Just continuing a conversation you started. It does at this point sound to me like your behavior might have played more of a role in your ban than you might be crediting.

Categorically, as you claimed before? Why not? If we can prove intent of an individual action beyond reasonable doubt, why not an action by an organization of people?

Or are you now acknowledging intent can be proven beyond reasonable doubt but that it hasn’t been in the case you were banned for arguing it?

In science, there’s absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly “centrist") when one does not have expertise.

This isn’t analogous, though; consensus is a category reached through reason and proof. Expert consensus is by definition a reasonable position (can still be wrong, of course, but it’s a reasoned consensus).

Centrism just means a relative position between two others. It is not definitionally reasonable, so your analogy of what I’m doing doesn’t hold any water.

Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say?

But just because they say it doesn’t make it a valid argument in their case.

My point here was just categorically being a centrist doesn’t necessarily make the position reasonable enough that it should be tolerated. If you’re a centrist between a reasonable position and an unreasonable one, you might still be being unreasonable. It really depends on the specific issue. That’s really all my point was.

That seems to be just hoping for no critical mass though. If it ever grows large enough, you’ll definitely get people willing to put the time in to disrupt things for their own entertainment.

I can’t respond to such a circumspect answer.

I can only answer generally that there still sometimes not room for reasonable disagreement where intent is involved. Courts absolutely do prove intent for some crimes beyond a reasonable doubt… someone could still disagree, but by definition it isn’t necessarily a reasonable disagreement.

Murder (vs manslaughter) in most jurisdictions is a question of intent. We prove it to the point of no reasonable disagreement all the time. That’s the very standard we use.

again: I’m a frigging centrist

I’m not saying this is the case in your case at all, but depending on the issue this isn’t always an ironclad defense. We certainly have historical examples of political centrists aligning with very extreme ideologies in an attempt to cling to power.

And just logically, some issues don’t have a valid centrist position. There’s no valid centrist position between a flat earther and one who believes the earth is a planet in space. For example, in a science community, I would expect people pushing flat earth to possibly get banned and could see the logic in someone trying to find a middle between those two positions getting the same treatment. Just because there are two sides to an issue doesn’t make a moderate position between them reasonable or defensible. Sometimes one side is just wrong.

I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.

But what about the problem of trolls just continuing to create new instances to circumvent bans and defederation? Is there really a solution to this beyond hoping we don’t reach a critical mass where this becomes a real problem?

Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.

I think it would help to know in more detail what went down here. If we’re talking about justifying, perhaps even unintentionally, genocide in either the sense of mass killing or mass removal by other means… I think it’s pretty understandable that civility starts to go out the window a bit. Arguably the position itself is uncivil, whatever words are used to support it. When your start to talk about the right to exist or not, to not be killed or forcibly removed by a state… that’s a life or death question and people will react that way. There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.

That said, on wider issues, as someone firmly on the left, I do completely agree that the left can get kind of ridiculously emotionally invested and toxic over even minor disagreements from other leftists that absolutely don’t meet the above threshold, even on questions as banal as pure strategy vs actual ideological disagreement. But it’s hard to say if what you experienced was the latter and not you possibly being oblivious to your part in the former without more detail.