If you vote on the other ultrarated debates, it will make it more likely future voters are assigned to this debate.
Now I'm curious, what sites have you moderated?
They can vote in the comments and we can count it. (I mean, I guess all mods have to decide what's okay, but I'm fine with Remy and them voting.)
I don't mean anyone in particular wants "all or nothing" and temp bans are on the table. What I'm saying is, I don't think anyone voting no has said they wanted a temp ban. Everyone has either said they want a permaban, or said Remy's free speech should be protected.
If you are wanting to change your vote to a temp ban, we can account for that and then do the "median" punishment out of all votes. Similarly to how surveys work.
"What exactly happens assuming the vote goes as expected and there is no perma ban."
We could go with median option if people specify in their vote that they want a lesser penalty. But I think people so far have all indicated they want permanent or nothing.
"That doesnt change the fact that the reasoning for a RB vote is also applicable to the debaters."
I mean I'm fine with them voting if it makes a difference, I just assumed they defended the side they agreed with so it wouldn't. I know Kohai defended the side he agrees with, I believe WF didn't want a permaban but could be wrong.
I assume their votes would cancel out. Really voting is how it is cause the site code restricts debaters from voting, but we could get around that.
"If I argued to ban everyone else except me, surely I wouldn't be the only one allowed to vote"
That's kind of how I see it. Cause we're trying to weigh everyone's interests here, and Remy is someone. The question is whether other people's interests outweigh his.
Also bias doesn't seem like an issue when we're literally telling people to just vote for what they want to happen.
I mean if they're both biased, prosecution and defense would cancel each other out, right?
Russia has a firewall, punishes ppl for going around it, and criminalizes organized dissent.
Also censorship laws make people afraid to say they don't approve, but when journalists ask open-ended questions like what politician ppl trust, he doesn't make the list. Obviously he doesn't trust his approval to carry him in a democracy or he would make the country democratic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2026_Russian_legislative_election
"All politicians lie."
Sure but Russia has fewer ways for people to figure out he's lying. See articles I linked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_freedom_in_Russia
https://cpj.org/reports/2006/11/russia-murders/
"Putin quite perfectly represents the majority"
Cause other groups aren't allowed to campaign against him, due to him undemocratically influencing the law. And he can't rely on that number for long and he knows it, or he wouldn't be killing political opponents. I've also mentioned how I'd want different factions to debate in front of a random pool of citizens to get a more informed version of the median voter, so that would counteract propaganda. His actions don't represent the median voter either, he just lies about what they are.
"Germany before Hitler was a democracy"
So the failure of democracy was in becoming undemocratic. And it was worse with Hitler than when it was a democracy right? Also Hitler didn't represent the median voter, he gained power because of how coalitions in parliament work and I think I have already mentioned to you how I would improve that.
https://www.debatecraft.com/forum/c/politics/posts/om/best-form-of-democracy
"Right now, yes. If it ran out of dictatorships to invade, it would invade democracies."
If wars were started due to demand for wars, they would not have decreased over human history. And we would expect the US to just invade targets at random chance.
"People in Russia have ability to vote. So did people in Yugoslavia, and war happened there too...Even people in Ukraine had ability to vote, and civil war happened there."
Again, wars are happening in places with very limited democracy, where leaders don't represent the median voter. This isn't an argument against democracy as much as an argument that it's hard to implement in practice. Which would be fine if your argument was against its feasibility, but governments that more effectively represent the median voter have been implemented in practice, and they rarely start wars with each other.
"this is irrelevant. If its democracies starting most wars, why would it matter against who is that war fought?"
Because autocracies create conflicts and problems that make reasonable discussion less feasible. The US is more likely to invade a dictatorship than a democracy.
"this sounds like assumption"
We can observe that democracies rarely fight each other. Kind of indicates that for conflict one of the sides needs to be an autocracy.
"Are you saying ability to vote gives person immunity from being slaughtered? If that were the case, Russia and Ukraine would never go to war. they both have voting."
Russia isn't democratic though, it's clearly a front.
