[meta] Please ban comics by bigoted artists
A few days ago I made a post to gauge this community's opinion on whether it should allow nice comics by bigoted artists. I think we have a consensus.
The majority of comments were very in support of banning comics by artists like Stonetoss and Jago. I heard from queer people who said they'd feel safer if the rules were changed. A lot of people were concerned about this community becoming a "Nazi bar", the comment expressing that feeling got a LOT of upvotes.
The people against the change had two main arguments: anti-censorship, and personal responsibility. A few people equated active moderation practices with book burning. Nearly all of these "against" comments were downvoted or ratiod, and tended to have a lot of arguments underneath them, while the "pro" comments went uncontested.
On the internet, 10% of people will disagree with just about anything. With that in mind, I think we've reached a consensus. The community wants a rule change so that users can't post inoffensive comics by bigoted artists.
That means no more Jago comics. I see a lot of people in the comments under the Jago posts, getting angry and saying they want this rule change. People aren't happy with the user who's posting all the Jago comics.
Mods, this is what we want. Please change the rules and get Jago's comics outta here.
Locking this for right now, this thread has gotten out of hand. Edit: unlocked. Please behave.
A blanket 'bigoted artists' rule is ripe for banning based on someone's entire history, like firing James Gunn for bad jokes in old tweets.
Instead I would prefer to ban individual artists based on their art. So I fully support banning Jago comics because all the ones I remember are based on anti LGBTQ+ or sexist stereotypes. Not because they are bigoted, but because their content is. No idea who stonetoss is, but if their content is similar then I would also favor banning them.
No purity tests though.
I'm fully for this. I'd rather have a clear ban list where every addition is thoroughly discussed.
Forcing mods to make constant judgement calls is though on them and might lead to arguments where they find themselves stuck in the middle.
Yeah I think this is the most important thing, as long as community discussion drives the content of the ban list, it's all good.
You'd almost certainly know a stonetoss comic, they were pretty common over the last decade or so.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/StoneToss
Oh yeah, I never liked those.
I initially chose not to weigh in because I find that people with differing opinions aren't always well-tolerated on Lemmy. I think you have a good, nuanced take.
I also thought it was very helpful that a few people called out example comics of what they meant by "bigoted" . I was going to express some concern that even mildly self-deprecating humor would be banned if it applied to lgbtq people. Based on those examples, though, I have to agree with the consensus. Jago and Stonetoss are just stupid in addition to being poor taste.
Lots of other possible directions. Is parody okay?
The argument of censorship is bullshit. If a comic is made to discriminate, it is basic decency to get rid of it. If an author makes themselves known by being discriminatory, no platform that cares about user safety and having a non-toxic community needs to get rid of them. It's as simple as that.
When you refuse that kind of "censorship", you are only making it clear that you like making this place unsafe for the people being attacked. Which makes you a piece of shit in my book.
So yeah, let's just ban these things that have no reason to exist, let alone on lemmy.
It is really sad that now, when someone mentions "freedom of speech" I automatically see it as a red flag, despite freedom of speech being a good thing. Nazis really mess up everything.
Freedom of Speech only means that the government cannot censor you.
It has nothing to do with what businesses, individuals, groups, or anyone else does.
When the United States runs a social media, then they can argue that all they want there.
The only caution with that is, private companies have a LOT of power and control right now. Easy to argue they shouldn’t, of course.
An example might be Visa enforcing “content guidelines” on any paid content on Steam providing NSFW games. Like, say, any game that acknowledges gay people exist. Payment processors and similar companies have claimed that’s a freedom of speech stance.
But yes, we can definitely keep it simple in forum communities constantly under human enforcement.
That is just the US legal definition and it is very flawed.
Freedom of speech, more broadly, is the ability to express an opinion without fear of retaliation. This implies constraints on social organizations of all sizes.
Freedom of speech should also be compatible with the paradox of intolerance (unless intolerance is chosen to be socially accepted), which implies censorship at many levels.
By definition that same freedom of speech can be used as retaliation. Nobody should be able to attack someone else and expect them not to defend themselves.
It is because such an idea of speech free from retaliation exists that the parodox of tolerance also exists.
Speech is never likely to be free from consequences. That is exactly why we have diplomacy.
I agree, and It's all because of the distorted form of freedom of speech they have in USA, we generally don't have that problem in European democracies.
For instance FOX News is simply illegal by European standards, because they lie and distort reality.
In online spaces there also seems to be this wierd thinking of "if it isn't illegal you have to accept it".
Yes, which is really stupid, some people seem to think that freedom of expression means that sites have to allow their stupidity. Which is far from the case.
In Europe it is still there, far right extremists love to complain about cancel culture, about being censored, etc.
But yeah, they generally prefer to sue for defamation when someone criticises them
they know they are wrong, so they become defensive and tries to gaslight, its pretty much alt right tactic 101.
France unfortunately has billionaire-backed C-News which is the same flavor as Fox-news.
Maybe similar flavor, but they can't possibly be as bad, because much of what FOX does would be illegal.
Maybe similar flavor, and maybe they are as bad and maybe you just are posting about something you don't know/care about.
What they are doing is definitely illegal, but they only get the occasional slap on the wrist for it, which the billionaire owner pays. France does not really enforce rules concerning media surveillance, unless it suits rhé government's agenda.
Points they were already checked for include: promoting racism, having racist claims, false claims about [abortion, immigrants, "leftists", convictions of right-wing former president], edited images, using fake numbers, having shared staff with RT, and gaming the channel's stats to fake compliance with the law regarding the diversity of what is shown.
CNews went to create a fascist candidate (Eric Zemmour) for the last presidential elections (the guy was pretty much unknown before). Oh, the guy even had a neonazi group (les Zouaves) for security during rallies.
Fu'nily, the neonazi leader (Marc de Caqueray Valmenier) was investigated so the channel owner (Bolloré) gave him a role as a security guard on his private island.
They have plenty of spaces of their own to post and like the content we don't want here. They feel a need to spread it though, to harm others because at the basis of it all, that's what they want to do whether they realize it or not.
I don't really care either way as I just browse this place casually (not that I support bigotry), but I can't believe how many community outrage posts like this that this community has received in the past week or two. You'd think we were in a community dedicated to much more serious topics not one dedicated to 'Sunday comics.'
