up recently, would it be worth creating a short-term cleanup thread for DMOS?

It's been discussed, we might even have one somewhere, personally I've always been opposed to giving it a strict cleanup effort because DMOS is the one part of the site where people can just express their raw opinions, and as long as they obey the rules while doing it I'm against trying to enforce personal standards on what opinions people can and can't have.

i agree with Jay. while i might think some of the things said there are reprehensible (or imply reprehensible things), it's unfair to selectively police political opinions we don't like that don't otherwise break the rules. if they're not expressing objective bigotry (for example, a post that misgendered Steph or connected their perceived decline in quality with their gender identity), there's no grounds to remove them.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Aug 3rd 2022 at 4:31:41 AM

Right; that's part of why the earlier DMOS example was removed; it was openly bigoted by complaining about "xenophobia", in addition to breaking other rules, like mentioning multiple works at once. But someone simply saying that they stopped watching because they disagree with Steph's politics, and not even elaborating further, is honestly really tame.

I wasn’t really talking about political opinions, and more so entries that move into rants about the creators themselves (like the Doug Walker Canadian PSAs one that got brought up on the complaining thread) but that was just me throwing out ideas.

Sure, if the cleanup sticks to enforcing the actual rules of DMOS I'm not against it. I'm just scared people will use it as an excuse to remove DMOS examples they personally dislike, ya know?

I don't really think entries from DMOS need to be removed that often besides the occasional ROCEJ or over the top complaining/bashing entries. If we somehow get a rash of bad entries that need to be removed, a clean up thread wouldn't be bad idea. I just don't think DMOS is being misused to the point we need a separate clean up thread right now.

Didn't Pebbleyeet having a page result in him coming to this site to defend himself a few times and cause a ruckus? I swear I saw something about something like that.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Aug 3rd 2022 at 9:23:10 AM

The man himself never showed up on TV Tropes to the best of my knowledge, and it would have been discussed extensively in the thread if he had.

The entry isn't even technically complaining about Steph's politics. It's complaining about Steph disliking a game's creator for their politics instead of criticizing the guy as an artist. And while I'm more on Steph's side for that, it is very much jumping to conclusions — and a violation of ROCEJ in itself — to assume the person writing the entry agrees entirely with Cawthorne's politics. (Though the deleted section where they implied Steph was "bashing on not only religion but those who don't have the same political views as Jim" is a little... suspect, but in theory people are allowed to disagree when a video gets "political" or "bashy" in DMOS, I guess, if they aren't getting hostile themselves.)

That said, that page does have some people removing sections of DMOS partly because of the heated politics involved, which could either be justified or suspect, but either way is a ROCEJ concern. (Also they trimmed "natter" that isn't really natter in this context, but just another part of why the person disliked the video in question.)

Edited by mightymewtron on Aug 4th 2022 at 3:02:39 PM

Would it be a good idea to deep clean Memes.Politics and its subpages? A lot to the "memes" seem more like thinly-veiled political attacks than actual memes, and ROCEJ may as well not exist on the Biden subpage.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Aug 4th 2022 at 8:10:10 AM