Curl, that's what's called special pleading for a group that hides behind a political ideological definition because they feel it makes it permissible for them to break the code of conduct on this site.
Based on my observations, I think the moderation team has done a great job on this site. It is true that this site has a particular philosophy that it upholds.
1. We're granted a wide range of freedom, but the decorum window has a boundary when you start denigrating people based on their immutable characteristics.
2. "That's my religious beliefs" or "That's my political beliefs" (or any other reason) is not justification for dehumanizing people. It isn't a necessity of any religion or political ideology to engage in dehumanizing rhetoric on this site.
3. So, when people get banned for dehumanizing people, saying "it's politics" is not a valid response for behaviour. Nor is it any kind of political bias.
Dehumanizing people and then saying "it's my political belief" or "it's my religious belief" to justify bullying someone or a group (directly or indirectly) is simple cowardice. This is the sort of moral grandstanding nonsense that shouldn't be tolerated on this site. If you want to flout the rules of the site and get banned for it, you're the perpetrator, not the victim. We live in a society, and I think it's a valuable social contract to just stay off of the prejudice against immutable characteristics.
Now, the large platform social internet stuff (like YouTube, social media platforms) has become a very foolish place where people are encouraged to post overdramatic, virtue signaling, and victimization accusation posts (basically, the moral grandstanding genre of posts). There are vast swathes of people who generally to almost only criticize media and art (including video games) as a political question and through political values and then everything degrades to back and forth low-comprehension gibberish.
Yes, we have fewer animals in the building, but I don't think that's an argument to let the skunks in.
We have a smaller number of people, but we also have higher quality conversations where people are a lot better at actually comprehending what's being said, responding in long form. We have a political forum which I think works great as a heat sink for the site: doubling as a venting center as well as a current events and mitigating the venting in other forums.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
