23 June 2019

This Ravelry thing

Ravelry has banned pro-Trump anything on the grounds that the Trump administration are white supremacists.  Various people are declaiming that this is an obvious failure of tolerance.

Just in case someone is suffering from a sincere confusion on this point; an expectation of tolerance on your part -- you expect to be tolerated -- required the exercise of tolerance on your part.  You have to extend to others the tolerance you expect to receive.

White supremacists definitionally don't do that.  As an ideology, it's about imposing a strict hierarchy, enforced with violence.  ("I might not murder you this time" is not tolerance.)

There's a much longer description about acting to constrain other's choices and how the material goal of justice is to expand the scope of just treatment to all people, but it really isn't necessary.  An expectation of tolerance is isomorphic to an agreement that you're not special.  Anything with "supremacist" in it fails that agreement.

3 comments:

Moz said...

Ravelry the knitting community?

It seems like a weird place to even *have* white supremecists, let alone enough of a problem to need to explicitly ban them.

Graydon said...

+Moz -- yup, Ravelry the knitting community.

A plurality of the US population are active white supremacists; American evangelism (as currently recognized) got created to be the religion of white supremacism in response to civil rights. (It always had been, but it had also been increasingly niche.) And a certain percentage are pushy about it, with the effect that if you don't actively defend a social space it gets taken over.

Slybrarian said...

I was going to say "you wouldn't expect an elfgame forum to need to either" except then I remember that it wasn't surprising at all that RPG.net needed to ban supporting Trump, just like they had to ban anyone supporting Gamergate. In both cases the bans made it a much more pleasant forum.