(Insert title here)
Giambattista said:
Was there any real reason my avatar would cause excitement or controversy? Was it really that bad? Was it actually a cause, or was it inflated beyond credibility for something?
Was it actually controversial? Racist? Worthy of being removed?
Is this just a ritual that Sciforums goes through every once in a while?
I would look back to my
earlier assessment:
I think there is a question of whether or not the political statement is legitimate. And here I don't mean whether or not the authority agrees with it.
Yes, I left out the harsher part of that paragraph, but only because the above is the part I want to focus on.
There are essentially two questions:
What? and
Why
As to the what, there are a couple of controversial issues that would put the image on someone's radar:
• The Hitler reference, in and of itself.
• Echoing the least rational, most provocative parts of a useless, largely racist° argument distracting American politics.
Maybe in January, 2009, the avatar would have had different significance. But it's April, 2011, and folks have endured this Hitler-mania for a couple years, and the closest thing to an explanation we've gotten is, "Liberals called Bush Hitler!" For two and a half years, then—remember, this started during the campaign—we've put up with many people hiding their racism behind a stupid, superficial tit-for-tat.
Still, though, that doesn't say anything about
you. However, when you stopped and asked people what they thought of your new avatar? Yeah, that put you into a realm where it was possible to construe the avatar as deliberate and inflammatory goading. (i.e., the
Why?)
That would be the strongest assertion of impropriety.
It is my
personal opinion, though I cannot explain it for you thoroughly because much of the material is restricted, that:
(A) The avatar is controversial
(B) The question of how controversial is open
(C) The question arose primarily in response to other issues
(D) I don't know why anyone mentioned the back-room thread to you°, as no official action or position had been resolved
Additionally, I would simply remind that the relationship between standards and action is not fixed. Sometimes the difference between acceptable repartee and unacceptable goading depends on what else is going on around the site.
I'm sure I could devise a longer answer, but I'm not sure it would actually say anything more.
____________________
Notes:
° largely racist — It's always a matter of perceptions, but take, for instance, something I've mentioned here before. Imagine you go to a Tea Party rally. As you're walking through, you stop and listen to a guy explain to people why Obama is Hitler. And then you walk along for a while, and come across another Tea Partier denouncing Democrats as dirty Jews. Now, setting aside the obvious paradox—Really? Obama's going to massacre the Democrats?—it just reminds that this whole thing is about Obama the alien. You know, the anti-colonial, Kenyan-born commie-fascist-Jew-Hitler who hates the white man and his glorious, noble, capitalistic institutions. After a while, yeah, people do start to accept that for those folks it's the fact of a black man in the White House. During Obama's term, I've even encountered a conservative argument that the fact that people are throwing all sorts of racism at the president cannot be taken to mean they're racist.
° I don't know why anyone mentioned the back-room thread to you — This should not be taken to mean that such action was unacceptable, or without reason. I've tipped people before that the staff was gearing up to come after them, but I'm not certain I ever got such a proactive result.