You remember learning about oppressive governments in history class! Let’s talk about some here!
Any similarities between current events are purely coincidental.
There’s a reason people need to have guns and freedom of speech, that’s to fight against oppressive governments
Disregarding your own rules for the purposes of your own feelings regarding the matter has proven in the past to be a vagrant option that often ends up causing many people to feel the need to rise up in response
See John Adams’s government, when they broke many of the precedents set before them for the good of the states just so they could secure their own power despite their controversial and destructive actions
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I took a course on censorship last fall (as in 2018) and one of the things we discussed is that often censoring bodies won’t explicitly censor an idea or a work, but will implement restrictions on it designed to prevent those ideas from spreading, sometimes by repurposing tools that were never intended for the purpose of censorship in the first place
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It’s not the fact that the action was taken in the first place, it was that the rule was ignored on the administrators end for no good reason.
They did it just because they felt like it rather than because it was actually necessary
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In response sometimes people form groups designed to revolt against oppressive governments, such as the council of idiots.
Personally, speaking as a consequentialist, if an action will provide no benefit and will cause harm to some people, I think that one should not take that action
Deferring to the past without analyzing the past is how poor decisions are made
I experienced this myself when I was a mod, in some cases using my power just because I felt like someone was treating me like a dick
This even led to a ban out of emotion rather than logic
Rules, such as rules encouraging discussions to stay on-topic, are obviously necessary for some situations (such as social banter in the thread for the game queue)
However, the telos, or purpose, of the off-topic category is for people to be able to have whatever sort of conversations they mutually wish to, as long as those conversations do not violate other rules of the forum
Actually
They might be able to just do the same thing but with the post sent over to the cookie thread
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