Not caring is supporting bigotry.
"I don't support nazis, I just don't care if they conquer the world" is not really a good sentence to say.
No, it's just not involving myself in internet drama.
You might have a point if we were actually talking about Nazis or someone like Trump and his ilk, but no were talking about some person with little influence who creates comics and posts them to this little community. I'm assuming this is about the guy who has all the thirsty looking comics with women in their underwear that someone claimed didn't support LGBT but didn't elaborate further? Forgive me for not joining in the tribalism and drawing my line in the sand over this egregious act.
The fact that you have to immediately rely on exaggerated appeals to emotion in order to even make your point should be a sign that you're going a little overboard.
So for you, discrimination and fascism should only be fought against when on a gigantic scale? As long as it's not the president of a country, you don't care?
"My neighbour is insulting black people in the street but you know, it's just a little racial slur a few times per day, it's not like it's actual Hitler living next to me, so I don't care"
How does that kind of logic even make sense?
I don't know why there are so many enlightened centrists on lemmy lately but it's really gross.
Can you actually point to the discrimination and fascism being posted here? You keep having to rely on hypotheticals and unrelated situations as your argument and have yet to make a single reference to the actual situation occurring here, all while acting like we're somehow pro-Nazi or pro-slavery if we don't automatically conform to your viewpoint.
https://lemmy.world/post/45557825
Here's an example.
https://lemmy.world/post/45513297
Here's another.
This user in particular is one of the main issues of this community, most of their posts are like that.
But I know that you're just asking for an example to try to attack it, and there's not really any point, because if you don't see the problem from that link, a conversation cannot do enough.
Oh, you know that do you? There's no point in devoting a single word in any of your dozen+ comments here to explain a position that you apparently feel so strongly about, while calling others "Nazis" for not automatically siding with you and your moral righteousness
Apparently you don't see the problem either since you can't seem to articulate it even once. You seem entirely reliant on logical fallacies, Nazis, and fascism to manipulate others into falling in line with whatever feeling you happen to be feeling about something. This is the same toxic bullshit that gave us things like the Satanic panic and the drug war and it's incredibly gross.
I've copied this from my response to someone else above, but Stonetoss is an easy one to block, IMO.
If they epose neo-nazi talking points (holocaust denial being a big one), they're probably questionable. Add onto that his regular jewish dog whistles (1, 2), he loves his over-simplified racist undertone statistics, anti-immgration, quasi-'white replacement theory' nonsense, or some race-related pseudoscience.
Stonetoss either promotes, or genuinely believes a number of neo-nazi views. To me, thats enough that I dont think his comics should be cross posted here.
I agree with you
You know, part of the problem with situations like this conversation, I feel, is that it's always Nazis. It ends up being a cliche that, when something else happens, like the US starting to literally follow similar trends that led to the actual nazi party, it's already something people are tired of hearing and it hurts the message.
They end up not taking this seriously (because web comics, even shitty bigoted ones, are not as serious as what happened in nazi Germany) and then the other claim doesn't get taken seriously because "everything's Nazis with you people".
Just a thought i had when reading this.
This comes from the fact that there's less and less space between actual nazis and "just far-right extremists".
And I think people don't really see a point anymore in trying to find a difference, me included.
No. Support is support, and not caring is not caring. Redefining words won't change the outcome on the ground.
If you are standing by when an oppressor is oppressing, then you are participating in it.
Accepting the idea that being passive is neutral, is a horrible moral stance that is always advantaging the oppressors.
If it is your stance, you are participating in letting the oppressors do whatever they want, which is supporting them.
There's a reason why you can be condemned for seeing someone getting attacked and doing nothing. This "neutral" stance has been known to be a piece of shit stance for centuries.
That is not what participation means. Redefining yet more words won't change the outcome on the ground either.
This would seem to be the "duty to rescue". But there is no universal duty to rescue recognised in law - because there is no such duty recognised universally by people either. And where it is recognised, the punishment for failing to carry it out is less than the punishment for putting someone in harm's way, or harming them yourself.
This is, in fact, a very good way of seeing that "neutrality is aggression" is a minority, and wrong, belief.
You seem to be conflating legality with morality.
It being legal is a good suggestion that society hasn't decided it's on the same moral level as things that society has decided to make illegal. At any rate, the unviersal statement 'This “neutral” stance has been known to be a piece of shit stance for centuries' is wrong on this basis. If it were so obvious, so known, then, yes, I do think it would be illegal.
So according to your logic, if you walk past someone being raped or murdered and you don't give a shit and move on, it's completely fine, because you're just being neutral? You would consider that not helping the victim, doesn't help the aggressor?
How do you even manage to convince yourself of such a logic?
No, it is not "completely fine" but it is not morally equivalent to committing the rape, and there are justified reasons for doing nothing: e.g. you cannot physically intervene, and are scared of the cops and so unwilling to call them.
Apathy is an oppressor's greatest weapon.
You may not think you're supporting them, but silence is complicity. And if you're complicit with it, you tacitly support it, otherwise you'd have an opinion on it.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing
OK?
The quote highlights that passive inaction is as dangerous as active malice. It encourages taking a stand against wrongdoing rather than remaining neutral.
But it isn't as dangerous as active malice. Punching someone in the face is more dangerous than watching someone punch another in the face.
I agree with the quote, but I take umbrage with it being used in this context.
There's nothing to be gained by forcing people to act in ways that they do not wish to act, or to think in ways that they do not wish to think.
The way you're using that quote is basically saying, "Agree with me, and think the way I tell you to think, or you're a bad person".
That is evil, and people of good conscience should not agree with you. It is better to allow you to think that they are a bad person rather than to allow you to have control over their morality.
Is bigotry not evil by your standards?
A, you've missed the point completely. B, you're moving the goalposts. And C, you're forgetting the possible charitable view of things in that a person who is not aware of the original artist's bigotry finding something that they posted funny and sharing it with other people.
In context of the conversation, you're saying there's nothing to be gained by banning comics from racist artists.
You sure? Because in response to your statement saying you don't have an opinion (ie, you're doing nothing), it means that you're allowing bad to happen due to apathy (that's assuming you see yourself as a good person, if you're not, disregard).
