Wiki and Forum Policy - General Discussion

Agreed, the main focus isn't the work in question - we can trope just about anything on here as long as we can do it accurately because a trope page doesn't mean an endorsement in the same way that a Wikipedia page doesn't. The problem is that when the work dealt with Holocaust denial and a moderator generalized the opposition to the page as a "crowd demanding justice for a perceived moral wrong", that doesn't inspire trust in the moderator, especially since any kind of action we could take against the post would also have to be taken in by the same moderation team that person is a part of.

I know this is offtopic but Redmess if you want to see how we can actually criticize bigoted works on their trope page look at the Billy The Heretic page. Holy shit does it bash it hard! I love it.

Yeah, it doesn't really help but the mod team's decisions are often so opaque. We had to make a lot of noise to get anything done about Fighteer here, and even now, we're waiting on the announcement.

When a mod derides being against holocaust denial...where's the trust supposed to come from? I didn't know Crazy well before he was promoted, but I did have some encounters that, coupled with the Stonetoss stuff, would give me concern, without getting into the content of PM's.

I'm not trying to be difficult in all this, but my interest is the safety of the community. I believe you can have a good, differing view of Stonetoss being tropable or not. The way it was expressed would leave me very leery of this mod handling issues of bigotry. I think most of the mod team is great. I've seen Macron, Synchro, Willbyr, etc. come down hard on this stuff. There was a guy I'd seen offsite I recognized as a Neo-Nazi and when he started with the rhetoric, Nombre, (when she was a mod), smashed the hammer down instantly.

But there's some stuff I think it's fair to ask to be cleared up.

I like that, too! You can't take that stuff seriously. Even Stormfront has been smashed in public opinion. I don't think we should need to be neural about Nazis, honestly.

Edited by Lightysnake on Dec 24th 2022 at 10:13:27 AM

Can we also have some imput from the mods on this here? Do they feel comfortable confronting other mods on such an issue, in public if needed?

I believe most signs of bigotry and anti-LGBT rhetorics typically result in "you have one chance to properly elaborate before a bounce" in EB.

Edited by Amonimus on Dec 24th 2022 at 9:22:22 PM

Actually, I'm wondering if the Billy the Heretic page falls afoul of our wiki rules on complaining and excess negativity (which we have an active cleanup thread on). That does seem like it limits our capacity for troping neo-Nazi artwork, since it seems a bit unreasonable to compel tropers to say nice things about racist rubbish.

I feel like a “right wing propaganda cleanup” thread would be the appropriate place to talk about this.

I concur there's overlap, but the reason I brought it up was Crazy's comments on it after what Septimus said. I grant likely they're busy with holidays, though, so not expecting immediate replies.

@ Laculus. Um... I'm normally not pro bashing but if the work IS that awful then it's okay by me. Because if we only allow positive stuff then we are lightly encouraging praise of said works. If the bashing cant stay then the whole page should go too.

Edited by AegisP on Dec 24th 2022 at 10:41:27 AM

it's kind of a grey area. we have to trope as neutrally as possible. that's not negotiable. but, imo, anti-bigotry is the neutral position on this issue.

the compromise is debunking the points without shit-talking them. let the evidence speak for itself.

They don't have to say nice things (that would be gushing, which we also have a cleanup thread for), they just have to stay neutral. That's kind of the problem for that sort of pages, though: it is impossible to stay neutral on them.

The issue is, do we want a consistent policy on all works for bashing/gushing, or do we allow exceptions? And where do we draw the line, if we do?

Edited by Redmess on Dec 24th 2022 at 7:53:06 PM

I feel like I may have opened a can of worms with my earlier comment about how "it's not what you believe, but how you believe it". I was corrected by other users who said that the policy is that certain ideologies like Nazism are grounds for an automatic ban, so I want to address why that was my impression.

See, Nazism is the kind of thing that can almost never be argued in good faith because it relies on thoroughly discredited and unscientific premises like racialism. A "good faith" Nazi would have to start by arguing that most of our societal premises are incorrect, a tall order which is far beyond what one can reasonably expect from a silly Internet forum. Nobody actually starts their argument there. Boom, argument in bad faith, banned.