"Even today, democracies are on a one way path into chaos by all measurements. Biggest debt, population which is increasingly mentally ill, birth rates which are non-existent, and insane amount of retarded laws such as UK's lifetime ban on smoking."
Yet quality of life is much better in democracies. And autocracies have much more draconian bans than bans on smoking lol.
I mean I thought I was responding to that. None of the complaints I've seen about Remy have been that the responses to him were offending them. Never seen someone say "I blocked Remy, but from the responses to his comments, people keep saying that I (thin-skinned person) got owned." Probably (a) because if his posts are marked offensive they won't see the comments on them in the first place, and (b) because he's not really targeting people who don't interact with him.
Additionally, if someone did make a response like "wow, Remy owned [thin-skinned person]" then that comment would be marked as offensive, so thin-skinned person wouldn't see it.
I don't think there's anyone using the "hide offensive posts" feature who is still involuntarily being harmed by Remy's posts. It's all voluntary from what I can tell.
"If we count USA, Ukraine and Israel as democracy, then I am afraid its democracies starting most wars."
Against who? It's almost always a nondemocratic country. If both countries were democratic, they would likely just bargain with each other instead of fighting wars, which are inefficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
https://gametheory101.com/courses/international-relations-101/wars-inefficiency-puzzle/
"history of human race is that of wars, witch trials and slaughter"
Yes, slaughter of groups that couldn't vote.
"Decline of democracies shows that over time, democracy becomes oppressive or just dies because masses are oppressive wolves."
At worst, it turns into something that's not a democracy. Also this "long term" is hypothetical, because democracies today do better than autocracies.
Forgot to tag, see below.
"Sure, you have to choose to see exactly what offensive thing is said by one account but you are now still dealing with other people responding to bad faith behavior, getting upset, and very likely starting to cross lines themselves"
I don't think ppl are complaining about people's responses to remy, just remy himself. If those responders cross lines, they'll be marked as offensive too.
"But as far as I know, humans are predators throughout their evolution."
Yeah, pack animals who look out for other humans. The other animals lose, but it's cause they can't vote.
"democracies world wide are getting worse"
An yet democracies have the least oppression of any governmental system and every time two countries go to war, it almost always involves one of them being non-democratic.
"Something that worked well in one community I was in was there was a specific section that was unmoderated"
I mean we have that and Remy is in it. All his posts are automatically marked as offensive. You have to consent to seeing offensive posts to see anything he writes.
Sheep outnumber wolves by a ratio of thousands. No group that relies on destroying members of the outgroup can get too big and survive. People might "use" members of the outgroup, but they can't expect to kill the golden goose and survive. So everyone lives to fight another day, and then someone who was in the minority before becomes a member of the majority. 51% of congress can scheme, so it's best to prevent that, but 51% of the entire population of a country rarely coordinates well enough to abuse democracy. And in any other system, the risk is still there, the threshold for abuse is just much lower.
And once a minority group's survival is at stake, they'll coordinate to protect themselves while members of the majority will be split. There's a reason voting was like the last civil right given to minorities. Once they got that, it was pretty hard racists to take other political rights away from them without restricting voting in some way.
"it was always obvious that democracy is two wolves and sheep voting on whats for dinner"
People say this, but democracy is the only system where the sheep have a chance. If they outnumber the wolves, they win. Every other system ends up with like 1-10 wolves ruling 10,000 sheep. Additionally, most people contribute more to society by being alive and happy then by being dead, so it would be rare for a majority to democratically exterminate a minority. More likely they win on some issue that favors them, and then most members of the minority are in the majority on some other issue and win then.
The globally estimated ratio of sheep to wolves is 5,200 to 1. Similarly, I don't think a group that survives solely by eating/destroying members of the outgroup could survive as a majority. Once the predator group gets bigger than a small fraction, it will lose members.