One of these days I'm going to create /c/selfawarewolves...
Twist yourself up like a pretzel all you want, but at least listen to what you're saying and think about it for more than 5 seconds. Because you're supporting people who spread bigotry by arguing against banning them, and trying to take the moral high ground.
In specific context, I am not arguing against or for banning comics.
I personally am for banning people that are bigoted, and especially when their bigotry is hidden away from their art so that I might find myself enjoying art from an artist that I would personally find detestable.
What I am arguing against is the specific use of the phrase "All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing" as a hammer to bludgeon somebody else into accepting a specific viewpoint as the superior one.
I've said it before in other ways and I will say it again that if you give me the choice between being your bitch and being an asshole, I will pick asshole every single time because I value my right to choose above what you claim is an absolute truth.
It's quite comical to me that people cannot see that these are two separate conversations, and the separation of the conversation happened long before I waded into it.
I was going to point out that comics like that should already be covered by the rules against discrimination... But reading the sidebar it doesn't look like we have rules like that. We have a full paragraph detailing how an exposed nipple should be tagged, but nothing saying "hey, don't be a homophobic sexist bigot". Probably worth adding something to the rules like:
Nazi bars form by exploiting moderators who are too afraid to say no and actively kick out a culture of hate.
I'd vote for that rule example you gave be added to the sidebar exactly as you wrote it
Hate should never be tolerated.
And it isn't - apart from the witch hunt by the OP.
I woke up this morning and there's three Stonetosses back to back in my feed.
If we could go ahead and throw them on the ban list, that would be pretty groovy
At this point just leave the community. A artist ban is in and of it self more problematic the the comics themselves.
A tag requirement so people can make their own blacklists is far better
There's a reason every image board in p*** site ever has a robust tagging system.
The only good that ever comes from the administration banning things is it just turns into a glorified Nazi problem.
That's why I'm not a big fan of the artist himself. Actually banning art is never the correct choice. Provide people with the ability to do it themselves or don't do it at all.
I've been considering leaving this community anyway because the mods have been dragging their feet on this issue. But it's a new mod team finding their feet, and a considered approach takes time, so I give the benefit of the doubt.
Encouraging someone to leave the community for expressing dissatisfaction that the community allows a nazi to use the platform might be a bigger nazi problem than banning nazis would be.
I have no comment currently for what will happen regarding bigot artists, I'm not the top mod.
However, please stop making META posts when you made one about the same topic just a few days ago. If the comments on this get out of hand I will lock the thread for civilities sake. Please wait for us to make an announcement about such things, it may take some time.
FYI that's the MO with this user with their current and previous instance grail accounts. Here to only be a troll/drive attacks at who they dislike.
Before was part of a witch hunt against a blajah mod because they were simply a mod of a comm they disliked.
it's nice that someone is responding on it.
Now that there is a mod team, can restrictions on meta posts and mini modding potentially be added onto the internal discussions?
The intent is there and I get they're trying to help, but the amount of negativity and toxicity to something that wasn't even a rule at that time, I think should be addressed and not allowed.
Not that I think they were wrong, so to speak. But... I don't think that orchestrates a healthy environment when there is a mod team for it that can /remove/ the content instead of just spamming the community with protest comments or flaming
edit: FUTO speech to text is buggy and likes adding text I tried to add later on in parts I'm editing, removed the delayed addon lol
We are all on different time zones and schedules.
And like I said, not the top mod. I don't get to just do things, that would be a massive overstep of my mod powers. I just remove comments that take it too far, occasionally talk in comments like this, and remove anything super bad.
I wish I had a definitive, satisfying response and make this whole problem go away, but I lack that power. Sorry.
There's a specific type of person that makes quick, unilateral decisions that effect entire communities, with out allowing time for community members or other admins to participate in a discussion.
They're called hoa presidents, and I think I can speak for everyone here; we do not want this community ran like a shitty hoa.
Give the mods time to decide how they want to deal with the artist's we don't want shared here. I don't want the moderators to curate it, nor do I think they should have the added workload of digging through an artist's history to verify they are an issue - which they have to do thoroughly because of how easy it is to edit a comic to be something its not.
I still think the easiest is to just have everyone put the artist name in the title. If the singular post isn't a problem, it can stay. If people want to block the entire artist, they can make a filter. Perhaps a bot could also be made to pick up on the artist's name and put an informative "BTW, this guy stinks" in the comments. If a user is repeatedly posting hateful content, then they should get banned.
I preferred the simpler times where it was a simple downvote and move on. Those artists will probably get ratioed anyways and the posts will be sunk.
Witch-Hunt mentality is kinda a lame way to go about things.
That creates an actual slippery slope.
Day 1: everyone just down votes and it's sunk
Day 2: one good day for the nazi tolerant, it gets enough unknowing upvotes to make it to the front page. A handful of anti-fascists block the poster and community.
Day 3: the people who politely raised their concerns above have also left. Everyone who remains is OK with downvoting on a case-by-case basis.
Day 4: people who don't like Nazis are exhausted by having to say no over and over, also leaving.
Day 5: all that's left are Nazis
::: spoiler "Nazi Bar" story for the uninitiated Back in 2020, a writer named Michael B. Tager wrote a few tweets about his time at a dive bar in his native Baltimore.
While he was enjoying an after work beer he noticed the bartender booting out a seemingly quiet patron. This patron was wearing a jacket covered in Nazi symbolism.
When Tager asked about why he booted the guy, the bartender, a seasoned pro, said that if you let one Nazi in, slowly they replace the clientele.
“You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” he said, as Trager paraphrased. “These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while, they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.”
“And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh *****, this is a Nazi bar now,” he continued. ”And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.” :::
The people who really want racist/sexist/etc comics are free to make their own instance or community. This is the fediverse. There's no government with guns or CEO to lock it down.
If that stuff makes for a better community, it will do just fine. I expect it won't.
One of the things right-wingers push for is the idea that they're normal and healthy, and everyone else is deficient. Like everything else from the right, it's projection.
Its inclusion does lead to a Nazi Bar situation as more of that material gets posted, that crowd grows, then the place becomes hostile to the original founders.
they do, but right wing communities, in most sites usually dont flourish at all, because they wont have anyone to argue against.
