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I say let it stand as a testament.

I know you're joking around, but I'll take advantage of the moment to rant on a tangent for a bit. I legit saw this attitude spreading through the moderator space on reddit a decade ago, as they started getting influenced by users to let slide more and more horrible takes so that "the community can judge for themselves" as tender, shut-in lads and lasses who were trying to manage our largest discussion forums without pay were suddenly being bombarded from all sides by people trying to subvert the subreddits and control them for their own agendas.

And largely, it worked. Many, many times I've seen subreddits and forums on other sites fall because the mods got compromised, the other mods got too burned out or emotional to keep doing their tasks, and as a result the conversations started allowing more and more incel-bait, tired tropes of persecution and misogyny, foulmouthed, delusional teenagers who have never left their houses suddenly making profound statements about the state of gender dynamics, and a whole ARMY of foreigners pretending to be normal Americans or Europeans on both sides of every argument, just screaming their nonsense louder and louder until the only users left were the ones who agreed with the delusion. I wish people understood that some of the most famous horrible subreddits and sites started as jokes and were gradually co-opted and hijacked to become unironic hate-spaces.

This was the plan all across the internet and it worked. We are all so tired of every argument and issue that most people don't engage anymore. We don't even try to correct anyone because we assume either other users know better, or will sort it out for us, or who cares anyway, what's even real? Just tune out, keep scrolling.

So now I say, no. We need to be far less tolerant of intolerance, we need to burn them out of their nests and dens. Reddit didn't go nearly far enough with banning the incel subs, they should have banned incel ideology, they should have banned redpill rhetoric entirely. I once would have balked at that kind of "censorship" but I'm now watching my nation dissolve under the stupidest movement ever created and I'm somewhere between shaking with rage and shaking with exhaustion.

I felt like I understood your original post, so I hope you're okay if I try to bridge the misunderstandings? If at any point I misunderstood, let me know.

They aren’t going outside and saying these things where at least one man would smack him upside the head in order to correct bad behavior.

Expecting men to beat the shit out of people doing the “wrong” things is also a really big problem and isn’t a solution either.

I feel like this boils down to: having men use physical violence to coerce other men into "proper" behavior isn't the solution. The scare-quotes around "wrong" imply the term being potentially misused.

I remember in the late 80s when i was really young hearing about gay bashing as if it was a perfectly okay thing to group to and go do.

You note that groups used violence against gay people in the 80s, and that it was considered acceptable. I read this and the next sentence as being an example, provided to support your first sentence.

I remember people talking about Freddie Mercury coming out as gay and not feeling comfortable asking why that is a problem for fear of being targeted myself.

The fear of violence was such a severe deterrent, that even questioning why being gay was "wrong" could have led the group to assume you were gay and thus become violent against you.

I don’t have any answers

Although you don't believe in corporal punishment, you don't know what the answer would be. (Which is totally fair, IMO.)

Is that the gist of what you meant?

If so, I suspect people lost track of your point around the term "gay bashing." Most people these days probably associate that term with someone speaking poorly of gay people, which sucks, but is relatively tame compared to what I thought you meant - which was, groups that went around literally bashing, as in physically attacking, gay people. (Which was, and still is in some places, an absolutely real thing.) It's possible that this misunderstanding derailed the rest of your comment, leading readers away from your point.

Nobody understands a thing you're saying, I think you don't grasp the concept of "context" like so many internet drones. I'm blocking you now, have a good day