Carcosa DM’d me and I’d like to address and discuss what they said with people here:

I personally disagree with how the moderation was handled but the internal systems set up discourage admin overreach on community moderation actions without an appeal, plus I didn’t handle it perfectly anyway so there’s nonzero standing to remove it – just not enough standing that I think it should have been.

I have considered appealing the removal of my comment but haven’t been able to commit to it.  It’s still in the mod log and getting a 10 day old comment restored doesn’t feel worth the effort to me.

I sincerely agree with the problems with the site moderation discussed in the em_poc thread however do not know what a good pathway forward for action is. As it is not as simple as recruiting more em_poc members into the mod or admin team and the community code of conduct rewrite has not been enough.

What do y’all think?  The common refrain has been that the mod team needs to confront its white brainworms and latent liberal zionism, maybe be more third-worldist.  If we have admin backing, my proposal is re-education.  Literally, writing things up, handing them to the admin, and getting Carcosa to leverage their position to ram through policy changes and make people either learn and grow or resign.

I am not asking you to take on any extra efforts only asking for you or anyone else you’ve included in your discussion to consider communicating with me privately. Any discussion that would take place would have 1000% mod action immunity for anyone in the em_poc community.  I am sure there is ample doubt of my or any admin ability to actually do this as the history of the site speaks otherwise nor can I blame anyone but myself and the other admins.

As of now, Carcosa’s sent out an open invitation for any of us to DM them their concerns.  While I think their offer is in good faith, I worry that only DMing them in order to minimize hostile backlash from other users would lead to a lack of transparency, whereas unified or joint anonymized public statements (if we can agree on a joint position, a “poc party line”,) are harder to ignore and give the userbase something to reference in future disputes.  I said about as much in my response:

(Me:) What I think I would like is if we in the empoc comm can organize some sort of writeup as remedial education that fills in the gaps (blind spots) in white feminist analysis and then the admin or mod team can take that up and try to help start incorporating it into the site culture.  Because this is bigger than Hexbear itself, but Hexbear has taken a leading role in educating people through site culture on other matters.  However, some of that pessimism comes from people feeling that the mod team is not interested in that growth based on a long history of disappointing interactions with the mod team.  I can ask around and see if people would rather DM you or DM me and have me write up a synthesized party line.

(Still Me:) I think education is necessary.  I think I’m interested in trying to write up and synthesize, if people do not want to DM you directly, something that can be used to facilitate that education.  I fear that making it completely transparent (an effortpost) could ignite another struggle session, and I fear that making it not transparent enough could result in no accountability and no progress.

Carcosa’s response, emphasis added

Thank you for the response, I will commit to temp or perm sitebanning anyone pushing back against such an educational post, if you want I can approve an account that the em_poc community can use collectively or to make the post.  I have wondered about how a mod/admin audit could work. An idea that could be a way to improve trust.  I would like to say most of the people involved with some of the worst decisions and actions are no longer with the site moderation team but without more specifics I don’t want to say for sure.

I personally have paid less attention to the mod-team issue, so it would fall on others to do the writeup for that, however I may be able to facilitate said writeup if people send me receipts.  I think that Liberal Zionism, often visibly as prioritizing zionist feelings over the lives of their victims, has been the most visible problem we keep running into, but there have also been anti-black struggles.  Any compilations of grievances and examples of which we can bring to Carcosa’s attention may be helpful in setting forth clearer expectations for moderator behavior.

Now I want to try to tackle the deeper issues here.  The site issues are not Hexbear problems, they are western society problems that infect Hexbear.  Any space that exists within a racist society will still have problems of racism if it does not work hard to combat those problems within it.  We can shrink away from this site into smaller and smaller enclaves and privater and privater groups, or we can try to turn this space into one that can help re-educate people out of those perspectives.  I know people are burnt out and do not have much hope that Hexbear’s latent whiteness problem can be solved, given that we’ve had multiple zionist struggle sessions during an ongoing live-streamed Nakba 2.0.  I am not calling on anyone to take on a fight that they’re not up for.  However, I believe in taking every opportunity to force growth and education — even if by dragging the site kicking and screaming — because otherwise it’ll never get better.  Maybe a misapplication of Sankara’s “as revolutionaries, we don’t have the right to say that we are tired of explaining”, but the line captures my compulsion.  I’ve certainly had my perspectives on other matters updated through education on this site.  I think it’s worth some effort, and I’m up for being the tip of the spear if other people don’t want to be at the front.  All I need is for people to back me up — if you don’t want to DM Carcosa or respond to comments here which can be publicly seen, DM me instead.  Maybe we make a Hexbear empoc matrix that’s invitation-only and workshop a joint statement.

I’m trying to work on a general effort post about the problems with white (imperialist and colonialist) feminism but it’s going to take me quite some time as I want to make it high quality and difficult to attack.  I got curious and picked up some books to read to learn more about actually, because I have a feeling that what racialized people know already through lived experience will have to be verbalized very clearly and intellectualized for white people to digest.  I’d certainly want community review before posting it publicly, if anyone’s up for it, and I don’t know what my timeline is because I have a lot going on offline that takes precedence too.

She messaged me from her new account and took accountability very convincingly.  She also said she could DM the mods and vouch for me.  She expressed a willingness to self-crit while also having the self-awareness to not center a white voice.  I advised I think self crit isn’t earned yet and I’d rather that we POC be empowered to take the lead here rather than relying on a white person to come save us by talking to the other white people.  She took it well and said to let her know if she could help, but she wasn’t going to insert herself into it.

I was very pleasantly surprised!  I feel she comported herself honorably in our private discussion, and I consider my beef with her personally settled.  Further discussions about some of widespread yet toxic ideas which she happened to uncover are simply ideological refinement, nothing personal.  I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to single her out for that and I do not intend to bring her up by name regarding any of this struggle session henceforth.  Other elements of how she interacts with people on the site are outside the scope of what I care about, which are the racial and biological essentialist problems so much of the most popular kind of feminism (white feminism) reifies.  She’s expressed a desire to improve how heated she gets in arguments and I wish her good luck in that, but that is so very much not my focus.

And that’s all I have to say about her.

way slave owners in the USremovedd slave women, and how their wives took out their jealousy on the slave women too, blaming them for “seducing” their husbands.