So would we ban posting Dilbert comics because Adams went wacko when he got older? Do we ban artists from the 50s because some of them were racist, even if we're not posting those ones?
I think it makes sense to not allow hateful and bigoted comics, for sure. And that rule would get rid of jago.
Same. Dilbert is pretty safe. It should be banning per strip basis. Not by author
The Dilbert comics is a fair point. I feel like the content itself isn't bad, just the author's public views.
I'm not that familiar with all his comics, but I tend to like Dilbert since I grew up on it a bit. I could swing either way, but I'd tend to lean towards being critical of the content and not the author's tweets.
I grew up reading Dilbert and got a bunch of the books. It hits so different now - every comic is about how corporations abuse us for profit, but then you realize the author actually supports it.
i mean, yeah... let's ban dilbert. even if adams was a saint when it was in serialization, posting it today platforms who he is today. we could pick apart edge cases all day but that's a lot of work to maybe be able to post comics everyone has already seen, or we can err on the side of caution and spend all that time reading good comics by decent people instead
A corpse? /j
But on topic, I don't recall the dilbert comics being offensive, even if adams was a fucking loon. Willing to be proved wrong since I stopped caring when PHB became the main focus of the strip.
that's my whole point: regardless of if the comics were fine, later in life he was a jackass so who cares? we can look at every comic he ever made under a fine-tooth comb to see if those later values show up in dilbert at the risk of alienating the groups of people he hurt regardless of the comic, or we can just say "fuck that guy" and move on with our lives
I see a big difference between an artist that posts derogatory art and artists who are shitheads in real life. There's an argument to be made about separating the art from the artist when the overall corpus of the art is not offensive that doesn't exist for offensive art.
I'm all for banning offensive art, but you're advocating for purity tests for the artists, which is too far imo
"purity test" implies attention to detail which is the opposite of what i'm arguing. i'm advocating for a "stink test." a lot of people here are arguing whether or not it should be ok to post art by a guy who stinks, but no one is arguing that he doesn't stink. i don't care if a comic inherently stinks or has the residual stink of it's creator, i just want to open a window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_without_a_difference
He's dead today...
Does that mean the rhetoric he spread and the potential for it to do harm are gone?
Let me ask you this. There's a whole lot of people who really really hate JKR. She's a bigot and She's done a lot of real life harm, so regardless of whether or not her art is not connected to that harm, the point is that lots of people are in favor of completely deplatforming her by pretty much any means necessary including harassing other people who they even think might be interested in her art enough to give her money.
Do you think that they will change their minds about buying into her franchise after she's dead?
Nope, just stating he is dead today, since the OP seemed unaware. About Rowling; no I don't think so. But it could well be that decades after her dying people will have forgot about her world views, and the books will be in fashion again. This is assuming the books are worth reading, which I hear they're not.
A corpse?
The way I see this being handled is that if lots of Dilbert is being posted and it's annoying enough people, they would make a meta post asking about banning it. We don't need to preemptively have that debate. That should protect us from needing to spend an eternity curating a huge ban list.
If we had a rule against bigotry, and a poster breaks that rule twice, ban them.
Not all of Jago contains bigotry, þough. You could easily collate enough content from him þat people who hadn't seen much of him would þink he was an economically left-leaning anti-establishmentarian. At what percentage do you draw þe line?
As anoþer user said, block content, not artists. Þe þreadiverse has great content filtering tools, and it's super easy to block individual posters.
Yeah, I don't get it. If the two examples linked above are his most offensive content, then this is a pretty low bar to ban someone. If the target of the criticism was priests or bankers, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Giving a demographic special treatment can turn indifference into resentment; it is not a path towards acceptance or equality.
He does also target priests and bankers. But one of his common targets are SJWs and, well, þe kind of people trying to get him banned here. I þink he's taken potshots at Me Too. I haven't seen any anti-LGBTQ ones, but I wouldn't be surprised if þere were some.
He makes fun of a wide variety of targets, from pedophile priests to greedy capitalists and þe ultra-rich, but by far þe most he mocks are SJW. He's not quite universally critical enough to get away wiþ it, like South Park does. Þere's definitely a bias against cancel culture.
We should ban economically left-leaning anti-establishmentarians.
Nazis don't get a platform. Not sure why this is even a debate unless it looks like a debate because a bunch of nazis are whining about it and get told to fuck off. In which case, good, gtfo.
Nazis should get a platform. A platform with a short drop and very sudden stop.
or a "barber" using only crude large cutting instruments.
The French actually automated their barbers back in the day, mind you it was pretty limited in style. But hey, all nazis love matching their Nazi buddies so "a little off the top" is a style we should ensure they wear!
Amen
Sadly, nazis already have too many platforms.
This is unfortunately true.
Yeah but there are no nazis here. OP is having his knickers in the twist about Jago.
Either way the community goes on this, I'd really like it if there were a rule that each post needs to include the artist's name in the title. That way, we could have a basis for filtering out artists we don't personally care for. Not saying this should happen instead of any kind of ban on specific artists or content, but rather in addition to.
Yeah. There's a particular person in these comments claiming we can just block things we don't like but who doesn't seem to realize that this doesn't work without some sort of tag system or artist name in the title.
any rule should be voted on to ban specific artists, and additions to the list should require their own vote. "no hate content" is a simple enough rule to enforce with minimal context but "no history of hate content" is way too broad.
For me it's blanket artist ban I don't like. Banned bigoted posts is 100% deserved, but not artist wide. The recent jago comic is totally fine, and that content shouldn't be restricted.
Also artists shouldn't be restricted willy-nilly. I feel artists like cyanide and happiness could 100% get on some people's nerves, considering that some other comics like it gets absolutely ratioed. Although they aren't bigoted, that's just dark humour
For reference, I'm trans and bi, so I ain't policing minorities. I have all interest in banning stonetoss here
Yup.
I would also vote in that direction.
I get the concept, it's basically the same issues in like Harry Potter or Five nights at freddies. IE a lot of LGBT people like these works, but it's also unquestionable that the profits that the works make, are used to bolster hate against these groups, even if the works themselves are not harmful to them.
