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[foo_bar]

106. I've had a similar sensation lately

Kind of a Pavlovian gut-punch whenever I see certain usernames on certain subthreads. Without minimizing the suffering of real life violence and abuse victims, DU's "jury" system metaphorically resembles the cop in that GD story, or at least I can empathize with the nausea that accompanies injustice compounded by systemic revictimization. I almost posted on this subject in H&M, but I realized physical revulsion isn't a great debate tactic in itself, plus I'd have to scribe an 80 word disclaimer (1. Yes, I've heard of the ignore function, 2. I've also been apprised of "trash thread", 3. True, there's an alert button, but it isn't really connected to anything, and 4. No, I did learn to read at some point, and I even try to perform a rudimentary form of analysis that permits potential interpretations of otherwise innocent looking letter combinations.)

Serially rude posters defending their callousness seem to prevail with the vox populi, while thoughtful and ceaselessly polite posters are silenced by our two-wolves-and-a-lamb democracy-for-dinner if they run afoul of majoritarian prejudice... I sent a few alerts on one particular thread, and all of them came back nullified, some with variations of "Lighten up Francis", "get a grip", "you need a thicker skin" aka put some ice on it, and on one panel the ad feminem was rationalized thusly:

Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: The small handful of posters here who seem to find sexism behind every post need to be called out like this. They are ruining DU.

The next day, I was seated on a "jury" after this post was inexplicably alerted with the following explanation: "Another allusion to, as another poster put it, 'a mysterious "Rape Culture"' on DU. This attacking of unnamed people on DU is an attempt to disparage the community without a shred of evidence for it."

So actual personal attacks = she deserved it, mysterious allusions to nonspecific injustice by unnamed people = attack on the DU collective. I don't want to compare the alert button to calling 911 in Milwaukee, because our 911 works fine as long as you alert unpopular opinions with content solely objectionable to a denialist status quo.