It's been used several times before. A fair few OTBC's have been doled out and a user got one warning and then a permaban.

Edit: ACEG made it easier for me by ignoring the timeout which would earn anyone a temp ban. Hopefully he will take heed and not link to breitbart when he returns.

Trolly must never visit CTH:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/48...an-you-916359/

This isn't some new chez-only rule. CTH gets a lot of new posters which are just ad-spamming bots, p8.8 gets a lot of new users who quickly break rules or more likely are just previously-banned posters who can't control themselves.

He's right though. Banning Breitbart is indefensible.

I've googled a topic, multiple stories exactly the same from multiple sources including Breitbart, I make sure I don't use the Breitbart link.


Complete stupidity. I mean, we know they are all using the associated press feed, but because it's from breitbart it's "fake"? Lol.

Chez -- can you explain how cow's post about brietvart violated the pc rule?

It violated the 'don't link to Breibart' decision. It doesn't matter if he doesn't understand why we made that decision - he knows that we made it.

Why has been discuss aplenty. I have to leave it at that for now.

However the mods handle it, Bratbart-style content which targets individuals and their groups with stuff like stereotyping and fear-mongering is indefensible. It's like asking to get counter-targeted.

You haven't explained how linking to brietbart violates the pc rule at all as far as I can tell. But by all means, keep "encouraging discussion" about the "pc rule" while steadfastly refusing to answer basic questions about it.

I've never seen a rule like this invoked in politics. It's clear ACEG isn't selling a product, so this seems irrelevant.

I've never read Breitbart, so i don't know much about it, but is it actually fake news? Or just really slanted?

It's a little bit fake but mostly just terribly slanted towards white nationalism. They post fake stuff that fits alt right narratives (climate change isn't real, contraception makes women crazy, immigrants are coming in waves and stealing jobs), but they also post "normal" news with a huge white nationalist slant.

How does this differ from current mainstream American conservativism? Almost all GOP leaders make noises about how climate change is not man-made. Hostility to contraception is a long-time attitude of the religious right. Almost all conservatives talk about the dangers of immigration now. As for white nationalism, well we can argue about, but some version of white supremacy is also a long-time aspect of American conservatism.

The problem with the Breitbart ban is that it takes too substantive a position on the state of modern American political culture. Breitbart is a mainstream political website in the US. Banning links to it is an implicit judgment that arguing for or posting those viewpoints, viewpoints held by major American political leaders and a significant number of Republicans, goes against the PC-bias rule. I think that is too expansive an interpretation of the rule, marking too much political discussion as out of bounds.

Normalization of extremism is still an open question. Conservatives can still choose to moderate. Mainstream is a whopper of a classification though for supremacists They been on the decline of self-defeating for decades.

The fact that it's mainstream doesn't make it not hate speech. Also, it's possible to talk about Beritbart without explicitly linking to their website just like I can talk about the Klan but I'd presumably catch a ban for linking to their website.

Right. And my point is that moderators should not be answering that question for posters.

As for mainstream, Breitbart is one of the most popular news-oriented websites in the country and Steve Bannon is a special advisor to the President.

Temporary positions in markets, narratives, and authority don't change informational qualities of known detriments of human beings like prejudice and discrimination. Why choose to give known detriments to human beings mainstream status as even just one participant of the main stream? is a question for posters.

Should purveyors of medium-hard prejudice be linked to this forum? is more like a question for the mods.


Wasn't one of the not-PC complaints about PC it is that it is popular too? 'Just cant say anything anywhere to anybody anymore'. PC is apparently mainstream too.

Like looky here is a PC forum we are in. It's got rules- like content and !!!, and the soft PC rule- 'protects vulnerable groups'. From who? The mods are almost too polite to say most of the time. I bet posters will tell you.

I'm not objecting to the ban on linking to hate speech. I'm objecting to banning linking anything from Breitbart. The first of these can be determined on a case-by-case basis, and while hate speech can be a fuzzy category, is potentially workable. The second requires a political judgement that anything directly associated with Breitbart is inherently offensive to vulnerable groups. That judgement might be correct. But it is a substantive political judgement that a significant portion of the GOP, which identifies with the general Breitbart outlook on things, is so offensive that it shouldn't be allowed a place within normal democratic discourse. Such a decision should not be left to the discretion of the moderators alone, but should also require approval from at least P7 regs as well. At minimum, the moderators should have solicited input from posters before censoring one of the biggest news providers in America.

After all, has a justification been offered that all linking to Breitbart is offensive to vulnerable groups? No doubt there are many articles on Breitbart that would be offensive. But many articles are not. For instance, shouldn't a discussion of the Republican health care plan be able to link to the critical comments of Breitbart.com to the plan? How is that offensive to vulnerable groups?

It seems to me that you don't need a blanket ban on Breitbart links to enforce a rule against hate speech or requiring a general PC bias. I agree with OrP's reasoning that a blanket ban is too expansive.

edit: let us engage in hate speech against my pony

"What about the non-offensive posts on Stormfront?"

C'mon man, WTF.

OP, your arguments just aren't good. You basically want to normalize the kind of things Steve King just said. You can easily say "alt right sites like brietbart are even against the healthcare bill" without linking there. That's not even hard.

There are decent arguments for allowing garbage to be linked from here, but you're not making them and trolly and spank are refuting them pretty easily.

No it isn't. It is a question that is answered by reality. The reality is that Breitbart is a mainstream political website in the US. It has high readership, real political influence, White House correspondents, etc.

Yes, I agree, which is why I am attempting to persuade them that they should allow linking to Breitbart.

They could of at least answered his question...

I agree as well. Perhaps it's really because they don't have the time to parse through every link and this is the shortcut they want?

As I said earlier, I can see a justification for banning links from a place like Stormfront in an effort to keep them obscure. That is obviously not relevant to Breitbart. And, as I said earlier, if Stormfront gained the same prominence as Breitbart, I would make the same arguments against blanket banning.

Look, I get that this is a somewhat symbolic point. You can make any point you want to by simply block-quoting Breitbart instead of linking to it. My position is that a political forum like this should try to attract people across the main parts of the political spectrum. Isn't that a big part of the purpose of this forum, to talk to people with a different political perspective? Neo-nazis are mostly irrelevant and so there is little loss to discussion if they don't feel welcome. The increase in signal and the more welcoming atmosphere for vulnerable groups can even potentially justify banning neo-nazi links because doing so has such little loss. However, if banning Breitbart and similar decisions causes mainstream non-trollish GOP posters to also not be willing to post here, that seems to me a significant cost, and posters should have a say in whether we should pay it.

OP, the reason people don't want white nationalist views here isn't a matter of exposure. Have you not seen the political landscape of the last 2 years? How can you have the same view that Brietbart should be allowed because of the prominence of Bannon and Miller while stating neo nazis are irrelevant? Do you not see the contradiction?

Banning people who block-quote Breitbart is a-OK with me.