There has absolutely been a theme in this process of non-administrator, non-moderator users being treated as second class citizens. The people who were wronged by Goober, who were threatened with legal action and then censored by him against site policy, were told to shut up and sit tight while the people whose opinions mattered decided what to do behind closed doors, and we've now been handed down a verdict that we got no say in whatsoever which takes almost comical pains to avoid judgement or consequence for the person directly and solely responsible for this incident. When the little users act up we get told we're in violation of such and such a rule and slapped with a ban and a snarky comment. When an admin tramples all over basic rules of how this site is supposedly administered and slinging legal threats, the admins produce something that reads like an air crash investigation, assiduously avoiding actually blaming anyone in favour of neutral suggestions of systematic change.
EDIT: It has been suggested that I delete this post since it falls to properly communicate the point I was trying to make, and which I communicated better in my
2nd post from this one. Fair enough. However, in the interest of not rewriting history or confusing people, I'm hesitant to remove it entirely. Instead, I hope this edit sufficiently communicates that you should refer to
this post to understand what I tried to communicate in this one. Sorry for the confusion!
You seem to have forgotten one core issue here.
You ARE "second-class" citizens, in the strictest sense: HLP is not a democracy. It's a benevolent dictatorship
, and you don't get to vote about who's in charge around here. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nobody's forcing you to stay here if you don't agree with the decisions coming from the conglomerate that is
El Presidente here. Benevolent dictatorship.
Personally, I'd rather you
didn't go... regardless of any disagreements I may have with you about various things. After all, when all's said and done, we're here for FreeSpace. All the rest of this is optional, community-related fluff.
Moving on...
A major part of the problem people have with the decision the
admins and moderators benevolent dictators arrived at is that said decision was arrived at "behind closed doors". That's just something you'll have to live with. You can believe us when we say that it was not arrived at lightly.
FWIW, the same thing happens in (all) governments. Classified information is presented to those in positions of power, information the public cannot be made aware of for various reasons. Those people in positions of power then have to make decisions based on
all the information they have. Those decisions, if heavily informed by said classified information, can look odd, illogical, or even downright dumb to the people "in the dark". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I love that kaomoji)...what we are dealing with here is abuse of power by an admin threatening legal action against members...
Wrong (but I understand the confusion). Anyone is "free" to threaten legal action against anyone else, on or off the forum. Doing so has nothing to do with an abuse of admin power. The latter only happened when he deleted the thread.
There is no reason whatsoever for that thread to remain deleted long after every other admin has acknowledged that its deletion was totally illegitimate.
Yes, there is. While you all have been focusing on one side of the wrongdoings here, you've been utterly ignoring that there is still another side: accusing someone of being a white nationalist
is a personal attack, which we do not tolerate here. So now the
admins & moderators benevolent dictators who weren't participatory in the original thread need to go through and edit it as we collectively see fit before restoring it.