Hey all. I’d like to open an official discussion regarding the upturning of the prior Hexbear party line on an :israel-cool: emote proper with the unambiguous Zionist flag.
I want to preface this by saying this is not in a ‘ceding the issue’ way. Over the past year I’ve been trying to engage in self-crit w/rt the chauvinism I’ve internalized growing up in a Liberal Zionist household, and my personal viewpoint on it did a 180 some months back, so I want to reopen this discussion proper in my personal capacities as Self-Appointed Emote Czar.
The reason it’s taken long enough beyond that is prior to July, I was essentially half-engaged with the site in order to finish out my degree. After that, it’s been mostly inertia of confirming with the admins and other /c/Judaism mods, as well as having to be rigorous about my job search personally giving me little free time to coordinate this.
I do not want to center myself in this conversation more than I inadvertently already have, so I will leave my own opinion on the issue as a comment rather than explaining further here.
The consensus we’ve roughly come to is to open up the discussion in an official manner for a day or so. After that, I’ll weigh the discussion in an entirely vibes-based manner (sorry Dean Norris enjoyers) and we’ll alter Hexbear party line on it accordingly.
The reason I’ve leapt to Z’s defense is that Nakoichi’s treatment of them and the other posters agreeing with them was so egregious that it really looks like a biased application of moderating privileges to force an opinion that, it turns out, is actually very unpopular especially in context, plus the clear examples of microaggressions that several other users have noticed and commented on already. But I’ll admit I’m not as up on site lore as other people, so I might have a less pointed opinion on Z than other users, so maybe I’m wrong about them as an individual. With respect to the flag emoji, this seems like one of those instances where someone had to rock the boat in order to get it moving again, and in all appearances it seemed that Z was being punished for being that person.
I agree but with 2 caveats. Z was far from the only person calling this out and rocking the boat in that way (nor were they the first), and received mod/admin attention because of their history not because of their stance on :israel-cool:
The admins should not have left someone unbanned who was such an unrepentant asshole and perennial sockpuppeteer, that they would not be able to restrain themselves from sniping back in the future