With respect to Holocaust denial, it is similarly nearly impossible to argue it in good faith. I think it is too far to suggest that it is by definition impossible for the death toll to have been exaggerated, but anyone who wishes to argue that in good faith would have to recognize the mountains of evidence suggesting that the numbers are accurate (if not understated) and how often their arguments are used as a canard. You'd have to be a very respected historian with a great command of language to pull that off and have evidence that's in all likelihood not forthcoming. Nobody's going to pull that off on this wiki, of all places. You try it, boom, banned. It's not what you believe, but how you believe it.

As for works like Stonetoss, my impression was that a similar decision was made for it as was made for pornography after the Second Google Incident. I personally agree with the result but disagree with the line of thought. I never believed that "porn is not tropeable", which is our current policy, but rather "this wiki relies on the input of the general public, which is not mature enough to talk about how porn is tropeable". I'd say the same thing for Nazi works — they do have tropes, but we can't rely on the general public to talk about them (or even read about them) in a mature, dispassionate, and objective manner.

Let it be said that I have no objections to booting these people or works off the website, but I find it dangerous to do so in an ad hoc manner, as it just galvanizes these people into picking up a victim complex and it can lead to inconsistent — and possibly unjust — results in the future.

I'll shut up now

Everything in the above only goes to show: Being able to trust the mods to deal with it is absolutely vital.

You can certainly question these things in good faith, but something like the Holocaust is so sensitive that that is best left to historians. Suffice it to say, if you were to question something like that, you'd better have some iron-clad data behind it.

As for the porn, the long and short of it isn't maturity of users; it is that our advertisers won't have it. We got a choice: we keep the porn, or we keep the advertisers, and since we really do need the money, we went with the latter.

Let's get one thing clear, just so there's no misunderstanding:

I do, in fact, condemn Holocaust denial for reasons that seem good to me, not least because I value honesty, but I am sufficiently self-aware to understand that the moral and ethical standards by which I do so are as subjective as anyone else's.

In that case, I'd simply say that the subjectivity of morality is only relevant if multiple sides of the debate are meaningfully present. There's no real point in bringing it up in the context of Holocaust denial, since (a) the facts of the matter are broadly settled by a consensus of historians, and (b) there's not exactly a demographic on TV Tropes who find it culturally important to deny the Holocaust.

Tell that to the politics threads.

anyone who showed up in the politics threads with Holocaust denial would be shown the door immediately.

I sincerely hope so.

They would. Which is why a member of the mod staff calling it a "perceived moral wrong" being subject to "mob rule" when someone objects to troping a Neo-Nazi webcomic is problematic.

We shouldn't be getting into "this is all subjective" to determine the wrongness of Nazi

Oh, no sweat, it was quite clear.

Edited by Lightysnake on Dec 24th 2022 at 12:23:33 PM

I was joking about the "no meaningfully present representation of the other side of the debate" part, just to be clear. You know, since this is an overwhelmingly left-leaning community.

Back then, some people were arguing in favor of keeping Stonetoss, but mostly on the basis of the "we don't cut things we disagree with" rule — that tropeworthy propaganda is still tropeworthy even if it's highly morally objectionable. Hence why the thing that turned the tide was the fact that the comic was being stealthy about it, which put us into a really bad position.

I agree that Crazy's take was... weird, because even most of the other people defending it back then were in agreement that the comic was a Nazi comic or at least had some really bad political hot takes.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 24th 2022 at 3:28:04 PM

Is it weird when given the context that all I saw was people throwing around the term without explaining why it applied? At best, I could tell that folks agreed that the people who were most vocal about liking it were neo-nazis. That's the sort of justification that suggests Stephen Jay Gould and Mary Higby Schweitzer support YEC because they are so often quoted by that group. Those two don't deserve to be lumped into the same group, and have taken at least some measure of effort to distance themselves from that group, yet YEC persist in quote(-mining) them.

There was discussion over a comic in question where it was blatant Holocaust denial and it was absolutely explained how. my second post here detailed it.

It was absolutely spelled out in the topic exactly what was being depicted

Yeah, the above makes it apparent the specifics of the issue with the webcomic were made public on the thread.

The difference between ST and the above two is the author’s personal views do align with Neo-Nazism, he’s not someone being quoted by a hate group attempting to distance himself.

Edited by 43110 on Dec 24th 2022 at 5:50:06 AM