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.
Look, I agree with you about religion in general and in particular Catholicism.
That being said, the opinion I now present is a bit of a Devil’s Advocate position:
The moderators of lemmy.world’s worldnews community want to create an inclusive environment, and doing so means that they have to accept that the majority of the world (up to 85%) identifies as religious. (Stay with me, this is going somewhere)
Whether I like religion or not, I’ve met a lot of those people, and I’d say at least a quarter of them are decent people, religion be damned. They practice what they preach, so to speak.
So perhaps the moderators are doing their best to give users, including religious users, charitable interpretations of their interactions with others. Meaning that disparaging the entire religion might set off a lot of fighting that they would rather not moderate, and they also don’t want to make the moderately religious feel unwelcome.
I agree with your assessment that the comment probably shouldn’t have been removed, it’s a bit overkill.
I’m just trying to put myself in the shoes of a moderator who wants to keep the amount of moderating they do to a minimum, and they could either accept that the majority of people may very well be religious or they can make an echo chamber full of atheists like us.
I think the rule is fine and getting rid of it is just asking to make a large portion of the world in a world news community feel unwelcome. Not every person inside the Catholic church is literally a child rapist, no matter how much they have done to enable child rapists in their ranks.
Like I said, I think removing your opinion (that could handily be backed up with evidence) is overkill… but at the same time maybe it was to prevent a flamewar from being started. Who knows.
Finally, Pope Francis sucks but is still a lot less sucky than most of the right-wing Cardinals who are closer in politics and ideology to that of Donald Trump and want to get back to sitting on gold thrones. Francis has at least tried to change the church marginally for the better, no matter if what he’s done fails to come close to what needs to be done. He’s literally up against his own theology and half of the Cardinals (if not more) of his own church. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that nonsense.
Anyway, that’s my two cents and me trying to give charitable interpretations to the actions of the moderators.
Your take is reasonable as a devils advocate type of thing, but I don’t think having a rule against anti-religious sentiments is a good thing regardless of what instance it’s in.
I get not wanting to form an echo chamber, but it’s not our fault that online spaces largely became a refuge for atheists and people who are critical of religion. I say let the dice fall where they may in a space where both theist and anti-theist opinions are allowed.
And aside from that, lumping anti-religious sentiments in with racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia is just ridiculous. At the very least they could have worded it better.
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 🤷♂️
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.
“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.” -Lenny Bruce
They’re calling Luigi supporters tankies because… The middle/lower class cheered for the worst of the bourgeoisie being taken out???
@teagrrl@lemmy.ml Maybe you were right lol. Like seriously, I’ll stop using “tankie” as a shorthand for “authoritarian apologist”.
Also,
PTB. Well, it was written in the rules… But the rule itself is power-tripping IMO.They’re calling Luigi supporters tankies because tankies are supporting luigi and literally anything else that can incite violence and radicalism in other nations than China, Russia, NK, etc.
It’s like if you held an opinion which the KKK also just happen to vocally agree with. You’re going to get associated with the KKK.
They’re calling Luigi supporters tankies because… The middle/lower class cheered for the worst of the bourgeoisie being taken out???
I know right, these mods are such social conservatives. They have no idea what the majority of their users think, or if they do, they disapprove of it. It’s such a condescending attitude of “we know best”.
