AFTER THE TORRENT, THE FLOOD

It's been over a year since I wrote A TINY TORRENT OF CENSORSHIP, in which I mentioned two unrelated incidents in which I'd made posts on two forums-- CBR and SUPERHERO HYPE-- that were censored, in one case, with a post-deletion, in the other case, with a locked thread. (I also mentioned an incident on THE BEAT, but it wasn't my post that was deleted.) This year, the "flood" has struck, in that in the past week I was banned from both CBR and SUPERHERO HYPE.

Such forums, of course, are always dictatorships, distinguished only by whether or not the dictators are permissive or stringent. This in turn depends on the POV of the person making the judgment. Based on my experiences with these two forums, I would say HYPE was pretty stringent while CBR at least displayed some desire to be seen as permissive. This is ironic in that CBR rebooted its forums in 2014, theoretically in response to the Janelle Asselin business, for reasons that remain unclear.

Now, precisely because HYPE locked one of my threads unfairly, I barely posted there in the last year. As for CBR, I changed my mind since writing, in the aforementioned Asselin essay, that I didn't think that I'd join the new CBR community. I did join, but since I didn't get the sense that I shared any of the tastes of the posters re: pop culture, most of the time I hung out on one or two Politics threads. Occasionally I took forum-posts made on CBR and made them into blogposts here. 

Given that the majority of posters on CBR were ultraliberals, the only attraction of posting on CBR was to bait said ultraliberals. Now, unlike most persons of this political persuasion-- and presumably ultraconservatives as well, if I could find any-- I don't consider "baiting" to be the same as "trolling." I'm aware that in some quarters "trolling" is defined as the activity of expressing an opinion that runs contrary to the opinions dominating the forum. Generally, this is not the meaning most posters communicate when they use the term "troll." They mean, rather, that the poster is putting out some opinion that diverges from the dominant one because the individual poster is attempting to sow strife and toxicity. "Baiting," however, has a longer and nobler tradition that predates Al Gore's invention of the Internet. and has more to do with voicing opinions based in differing premises. CBR actually put up with my baiting of toxic ultraliberals for over a year, and since I didn't break any rules for the forum, it seems likely that some snowflake poster made a complaint, the better to make the political threads into an echo chamber wherein everyone agrees.

So what did I get banned for? In both cases the ban was permanent, so I can't access the forums from my normal IP address. I assume that I could see CBR if I used another IP address, but I have not yet done so. I'm sure that there will be no explanation of what rule I supposedly violated, but I'm reasonably sure that I didn't post anything different from what I'd been posting for a year. I recall that one poster had just accused me of being a white supremacist, so it's probable that this was the rationale that the moderators used to get me off their backs.

I did look at HYPE through another IP that I'd never used for that board. All I noticed was that one of my posts had been completely deleted, but it wasn't even particularly inflammatory-- except to ultraliberals. One poster had been going on about how American Neo-Nazis were the lowest form of life, and that they automatically inherited all the sins of the Holocaust. I did not defend Neo-Nazis in any way, but I pointed out that the imputation of transferrable guilt did not make any sense. I stated, as a reducio ad absurdum, that it made about as much sense as saying that modern Muslims were responsible for the deeds of archaic Muslims who made slavery into Big Business. In retrospect I wonder if I would've been banned had I used a different argument, like finding American Communists responsible for the deeds of Stalin. But it's a moot point.

I've now sought out the political board DEBATE POLITICS to see how that one works. I've been a classic liberal for a long time, and still deem myself one. But I depart from most of the positions of current Leftists, particularly their descent into incoherence when anyone challenges their belief-system.

ADDENDUM: I was amused by this 2020 podcast--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiKQa8YOxpY

--in which one podcaster calls Comic Book Resources a "Tumbler dumpster file" because of yet another ultraliberal essay about how Hollywood oppresses female superheroes. I'm not surprised to hear that the site has gone even farther down the rabbit hole of idiocy than was previously the case.