The surveys dealt with all of this pretty comprehensively. The issue in my view is that the CoC has not been super consistent with surveys. I thought it wasn't a big deal cause we were just going off of surveys, but now we're using the CoC to ban people, so I'm gonna care more about the wording of it going forward. Regardless, I think this trial is a good opportunity for people to decide where the line is, and the CoC can reflect that so no one can complain. But if people vote to ban Remy and then vote for total free speech in the next survey, then I'm not sure what we do with that. Does Remy get unbanned cause now rage baiting is allowed?
The thing with core principles is it's easy to get people to agree in principle, but it's hard to agree on interpretation, and that ends up looking like 2-3 mods deciding what the law is. You may as well amend the constitution to say "only pass good laws" and leave the courts to figure it out.
I agree that there's a difference, but there's plenty of cases of other users saying things with the intent to offend and outright insulting each other. If we're allowing that but not allowing Remy to intentionally offend people because of his opinions, then we really are protecting some views more than others. And that's fine if people want that, but based on community surveys people have wanted more laissez-faire moderation, and that's been treated as the law for a while. So I feel like banning Remy here is an ex-post-facto penalty for something he really didn't have reason to believe was against the rules. He got penalized in the past for a specific violation of rules decided by the survey results but was never told he might be banned for something the survey results indicated was fine. The CoC is pretty broad, but since it was written, we've have multiple community surveys where users indicated they wanted offensive speech protected. Next survey is gonna need to include specific lines from the CoC, cause otherwise we're gonna have different documents saying different things.
"I would respect the position that this is a violation of Remy’s “free speech” a lot more if it comes attached with some nuance and the recognition of the price the rest of us have to pay for it"
In terms of offense, I think this price is mitigated by the ability to block offensive posts. And once Kohai is fine with me pushing my next update, people should be able to block an individual's posts as well. If the price you're referring to is some people leaving the platform, I see your point, though it's a bit difficult to measure the counterfactual. I know there's some people who would def leave if they thought the platform no longer respected their idea of free speech.
If I'm steel-manning their position, they're likely saying that freedom of speech is important as a principle to enable more discussion on a debate site, not that DebateCraft itself is legally bound to allow anyone on the platform. Myself, I would probably interpret the term "free speech" a bit differently depending on context; here, I get why people might see Remy as an exception since it's not his opinions they object to but the way he expresses them. But I do think the line between what an opinion is and how it is expressed an get a bit fuzzy.
You can now revote
>Reported Vote: Shoresy // Mod action: Removed
>Voting Policy: https://www.debatecraft.com/debates/vote-rubric
>Voted for: tie
>Reason for Decision: other
>Reason for Mod Action:
Request
---Shoresy's former vote---
Voted for: tie
Absolutely no ban.
Free speech that protects only comfortable speech is NOT free speech; it is permission granted by whomever the authoritarian is who happens to control the room. The entire point of this USA principle is that people are allowed to say things that offend us, anger us, challenge our values, or make us profoundly uncomfortable. Socrates understood this deeper principle more than two thousand years ago....
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
You cannot meaningfully examine your beliefs if every competing idea has first been scrubbed clean of anything disturbing.
That is especially true in debates. A debate that teaches the crowd only how to encounter approved opinions is not preparing them for real-world citizenship. It is preparing them for intellectual dependency and compliance. Put the difficult argument on DART. Let students read it, interrogate it, identify its assumptions, attack its evidence, and defend their objections. The answer to an ugly idea is not pretending the idea doesn't exist. It is giving the crowd enough knowledge and confidence to confront it. Critical thinking requires something to criticize, or it never exists.
Sure, I get there are reasonable boundaries for direct threats, targeted harassment, and genuinely unlawful conduct, but reducing discomfort alone as a virtue cannot be the standard. Once “this makes me uncomfortable” becomes sufficient grounds for suppressing an argument, whoever claims the greatest discomfort acquires a veto over everyone else's inquiry. Real education should demand something harder from us: hear the argument, examine it, challenge it, and decide whether it survives. If an idea is wrong, expose why it is wrong. If we're so afraid to examine it, we've allowed fear to discredit Socrates before the discussion has even begun.
