There exists no literal Nazi party. Do you mean anyone who has ever said anything good about the original german Nazi party? What does “supporting” mean?
Do you mean people who self-identity as a member of the Nazi party?
These are good questions that would need to be answered if it weren’t for “and the like”, which makes the rule fuzzy again no matter how unambiguously we define “Nazi”.
FWIW, I also find this comment kinda nitpicky. I realize there’s a few different things it could mean, and I think the phrase ‘and the like’ is doing some weird, ambiguous work.
But I do think it’s fairly straightforward and reasonable to clump “people who literally think [former] Nazi party should have won the war, and people who nowadays call themselves Nazis or Neo-Nazis (whether that’s associated with a formal party or not, it seems to me like an obvious endorsement of the original party)”.
[Don’t want to argue further about this, but wanted to register the disagreement]
But you realize this isn’t just random unmotivated nitpicking, because it’s also fairly straightforward and reasonable to clump “Nazi” with “HBD”, and from there to ban someone like Gwern for his GWAS and embryo selection research, right?
(I regret having posted the original comment since my opinion depends on a lot of related points and I don’t feel good about how people are likely to interpret the comment without all those related points. Will offer this one clarification)
I think there are lots of bad and dumb ways to conflate Nazi’s with other things, and a lot of bad policies I have seen people endorse re: Nazis. I *do* have a moderately strong opposition to the phrase “Nazis or the like”, as a concept, because that is opening all kinds of room for unprincipled slippery slopes like the one you mention.
But I don’t think it’s particularly weird, if you are running a private space, to say “in this space it is not acceptable to openly self-identify as a Nazi.” (This is in part because I think it’s generally essential for private spaces to have pretty strong leeway to define their culture pretty arbitrarily)
But I don’t think it’s particularly weird, if you are running a private space, to say “in this space it is not acceptable to openly self-identify as a Nazi.” (This is in part because I think it’s generally essential for private spaces to have pretty strong leeway to define their culture pretty arbitrarily)
[Emphasis mine]
Note that the OP is explicitly and specifically about public (a.k.a. “civic”) spaces.
Questions of what is, and what is not, appropriate for private spaces, are thus not applicable.
Ah, thank you, I missed that. (I’m not sure whether this changes my opinion about how fair it is to cluster all self-identified-Nazis together but it makes it complicated enough that I’m not prepared to make a strong claim on the subject)
Are you acting as the moderator nitpicking, or acting as a user nitpicking?
Are you personally committed to arguing with this post because it potentially mandates moderation behaviour? Or because you want to demonstrate being the bully being described?
What on earth is going on with this whole comment thread??
Only as a user. This is all on Davis’s personal blog
The precise definition is important, because there are many definitions of “Nazi” that an uncharitable judge could put me and many people that I care about under. E.g. see clone of saturn’s comment.
Accusing someone else of being a Nazi and using that to justify that they have to be banned or punished is an extremely common occurrence on the internet.
Davis himself says that the precise definition is really important:
and such rules should be clearly articulated beforehand
And I strongly agree with that. So it seems reasonable to understand what the remote scope of that ban is supposed to be. The current thing definitely strikes me as vague enough that I would not invest significantly into an online community that has that as one of their rules.
It’s also important because that footnote seems to me like it hides all the complexity of Davis’s proposed policy under the rug, by providing an extremely broad escape clause that I expect to get used all the time when moderators actually get annoyed or into a topic that they care a lot about.
I mean people who literally, actually support the Nazi party.
There exists no literal Nazi party. Do you mean anyone who has ever said anything good about the original german Nazi party? What does “supporting” mean?
Do you mean people who self-identity as a member of the Nazi party?
These are good questions that would need to be answered if it weren’t for “and the like”, which makes the rule fuzzy again no matter how unambiguously we define “Nazi”.
FWIW, I also find this comment kinda nitpicky. I realize there’s a few different things it could mean, and I think the phrase ‘and the like’ is doing some weird, ambiguous work.
But I do think it’s fairly straightforward and reasonable to clump “people who literally think [former] Nazi party should have won the war, and people who nowadays call themselves Nazis or Neo-Nazis (whether that’s associated with a formal party or not, it seems to me like an obvious endorsement of the original party)”.
[Don’t want to argue further about this, but wanted to register the disagreement]
But you realize this isn’t just random unmotivated nitpicking, because it’s also fairly straightforward and reasonable to clump “Nazi” with “HBD”, and from there to ban someone like Gwern for his GWAS and embryo selection research, right?
(I regret having posted the original comment since my opinion depends on a lot of related points and I don’t feel good about how people are likely to interpret the comment without all those related points. Will offer this one clarification)
I think there are lots of bad and dumb ways to conflate Nazi’s with other things, and a lot of bad policies I have seen people endorse re: Nazis. I *do* have a moderately strong opposition to the phrase “Nazis or the like”, as a concept, because that is opening all kinds of room for unprincipled slippery slopes like the one you mention.
But I don’t think it’s particularly weird, if you are running a private space, to say “in this space it is not acceptable to openly self-identify as a Nazi.” (This is in part because I think it’s generally essential for private spaces to have pretty strong leeway to define their culture pretty arbitrarily)
[Emphasis mine]
Note that the OP is explicitly and specifically about public (a.k.a. “civic”) spaces.
Questions of what is, and what is not, appropriate for private spaces, are thus not applicable.
Ah, thank you, I missed that. (I’m not sure whether this changes my opinion about how fair it is to cluster all self-identified-Nazis together but it makes it complicated enough that I’m not prepared to make a strong claim on the subject)
Are you acting as the moderator nitpicking, or acting as a user nitpicking?
Are you personally committed to arguing with this post because it potentially mandates moderation behaviour? Or because you want to demonstrate being the bully being described?
What on earth is going on with this whole comment thread??
Only as a user. This is all on Davis’s personal blog
The precise definition is important, because there are many definitions of “Nazi” that an uncharitable judge could put me and many people that I care about under. E.g. see clone of saturn’s comment.
Accusing someone else of being a Nazi and using that to justify that they have to be banned or punished is an extremely common occurrence on the internet.
Davis himself says that the precise definition is really important:
And I strongly agree with that. So it seems reasonable to understand what the remote scope of that ban is supposed to be. The current thing definitely strikes me as vague enough that I would not invest significantly into an online community that has that as one of their rules.
It’s also important because that footnote seems to me like it hides all the complexity of Davis’s proposed policy under the rug, by providing an extremely broad escape clause that I expect to get used all the time when moderators actually get annoyed or into a topic that they care a lot about.