No dunk was intended. My point is what I opened the post with: presuming lack of goodwill leads to perceiving lack of goodwill, in a vicious cycle. This is a sensitive topic, passions are flaring, and it’s fine for people to express themselves passionately (if respectfully). But in order for that to work, we need to acknowledge each other’s value and not be looking around every corner for someone trying to persecute you for wrongthink—because if you presume it, you will find all the evidence you need to convince yourself, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.
These various moderation-related threads have had a lot of that, it seems to me, and not enough pausing to consider the best ways something might be interpreted. If the question is ‘why isn’t this post flagged?’ for example, is your first impulse to find the evil thing in the community that permits this post while rejecting others? Or could it be to find the good (or at least neutral) thing that this post does but is absent in others? Do you presume persecution and unfairness, or do you presume that someone else has a different perspective and try to understand it? Same question, different attitudes, different outcomes for likelihood of reconciliation of the community.