So yes I also go with this camp, platforming non-hateful work made by hateful people still supports hateful creators and allows them to amplify the hateful message.
That said this is lemmy. We have the means here. If lemmy world comic strips want an open door "as long as the comics posted themselves aren't hateful it's allowed". Perhaps someone should make a Comic Strips on a different instance, and lemmy users can vote with their feet.
Hold on, what’s up with five nights at Freddy’s?
In short Scott Cawthorn the creator donates a lot of money to political campaigns. Per his explanation a strong military is his single issue vote. Which has him throwing money towards people like Mitch McConnel, Tommy Tubberville, Trump and Tulsi Gabbard.
What fucking idiot. Thanks for sharing.
The worst part (or at least a negative) is, I'm pretty sure Trump is bad for the military (just good for military contractors).
Based on cawthornes votes etc... I'd say the concept he has is more money going into the millitary budget, and more pre-emptive actions abroad keeps us safer back here.
Fully completely disagree with it a thousand fold. Had we not stuck our noses into the middle east so much 9/11 would never have happened (and I'm just working with what had happened at the time of cawthrons controversy rather than the obvious much more recent iran nonsense.
its creator was caught donating to bigoted political campaigns
https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/scott-cawthon-defends-anti-lgbt-donations-11578325/
People making mountains out of mole hills, hampering on those who don't meet their purity tests. The usual.
JKR is actively and vocally using HP profits for evil and is a good example in that comment.
Scott Cawthon, from what I recall, has some conservative/right wing/whatever views, but hasn't actively worked on harming the LGBTQ community. People hate him cause he's not perfect.
The evidence is literally above your post and was there three hours before you made it.
I just took a look through all the comments on this post and I'm failing to see any evidence. Perhaps something didn't federate properly and you can point me to what you're talking about.
Unless you're talking about the comment 2 up from mine, the only comment on this post mentioning FNAF (and the comment on that, which is what I replied to). A person offhandedly saying that Scott's a bad person is not evidence, it's an opinion from an internet stranger.
https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/scott-cawthon-defends-anti-lgbt-donations-11578325/
Thank you for providing an article.
TL;DR Scott made poor donation choices, prioritizing what he thought was important in the country while failing to see the actual humans being targeted by those people. He did not do so maliciously or with intent to harm, neither has he taken any direct action to do any harm himself. He made poor choices, was rightly punched in the face by the community at large, and he seems to have bettered himself since then. We should celebrate when someone gets back on the path of good, instead of continuing to hit them for mistakes made that have already been resolved.
I recall reading that when it was first published, along with Scott's response and subsequent resignation on Reddit. I've taken some time to look for something more recent since it's been a few years now, such as allegations of harm or direct actions he's taken, or even someone watching his donation habits nowadays, and I still can't really find anything. It seems like the majority of LGBTQ people he worked with, both at Steel Wool and elsewhere like some of the books, have put this business behind them and are working together.
From his Reddit response (Archived by KnowYourMeme with commentary. Source on Reddit is still available as well):
I find this response to be pretty level-headed.
Obviously saying you're a Republican today isn't a great thing to say (And many here in the federated world would say it was never a great thing to say). In 2021 though, people were still learning about the wool pulled over their eyes and questioning their beliefs, politics, ideologies. I don't know if he'd still call himself a Republican today, but just the one single label doesn't say much anymore (Is someone calling themselves a Republican actually MAGA, part of some other right wing group, or just fiscally conservative and is too harsh on immigration policy?). If you've got anything showing his stances of political topics, I'll gladly take a look.
We've also got this quote from the same Reddit post:
This is pretty common to hear as well from people who just lack the ability to see the harm from indirect actions (It's shared by a lot of anti-DEI idiots as well, but I do see this as different from them). By not caring about the specifics of a person, you also don't care to learn about the policies being introduced that may be directly affecting them.
My takeaway is that he was just ignorant, and I do not believe he was willingly ignorant but just plain ignorant. Nobody fully made him realize what was happening under the surface of our gold-covered shithole of a country, and it took shoving it in his face to make him see what's happening, and make better informed choices in the future.
Calling him out for the shitty donations was proper. People often just want to leave it at that and will always be angry at him for his actions, but I believe that people can be better than they were before and I do believe he has done so. Since I fail to see any actual harm that's come from this (Specifically directly from him and actions he's taken since the reporting, since both Scott and ourselves know the damage done from the previous donations), I see no reason to keep bringing this up.
Back to TheFogan's comment, and the specific part I had an issue with:
It is absolutely questionable! In JKR's case, we have ample evidence that she simply does not care about the harm she does and is very vocal about certain groups who she'd like to not exist. I agree that there is no question in regards to the harm the profits of Harry Potter are doing to the LGBTQ community.
Scott on the other hand, from everything I've seen, is decent. I likely do not agree with some of his political issues (And just saying Republican doesn't say anything about a single issue), but I fail to see him, Steel Wool, or anyone working in the FNAF universe taking the profits and turning them against their own community.
Comparing FNAF to HP, or Scott to JKR, is laughable.
There can't even be that many amazing "nice" comics by these bigoted artists that we'd be making a huge sacrifice by banning them. Not accidentally driving traffic to them seems worth it.
I guess there's a case around censorship to some degree, but there's already plenty of censorship-driven rules in place. It comes down to trusting the mods to not abuse their power.
Ya, I really don't see a downside in terms of content. Jago is simply not funny at the best of times.
promoting hate is suppose to be against TOS, unless you make a nazi platform, they can make thier own instances for it. but then right wing propaganda cant flourish in thier own echo chambers , since they need engagement, cant have that if everyone agrees with you.
I'm not sure we need to keep adding rules just for one artist. if the consensus is to ban Jago comics for their content, then that seems like a good decision.
however "bigoted" seems to mean a wide variety of different things now. and it seems that some people are ok with some darker forms of humor than others.
jago is well known for making comics specifically to try and piss people off. but I feel that dark humor should not be banned.
edit: No Jago is not dark humor. Yes Jago comics should be banned from the instance. please stop likening me to a bigot just because my brain is spicy and I have difficulty explaining shit sometimes. thank you.
jago's shit is literally just blatantly bigoted. how can anyone see these comics and walk away thinking otherwise?
https://jagodibuja.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/531en-scaled.jpg
https://jagodibuja.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/521en-694x1024.jpg
if your reaction to seeing these is anything other than disgust at the turbo-transphobia i've got bad news for you about your moral character as a human being
I'd rather they not be banned, but down voted to oblivion and the comment section highlight the fallacies and falsehoods that it presents and perpetuates.
