… like I said, it's a
complicated discussion↗. One thing that stands out is a sense of extremity, as if it is some sort of all-or-nothing proposition. Like a household argument, even, it's akin to the idea of asking could one please not behave in a particular way and someone declaring, fine, they just won't do anything.
In the end, the question of banning has to do with behavior. The historical origin also has to do with the pretense of rational discussion. The way around that point is to abandon that pretense of rational discussion. Compared to the
proposition↗ of "saying 'enough is enough - you don't get to say that anymore'", for instance,
we are down to↗, "seeing ignorance, mainly", that someone, "obviously has no clue about what he's talking about when it comes to racial inequality, and apparently doesn't want to learn anything either", though, "neither of those things automatically make him a troll or a supremacist".
Now, at the heart of what isn't trolling in that example was a question of taking two and a half days to get a deliberately insufficient answer to a straightforward question, stretching the digression out over many posts in order to disrupt the primary discussion. Given a pretense that one can somehow be excused because they are too stupid to know an overworn racist trope is racist, the question of whether deliberate disruption of discussions is trolling, and the "problem … of saying 'enough is enough - you don't get to say that anymore'", we might wonder what anybody expects to happen.
Moreover, on the point of things being complicated, consider two aspects omitted from the prior paragraph: The question of a member advocating for white supremacism was a weird straw man to work around a question of trolling behavior; the politic was recognized, prior policy discussions considered, and that's why the issue at hand was the disruptive trolling behavior, yet we somehow ended up with a public inquisition for the sake of burning straw. Also, the "problem … of saying 'enough is enough …'" is actually enumerated; it "lies in deciding who we can trust to be the gatekeepers", to which there is an obvious response: He's the Administrator, and Bells and I are moderators, and at some point, that would be our jobs.
The question of banning bigots and tinfoils is one of behavior. If we reject bigotry, tinfoil, and crackpottery, who is utterly silenced? Please consider:
But let's consider the topic of white supremacism, if you like. Suppose we ban all discussion of it. Then how are we going to meaningfully discuss matters such as the invasion of the US Capitol by Trump supporters? Are we just going to ignore an important facet of that because we've decided that white supremacism is unmentionable?
(James R↗)
"Suppose we ban all discussion" of white supremacism? Why would we do that? "Because we've decided that white supremacism is unmentionable"? What in the world does that mean? Are we really supposed to be unable to discern the difference between
behavior and
discussion of behavior?