I'm just sad

Or to put it another way, LWN moderation sometimes comes across like an awful primary school teacher saying "I don't care who started it" and acting like everyone involved was *equally wrong*.

This is the essence of it. The elites - at whatever level of combination of conscious planning and emergent behaviour arising out of the class incentives - use all kinds of delineated rhetoric to divide and conquer the masses, on lines of ethnicity, religion, culture. But never, never along the lines of class.

And we lap it up. And on occasion, when the curtain briefly splits for a second, and we see how the elites supposedly representing different factions - "Dem" and "Republican", "Labour" and "Tory", "Fianna Fail" and "Fianna Gael", "Al Qaeda" and "CIA" - hobnob together, laughing and slapping each other's backs, few seem to see it.

Too distracted by fighting other little people about whatever little line, whatever flag, they've been cultivated to obsess over, to notice.

It is, in fact, impolite to call people "bigots". First off, because it makes a serious accusation that commonly brings real-world consequences, while not necessarily being supported by the facts. To say that someone is being "described" as a bigot begs the question: it assumes that the target actually expressed bigotry. Second, because bigotry is a characteristic of conduct, not of identity. There is a large difference, for example, between calling someone a "liar" and claiming a statement to be "a lie" (which in turn is a stronger claim than simply saying that it is "untrue").

Of course it is a problem for people to express bigotry. (Here I understand that we use the term in the general sense of expressing unjustified prejudice, particularly towards groups of people defined by identity characteristics, rather than in the dictionary sense of general narrow-mindedness or obstinacy.) However, this must be understood to be true of all forms of bigotry, not just those that a moderation team finds sympathetic.

The kinds of "call-outs" that people defend in the name of holding back supposed "bigots" is commonly demeaning, grossly inaccurate and frankly beyond the pale. It is frankly wrong to suppose that "framing" this as impolite is "a tool that people sometimes use to position such behavior as *not* unacceptable". This is an entirely unsubstantiated claim. The plain reading of such accusations of impoliteness is quite literal and transparent. People should simply not throw around such language in public, and moderation teams had better be able to make a fully reasoned argument that would be convincing to any reasonable person, not just to people with aligned political views.