If you want to see bigots' comics, there's plenty of other places for you to see them.
We've been censoring social media left and right, putting our heads into sand, and look how well that turned out?
Pushing nazis, incels and bigots into their own little niche spaces and letting them fester is what got us where we are. I'd rather educate, shame and call out in public.
There's plenty of places to find nazis, incels, and bigots. It's called "most platforms." No one is under any obligation to platform hate or to welcome the hateful. Go find another bar if you want one with nazis.
I can't even downvote on my instance...
You people get pissed every time someone raises legit issues
Jago is not “dark humour” it’s incel garbage that constantly attacks women and trans people.
"if the consensus is to ban Jago comics for their content, then that seems like a good decision"
i know. which is why I wrote this. just pasted it there so you can see it more clearly.
No, no it's not, there is a very clear definition of that. However, bigots like to muddy that in order to make their bigotry more social acceptable, but it's important to not fall for that. It has the same "the left just calling everyone nazi this days therefore nobody is a nazi" ring to it, that nazis used to normalise nazism.
i had someone call me a terf cause I said I didn't like a TV show they did. that's what I mean. there's someone clearly being bigoted (like the artist Jago which should be banned from the instance) but not all dark artists rely on being a misogynistic fuck. some just genuinely think darker topics are entertaining. and some are.
that is why I am asking for is leniency on dark humor. (NOT JAGO. HIS COMICS SHOULD BE BANNED. I HAVE TO CLEARLY SPELL THIS OUT SINCE PEOPLE ARE READING OVER THIS POINT, APPARENTLY.)
Don't know about your particular experience but some randos calling people names doesn't invalidate the fact that those words have meanings
What was the TV show?
jojo bizarre adventure. why?
Never watched it. I was just curious what show would automatically "terf" someone ifv they didn't like it.
I feel like we are missing a part of this story.
I saw these Comics and I don't like them. Medium joke on juicy pictures. But I was like: "A free internet has to be able to handle things like this"
Does banning them not count as "how we handle things like this"?
Banning is censorship. For the good and for the bad.
It appears that the mods have actual 0 issues with hosting Nazi content, do we have an alternative community? I'm going to block this one soon.
I have moved to ![email protected]
hard agree
Ultimately I agree, I think, but I see a lot of it both ways. On the one hand, I hate that crap and it would be nice to never see it. But I don't even block people I dislike unless they're just trolls - I don't want to bubble myself. On the other hand, this is a federated platform. If people want to, they can run their own community without banned artists, and the people who really value that exposure can just go there periodically. But then, if the community really hates the Jago shit, then it seems like a culture can emerge of just shaming and not upvoting such posts. But on the other hand, the community probably won't attain that level of responsibility long term.
I think there's a lot of bad things and good things that come out of banning specific artists. And I think there was enough debate in your first post that it's not quite accurate for you to say "this is what we want". Although ironically I end up in agreement between you so maybe I'm just wanting unrealistic consensus :)
I feel like we already have the mechanism of downvotes for dealing with bad content. You'll always have artists with generally bad takes, artists with generally good takes but some bad ones, etc... So you're NEVER gonna reach a state where shitty stupid stuff isn't posted. And its not like we're gonna start to discuss banning some unknown random artist based on one comic that contains transphobia or something - it's just not worth the effort and clutter unless its a widespread, frequently posted, prolific artist like Jago. In those cases, we should downvote and move on.
I think what makes it complex for me is:
What I REALLY want is a community that is principled and conscientious enough about what they upvote that we don't need moderators and banlists to caretake the content for us. I want a community that can let a few Jagoposts through in case a good discussion pops up, or people are having fun ragging on it, and that still absolutely crushes these posts under downvotes and eventually organically scares off the kinds of dumbasses who really like it. I prefer this because it limits moderator power scope, it limits community meta debates like this one, and ultimately because a principled and conscientious population is awesome to have. The best communities I've ever been in online are essentially self-moderating. There are always mods or at least admins, but they have very little to do and it's usually bland custodial things (deleting duplicate posts, etc.)
But I understand that in reality, we probably won't have a such a principled and conscientious community, and therefore we probably do need to offload some of that curation responsibility that really should lie on the users, to the moderators - in the form of ban lists.
Ultimately I think I agree with banning artists in a way that is:
I'm just disappointed that it means admitting the community cannot effectively self-moderate on a post-by-post basis. But I think as long as it's still up to community discussion what goes on the ban list, that's pretty reasonable since it allows us to only need to think about the provenance and context of an artist every once in awhile rather than on every post. It's really a more efficient way to go about it and makes a more psychologically relaxed experience in general. Kind of like going to an organic grocery store is nice because you no longer need to check every product label for artificial coloring.
It's because there are two kinds of users on Lemmy: posters and lurkers. The posters are pretty much agreed that we want Jago gone, but the lurkers outnumber us, and they've been upvoting the posts because they don't know about the drama.
I see it exactly like OP.
I also would like to add that I have encountered quite a few, at the very least, questionable moderation decision. Bigots who were arguing in bad faith were left alone and people who tried to counter their bullshit were deleted. Normally I don't care about moderation, but I had the feeling that the new moderation was up to a good start with the new rules and moderators but in practise the moderation seems to be inconsistent.
ah, the true lemmy experience
Overeacted, but yes
Stonetoss is obvious, but what's wrong with the Jago comics?
https://jagodibuja.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/513en-694x1024.jpg
https://jagodibuja.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/521en-694x1024.jpg
https://jagodibuja.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/531en-scaled.jpg
Straight-up misogynistic, transphobic down-punching.
its always the wierd AI- obsession with sexually-objectfying woman when you see someone spouting right wing propaganda, you check thier profile/uploads its almost always these bizarre things.
Ah, that's a shame.
