An open letter to Skinner (POSTED IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FORUM)

[thesquanderer]

304. the subject line, etc.

"keeping for posterity" is not a complete indication of the context, if you don't already know the context.

Quoting something vile doesn't necessarily make it less vile.

Imagine this: Someone says something horrendous, and is banned. You *agree* with the terrible post, so you decide to repost it, essentially on the banned person's behalf, as a kind of tribute to him. Just how different would that look, from what actually was presented in 1SBM's post? How deep do you expect a jurist to dig to determine intent?

Here's the point: Jurists may make their decisions in a matter of seconds. Don't you think it's possible that a jurist could simply see the post, see it as instantly offensive even while not giving full consideration to the possible implications of the subject line, and just hit "Hide it"? We kind of already know that jurist 6 reacted that way. We've had people in this very thread (post #21 and reply post #76) who looked at it and thought they were agreeing with the OP when they, too, said they would have banned it! So clearly, it is very possible. So I think it's only speculation that any or all of the other jurists voted out of racism rather than out of anti-racism.

As for the explanation of courage, it was your subject line that accused the jurists of not having the courage to explain themselves. If you think it was so ridiculous to imply that such a thing actually would have taken courage that an explanation to the contrary was 100% needless, then why you would have said it? Though in hindsight, I guess I can see it could have just been blowing off steam and not meant as a true comment per se. In a way this gets back to the main point... separating the content of posts from their intent. It's not foolproof.