I recently made an account on Beehaw because I’ve been having pleasant interactions with the instance from my lemm.ee account. Some good threads, seemed like a progressive space. So I went back to the philosophy documents and read them again, liked most of what I saw (again) and signed up for an account today. Decided to break in my new account by browsing the top posts of the last month. Several of them were threads I recognised and had commented in, and felt like revisiting. Except my comments weren’t there. When I got to a comment I very specifically remember replying to (someone asked what’s up with HBomber and James Somerton), and couldn’t find my comment, I decided to check the modlog.
I’m banned. I’ve been talking into an empty void for 4 months. I was banned for being in bad faith. And one of my comments was removed by an admin, because I told people to assume good faith and apparently that’s not nice.
This doesn’t align at all with the documents I’ve been reading today. The ones about assuming good faith, and about giving people chances to clarify, and about how banning is a last resort only for obvious trolls. When I came to this community 4 months ago to make a post about fediverse drama, I wasn’t interested in active participation in the community, and I didn’t make that post with that in mind. I understand how that might not fit the desires of the community here. But I didn’t make that post in bad faith. I, and whoever wrote those pages on the philosophy of Beehaw, wanted the same thing back then. To create a corner of the internet free of hate speech and full of kindness. Now? I’m jaded and beaten. I don’t want to create a kind community anymore, I want to find one. I’ve given up on that ambition. So that’s why I reread the updated documents with hope. Why I created an account. And why I want to know whether beehaw.org is actually the website I read about in those documents. Because those modlogs say the opposite of what those documents said. If I don’t fit in here, if the ideals I thought I saw aren’t present, I’d like to find out quickly.
Should I still hope?
a religious practice being unfamiliar and a bit strange to you is fine, but what you consider a weird religious practice is almost completely arbitrary–and something just being a weird religious practice to you isn’t good grounds to call it “another cult thing”, which is what’s being objected to up-thread.
as an aside: if we’re being intellectually honest “practicing magick” or believing in its existence is really no weirder than adhering to Catholic transubstantiation–the former is just niche while the latter is adhered to indirectly by a billion people.
Religion is by definition “another cult thing”
Of course. They’re the same thing, total nonsense
i don’t care if you think religion is bad or cringe or whatever–i am not religious–but if you want to continue being on this instance you cannot use this as a justification to be weird about other people’s sincere spiritual beliefs. demanding they justify themselves to you is stupid, in the same way it would be stupid of me to harangue you about why you’re not religious and what a weirdo you are for being that way.
If they don’t want to justify it that’s fine, but they’re making claims that their magic is better than psychology, which is dangerous. And it’s totally valid to ask for evidence for claims that their magic is real
this is literally the sort of haranguing i just described–pretty much all religious belief is predicated on a non-resolvable, non-falsifiable metaphysical debate that is supremely uninteresting to all participants and even less interesting to read and moderate because in this lifetime it is non-resolvable and non-falsifiable. put simply: you will never convince a sincere and devout religious person that their worldview is wrong by asking them to source where that worldview comes from–and if their worldview harms nobody, bluntly, who cares if their worldview is wrong anyways? it’s not your problem. i don’t know why i would care that someone else is wrong about something that doesn’t impact me.