Why haven't you already started your own Comic Strips community with this rule instead of spamming the comm?
on the same note while im against it I read comics in other comic communities. Ideally little to no censorship would be in communities but the comics will still be around in other ones. Granted it would be nice for this poster to just get off his but and use the block botton but he can feel the warm fuzzies knowing people are reading the comic on the fediverse elsewhere instead of here.
Blocking it won’t stop everyone else from being exposed and the hate being normalised.
won't stop it by stopping it here in the federation. there are other comic communities and the person can make their own if they want.
None will ever be as big as this one, it might not stop all of it but it will stop 95% of people ever seeing it.
yeah whatever. I don't want to make peoples choiced for them or have choices made for me but I do have access and watch the other communites just like 95% of everyone on the federation. This is like one of the maine things I like about the federation and why as much as I like trust cafe its not federated so could devolve into such influences being one thing. Whats funny is I blocked the guy until your wierdisms (from my point of view, from another like yourself I am the wierd one). The comics are not that bad and no one needs to be protected from them.
Because they like stirring drama for the sake of drama
Critical support for Stalin's camps! No critical support for people wanting to not see misogynistic art!
That's like saying we should support Biden because he said something nice about unions.
Then again another account who loves to punch left 🤷
Sounds perfect. Do that.
There is currently no need, because this community doesn't ban inoffensive content.
No you misunderstand. I’m telling these tankies to go make their own comm with anyone who ever said anything they deem wrong permabanned. I’m sure it will be full of fun and engaging content.
Grail is a tankie?
I mean, left and authoritarian?
Based on what?
This? Right here? What do you mean?
“This author had a bad take one time, burn all his books immediately!”
GTFO with your disingenuous line of questioning.
Didn’t see the other post, but it is never proper to censor someone just because someone doesn’t like something they said. Remove individual cartoons that are offensive, don’t censor people.
nah, we don't need to tolerate the intolerant.
if somebody is a nazi, ban them. no need to think any deeper on it.
what if they were comics by hitler
I think we'd all rather Hitler had remained an artist, no?
what if they were comics by hitler while in the throes of wwii
Just for reference: this was the previous poll https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/58355506
and i want to say that it seems in no way "clear" to me that people overwhelmingly wanted comics by bigoted artists banned. i think you're mixing quite a lot of your own ideology into this post and projecting your views on the majority.
Of course the person posting all the horny misogynistic tripe here would unironically start their comment with the word hysteria. Are you really that clueless or just a troll. Either way it's not cool.
People that like Jago just wanna see boobs. It’s borderline against community rules.
I may not agree with what they say, but I will defend to my death their right to say it.
Better to know where the ass-holes are. Let them show themselves.
Let it be downvoted.
You don’t need to defend the right for a Nazi to speak.
Shall we just decree anyone we want silenced a Nazi then?
If they epose neo-nazi talking points (holocaust denial being a big one), they're probably questionable. Add onto that his regular jewish dog whistles (1, 2), he loves his over-simplified racist undertone statistics, anti-immgration, quasi-'white replacement theory' nonsense, or some race-related pseudoscience.
Man, its one thing to be arguing for slippery slope (which is literally a logical fallacy, meaning it shouldn't be used in an argument), but stonetoss either promotes, or genuinely believes a number of neo-nazi views. To me, thats enough that I dont think his comics should be cross posted here.
A slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy, but there are still slippery slopes that are not fallacious.
How might they be exposed to ideas to challenge their ideas and broaden their perspective? While exposure here may not offer a direct line, and may seem like more advantage to the spread of their ideas than them being exposed to ideas that challenge their ideas, it may at least expose more people to see their ideas, and, presumably, be of sound mind enough to not only not succumb to them, but perhaps go forth to offer counter-arguments and refutations and exposing fallacies and harms of their ideas.
I get what you're saying, but Nazis do not need a devil's advocate. Racists don't need any defending. Turns out, giving them leeway to spit out hate speech only encourages them to be more hateful.
You say you get it, but nothing you said after the "but" corroborated the claim.
Was not playing devil's advocate [nor non-playing advocating]. Was not defending. Was satirically pointing out the folly of becoming them; the folly of opposaming; the folly of arrogantly presuming what to impose in ignorant lack of introspection unto hypocrisy; the folly of fear driven reactions that drive a social tragedy of the commons blind race to the bottom into kakistarchy. Can't defeat Nazism from here. Can create it.
The principle espoused seems sound though. Same as how to deal with any/all totalitarians. That being to keep speaking out and stopping their madness, or it gets worse and worse, where any and all atrocities are seen as necessary virtues. I'm not sure how sending them to echo chambers to go on festering ever worse, unchallenged, serves this necessary avenue of remedy.
Better the monster you can see. Better the Daryl Davis approach, proven to convert people out of monstrosity, than to try to out-monster the monsters. Not having a bigger hammer was not the problem with the hammer being the only tool in the toolbox.
Yep sure. That’s what I said. :)
Imagine dying so Nazis can say Nazi shit publicly. Kind of stupid.
Imagine becoming a Nazi by slippery slope fallacy and tu quoque fallacy. Kind of ironic.
Yeah I did neither of those but I guess you get to sound smart so that's cool.
The problem is that downvotes do not work. They do not function as an incentive for these users to stop posting, because they do not matter at all.
It can work on larger platforms, where thousands, or even tens of thousands of people vote. There the users form roles based on how they sort the posts. People who sort by New are well aware that they are going to have to sift through a lot of trash, but their reward is that they get to have a more active role in setting the taste for the entire community. Because then you have people who sort by Hot or Active, which tends to be the majority of users in most communities (and is often the default). So in communities with dozens of posts, hundreds of comments, and thousands of votes every day, the things the community doesn't like gets buried.
The Fediverse is too small for that system to work. There simply is not enough posts, comments, and votes to make any of that meaningful. The same users can just spam the same authors over and over again, and it doesn't matter whether the post gets 100 upvotes or 100 dpwnvotes- the whole community is going to see it in their feed regardless. And it's not as if having negative "karma"really matters.
One of tbr systems Reddit had to combat this was that karma occasionally mattered. Some subreddits would require karma to join, or ban if your karma dropped. I'm not sure if the tools exist for something like that here or not. There are a lot of different t ways you can slice up the numbers, but basically looking at post history, ratios of up/down votes, total down votes, etc. Effectively letting community feedback drive the moderation process.
