Draft Day! wrote:
When Rojo uses white men being slandered as an analogous situation to women and people of color getting slandered, I’m very curious about the intent here. Because intent matters.
Is it bad when anyone, white men included, are slandered, for any reason, including for being white men? Yes.
Rojo COULD use that example of slander to have empathy for other groups of people being slandered, that everyone being slandered only proves that more and better moderation or registration is needed.
Instead, he seems to come at this point from a defensive position, that it white men are slandered, that other groups being slandered is the balance, and there is nothing to be done about any of it.
This, my friends, is ignorant, nihilistic, and racist.
P.S. Has Baltimore jumped the shark?
One thing that I found really interesting was Rojo claiming the site can't be misogynist or racist because Galen Rupp was often called gay.
I disagree strongly with the idea now that people can't be racist against a white person. That idea is fundamentally illogical and stupid.
However, pointing out that the site can't be racist because the most attacked athlete was Galen Rupp is also idiotic. He was a white male being attacked, he wasn't being attacked because of his race.
The racist on this site attack people because of their race. That's what makes it racist. See Coevett for example. Him pointing out Kenyan dopers isn't racist on the surface. Him calling Kenyans the dumbest people he's ever met is racist.
And now that Coevett has clearly been shown to be a racist, it's understandable why people see his repeated accusations against Kenyans to be racially motivated. Because he has shown himself to be a racist and devotes most of posts here to attacking people of that race. The fact that the site didn't even ban him for a day for this shows the site isn't serious about cleaning up the racism. In fact the mods explicitly singled out Coevett as an example of the type of poster they were looking to protect.
People call the site racist because they allow a lot of dog whistle posts that make claims like "every classroom with black kids in it had problems" to stay up and generate clicks and revenue. They also historically clearly had mods refusing to delete racist posts while furiously deleting any posts that complained about them within minutes. Clear evidence of fostering a racist environment, for whatever reason.
Because of that, the site has obviously attracted the rats, and it's not easy to get rid of them. The moderation seems to have gotten a bit better but it's probably too late. The rats have made their nest and the site will always be have issues, especially since the efforts to clean them up seem half-hearted at best.
So it's easy to see why people view attacks on black athletes and women on here as racist and sexist. A post attacking a woman athlete or a black athlete is usually not racist on it's own, but because there is an extended history of outright racist and sexist posts that were allowed to stay up for a very long time, and the number of dog whistle race baiting that is allowed by the site, it's a very reasonable to assume there is at least some connection between the racist and sexist undercurrent of the site and the posts attacking these athletes.