Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
A mod from World News@lemmy.world.
What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
I had my comment removed and received a one-day ban.
Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
Original post: Pope is in ‘critical’ condition after suffering ‘asthmatic respiratory crisis,’ Vatican says
Like many of us on Lemmy, I think the Catholic church is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, including the way they were/are directly involved in blocking access to contraception leading to the needless death of millions of Africans due to the AIDs epidemic, the endless cases of child sex abuse, along with the ongoing coverups, and honestly too many awful things to mention in detail here.
So I left a comment that said:
The Catholic church at this point has all the moral authority of a child sex cult.
Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Amend community rule 4 to remove the reference to religion. WTF is it doing there as a rule in a news community in the first place? Is LW being run as a theocracy now?
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist,
anti-religious,or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
The mod in question is also a religious weirdo (see below during a discussion about Luigi), so perhaps that is why they have the rule in place. But if that community not going to accept fair criticism of religion then it isn’t a serious news community imo.
I fully acknowledge it wasn’t a long ban and the rule was in place, so it was perhaps a BPR or YDI in that sense. But the rule shouldn’t be there in the first place. How on earth is it justified? And looking at the other votes and comments on that post, it’s clear that the the vast majority of folks hate the Catholics church as much as I do. So why is this mod running defence for the famously morally bankrupt Catholic church in a world news community?
PTB
I saw this in the modlog and it also came off weird to me. It’s definitely BPR or PTB but you got the ban reason wrong? It says rule 6 right there, not rule 4.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
So… I kind of see this? The original post was about the pope’s health. Your comment was removed along with a slew of other much less defensible and off topic comments so I can see how a mod might just go in there and remove them all for being off topic.
TLDR, you didn’t deserve a ban but I think you mischaracterize the reason for the ban and it’s not as serious as your title portrays it. Make those comments in a place where it’s relevant (i.e. under a post about sexual abuse) and you’d be a-ok I’d wager.
PTB for sure.
Anti-religious sentiment is something that a lot of people get really, really wrong here. Because they don’t understand the difference between three things:
- The religion itself - a set of moral and epistemic beliefs, rituals, behaviours. e.g. “Christianity”
- The religious community - people who claim to follow #1. e.g. “Christians”
- Religious institutions - a power structure using #1 to rule over #2. e.g. “the Catholic Church”.
OP is clearly criticising #3 and only #3. That’s completely fine. Discrimination would target #2 instead. And it’s clear that rule 4 is about discrimination, otherwise “anti-religious sentiment” wouldn’t be lumped alongside homophobia, racism, etc.
Amend community rule 4 to remove the reference to religion. WTF is it doing there as a rule in a news community in the first place? Is LW being run as a theocracy now?
Ideally this should be amended in a way that people can still criticise #1 and #3 just fine, but doesn’t let you to target people based on their religion or lack of. Things like [for example] “Christians are all disgusting and rotten” should still not be allowed; but things like the mod’s comment towards Atheists should not either.
…in any other instance I’d propose people to escalate the issue to the admins, but given LW’s tendency to screech at people not willing to put up with crap, that is likely useless.
I think there’s a difference between criticizing religious people, and criticizing a religious organization.
Criticizing an organization isn’t discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs, and should be allowed
I feel likw this could be a case of a rule being written (a bit poorly) with reasonable intent, and then interpreted to the letter rather than the spirit.
I do get its important for mods to be consistent around rules if they want to avoid burn out and getting too pulled into disputes, but I think the rule is misworded around the important part- discrimination based on a person’s religious identity
I suppose the question then becomes, where’s the line? Is criticising individual high-ranking members of a religious organisation criticism of “religious people”, or of the institution? If I say the Pope was a paedophile defender (because he demonstrably played defence for known paedophile George Pell), is that criticising Catholicism, or a religious person who has not himself directly done anything wrong?
I mean, protecting/enabling a pedophile is directly doing something wrong, and so is obstruction of justice.
But the line is when the criticism is religious identity. The pope isn’t a piece of shit because he’s Catholic, he’s a piece of shit because he used his position of power (in the Catholic church) to protect someone who robbed a child of the capacity to feel safe for the rest of their life.
The behavior and use of organizational power to do harm is the issue, not the demographic he identifies with. As a general rule, shit rolls uphill; you’re allowed to criticize people in a religious organization who should have prevented heinous crimes. You shouldn’t be allowed to criticize someone for identifying with Catholicism or as a Catholic, but I’m not really seeing any example of that here.
I periodically see folks on lemmy talk trash to others on the basis that they’re religious, or condemn folks for believing in something non-secular. It absolutely happens here, but this (and your example) seem pretty unambiguous to me 🤷♂️