That's still not perfect because users can block/mute other users. Doing so would effectively be abstaining from voting, and that's not the healthiest system. But we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good.
mods here support zionists, of course they will not listen
I get it. I don't want to see Nazi shit either. but when I do, I DV and move on. simple as that.
edit: it's funny, because y'all are doing literally the thing I'm advocating for. so by downvoting and moving on you're literally agreeing with me 🤣
I didn't follow the post to see the ratio, but I guess point 2 of rule 2 supports it... although I really don't get the "feel safe" part, are posters stalking other users and waiting for them outside of their houses or something like that for blocking people you don't like not being enough?
I hope people don't feel unsafe by Joan Cornellà comics too.
You wouldn't feel unsafe seeing posts by people that are basically saying that you shouldn't exist, or that you're worth less than other humans?
Good for you that you're so privileged you never had to face discrimination.
I don't feel unsafe because someone posted a comic by someone who at some point said some stuff that might imply they hate me or some aspect of me, no. No-one's asking you to get in a room with them, or even read the offensive stuff they said.
As I said, good for you to be privileged enough to have never felt unsafe because of that.
Now get out of your own ass and understand that not everyone is like that, and that if people here are agreeing on the opposite, maybe it means that you're not the general rule.
If everyone who disagrees with you can be assumed to be privileged, and every disagreeing privileged opinion can be dismissed due to being privileged, you will indeed be able to manufacture whatever consensus you want. And the more you wag fingers at people who don't agree, the more you'll cement it.
There's a simple principle: if something just makes you feel bad, but doesn't actually harm you, then you can be an adult about it and regulate your own exposure. It's not like stuff that does harm you, which society ought to try and prevent.
This way, society can concern itself with stuff everyone can see and test and verify, rather than stuff that makes some group of people feel unsafe, which only they can attest to. That's a good thing, because on the latter route, you end up either letting the most frightened person censor everything for everyone, or privileging certain groups of people censor everything for everyone, neither of which is a good outcome.
People spreading horrible ideologies hurt everyone, even if not directly. Lower exposure doesn't change that.
Hiding your head in the sand doesn't fix problems.
Also, going form what the conversation was, to "the most frightened person censors everything for everyone" is one of the most gigantic slippery slopes I've seen. Blocking sexist, homophobic, racist, transphobic, or discriminatory in whatever other way, content is not "censoring everything for everyone", it's not even censoring, it's telling the hostile pieces of shit that try to destroy society to shut up. And people who want to see that kind of crap can do it on 4chan or whatever shithole so here, there's no censorship at all.
The more you talk the worse you look, by the way, so you should wonder what kind of message you're trying to convey. For now it's looking a lot like enlightened centrism.
I'm trying to convey the classic ideals of liberalism.
You're not talking about people "spreading horrible ideologies" you're talking about people who have made comments you find to be wrong, hateful and offensive in one place, and for that reason preventing an entire forum from hearing or seeing anything that came from them.
No. That would be more like following the liberal ideal of defeating corrosive ideologies by countering it with a robust defence of your own principles. You don't want to tell people to shut up, you want to make them shut up.
Stonetoss is a piece of shit, it's probably hard to even find a comic of his that isn't against the instance rules. Jago I have only seen what was posted on the community and it was just some stuff to roll your eyes at the sexist inferences (and some other stuff wasn't even bad), but some other stuff of his that were posted here on this thread are blatantly transphobic, so fuck that guy too - however, not feeling unsafe because someone posted a dumb comic on the internet, especially when it's not hateful content like what has been shared on the community, is not a privilege, it's your choice to feel unsafe - because how the fuck anyone in this community can even be a threat? If you let people get into your head that easily, you gonna have an awful time.
edit: Never mind, I just stumbled upon a video and saw other people using the sentence “feel unsafe” and I realized it doesn’t have anything to do with actual safety, you are just saying you feel uncomfortable but being dramatic about it.
The reason the sexism in Jago comics is "just something to roll your eyes at" is specifically because it's been tolerated ins society for so long that we do not view it as problematic. By contrast the anti-trans hate presented in those same comics is much newer to a lot of people so it seems worse by comparison. Both are examples of marginalized groups being attacked or misrepresented by someone with bigoted views and I am surprised you could write such a long comment on the topic without actually coming to an understanding about that.
Good people always feel unsafe around perceived injustice.
- said every tyrant ever :P
Perhaps learning how to block authors you don't care for would help the people that feel unsafe due to a comic being posted.
No it doesn't.
How do you suggest we do that with the current way that tagging and content filtering works on Lemmy?
We can block things in text by keyword. However, we don't really have a proper tagging system on Lemmy. If the comic doesn't have attribution in text form (in the title or elsewhere in the post body) then it doesn't help to block the author's name or pseudonym.
I scrolled through months of the community's feed and only one post author is posting the content many are being made to feel unsafe by. The Lemmy block system is great at blocking a single user. In this particular case, no more sophisticated filtering system is needed.
I do understand that many scenarios are more complex but this is not one of those instances.
There's at least two, which I know for certain because someone else saw this post and decided to post two Jago comics back to back.
Blocking those two accounts doesn't do anything to fix the main problem which is that certain content is not tolerable here and the current way this community and Lemmy at large works doesn't account for and cannot combat this.
You assume no further filtering is needed but when someone else starts posting the comics or the person who is blocked decides to change accounts and continue posting etc this becomes ineffective.
I suggested in another comment that making a rule about using the other filtering systems we do have (by using the comic name and author name in the title) we might be able to get around just banning said comics all together, but at the end of the day I really do feel like comics that are used to spread hatred are probably something that shouldn't be allowed specifically because they cause damage in multiple ways to a community.
If you don't know the Nazi bar analogy then you clearly are missing part of the story but if you do and you think we can avoid becoming the Nazi bar in this scenario by wearing headphones or blindfolds then I don't think you're being realistic.
Um yes it is? There's a bazillion accounts on here, I can't just type in "no Nazis". A moderator is one person having to do it.
Please don't. You seriously need to grow a thicker skin if thing you see online hurts you.
Why even bother with federation when we can just 4chan
That's not quite what I'm rooting for here.