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Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.

In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)

If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.

I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.

During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.

Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.

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693 comments

  • I was at work yesterday so I couldn't have my eyes glued to this.

    Are the admins/mods still framing their the problem with the struggle session as just being about the banwaves?

    Has anything been said or done about the ACTUAL spark that began the drama? That is, has there been a discussion about the way decisions are made without user input (let alone democracy) for reasons that are then lied about?

    This will happen again unless the primary contradiction is resolved: is this website a social club for the mods in which we are simply extras, or is this our website as the users?

    • I am working on creating a matrix space that would be where all site proposals are posted, discussed and voted on. This space could also be where feedback and mod action appeals can be posted. Discussion regarding each proposal, appeal, or feedback would be within a thread under the top-level message.

      It is open to join for anyone, the history of the channel can be seen and voted on, however only people that verify their hexbear account can send messages.

      This is very much a work in progress and may change in the next couple of week but our priority is to change things to improve transparency/user engagement in the steering of the site

      From Carcosa somewhere in this thread

    • dude this aint a democracy tf you talking about, and invoking mao's contradictions in this case is deeply unserious

      • jeez the worst insult of all wow sorry I phrased it wrong

        Question: is this place for its mods or its users

        Answer: this is not a democracy

        Is that like the vibe in the modchat or just you? Maybe I should just keep my head down.

        • To be fair to helltaker, the wrecker successfully got several user’s to point fingers at her when she wasn’t in a position to defend herself: if that happened to me I’d come out the gates swinging too.

          Sulvor posted Carcosa’s proposals from elsewhere in this thread- I think most of us are waiting for Lyudmilla’s upcoming update post to review all proposed changes and plans of action.

      • Do you think dialectical thinking can only be applied to political economy? Genuinely asking cuz as I have learned more and more about it I keep seeing it everywhere lol. It's also fun seeing western academia reinvent new dialectical forms of thinking over and over in spite of the dominant rabid anti-communism lol

        To me, rly, it seems like an unfortunately-often-vague-and-misunderstood philosophical approach toward explaining the behavior and development of complex systems that can't be described satisfactorily by the opposite approach of metaphysical methods based on external static, strictly categorized and consistent, solely-determining repeating relationships of cause and effect

        Ofc Engels thought dialectics was more than just a mode of thought but something like the way reality functioned fundamentally (idk, I should go back and finish reading Anti-Duhring), didn't he? Idk how you would reconcile this with modern physics butttt......

        Have been thinking about a formal system of """"dialectical"""" logic for a few years on and off, recently actually been reading more about the various paraconsistent formal logical systems created to address the many shortcomings of classical first-order logic (math nerds legit had to reinvent basic concepts of abstract math like a century ago cuz they couldn't reconcile the fact that naive set theory is inconsistent and therefore proves everything is true according to that logic) since I got some meds for my ADHD that let me focus better lol. USSR actually had a Lysenko-type guy ("Ivan Orlov", he uhhhh didn't like Einstein's theories of relativity among other things apparently, I just found a paper of his on some Russian crank website lol) for logic lol, turns out he was doing stuff with relevance logic before almost anyone else was (that is known). I'm very

        and I can't find most of his publications cuz I don't speak Russian and most of it is rly obscure but modal and relevance logics are pretty cool imo

        Point of all of this being I think dialectics has many useful applications, especially to understand complex systems like this site lol

693 comments