Originally I was just going to pack my bags and leave quietly, because this is some disgustingly offensive shit, and impossible to just ignore, as you so disingenuously suggest; I want no part of a site that permits and even encourages this kind of monstrosity (and look at the rep! Christ!). But in the end quiescence struck me as cowardice. I am a man who believes, strongly, in moral terms, in being a loudmouth. So:
Smacking rating labels on others' work for the sake of your own bullshit fringe politics? Claiming to act in defense of a hypothetical group of readers who, if they exist, are so sensitive they shouldn't be let out on the Internet at all unsupervised, let alone E2? Classifying material as offending on your own unilateral judgment (or how else do you determine it? Do you find someone traumatized to read your candidates and see what puts them into catatonia?)? All this is too reprehensible for words. Calling it »social justice« when it's the opposite of either of those things only adds insult to injury, but it's a pretty serious insult.
Let us be clear: it's only nominally that this constitutes any kind of objective system of protection; you just say it is. In reality it is the sequence of prejudices and valuations of yourself, user Aerobe, personally, given flesh. You could have asked people voluntarily to add disclaimers at the beginning of strong writing; you could have created the categories and only added writeups to them at the author's request, you could have shown even a slight bit of humility concerning your own beliefs, &c. &c. There are any number of solutions which allow the writers to control the presentation of their own writing. But you didn't use any of those. Instead, you opted to force your own ideas on their work — and your choice from all available options of the specific terminology of a bunch of pop-shithead authoritarians is as telling as it is revolting. Because, of course, the only real drawback to any of those other approaches is that if given the option, some people would inevitably opt out. And we can't have dissent, can we?
(Here I must remark that I really find it troubling that, even here, among reasonably intelligent, educated people, almost nobody can apparently tell the difference between just naming something, let's say, »justice«, and it actually being justice. I find myself wondering if you people would support the Klan if only they renamed themselves »The Equality And Fairness Initiative«.)
I'm pretty sure this operation is a complete perversion of what categories were supposed to be for — but even if they really were coded for this kind of shit, that doesn't make it any more acceptable. As I understand it there is also now a tool for actively censoring out the writeups you've decided are offensive — to be perfectly frank it sort of staggers me that even a single person can condone that, let alone dozens. The whole thing is not only despicable in itself, although that would be enough, but a slippery slope to even worse censoring »for the good of the users«. Even if you were acting in favor of a remotely sensible belief system, this would be goddamn abominable.
(Incidentally, and as a total aside of the sort I've never been able to avoid, the slippery slope is a lot less of a fallacy than some people would like it to be. The most famous example of slippery-slope reasoning I can think of offhand is a quote by Heine: »das war ein Vorspiel nur: dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen«. Go on, call him wrong. NOTE: Apparently this requires clarification, despite my stating it at the start of the parenthesis: this is an aside, a curio, and to be read as unrelated to any of the rest of this node!)
This, all this, is replacing the good with the appearance of good. Cheap fucking pharisaism. I've said several times that I couldn't imagine anything other than a changed policy on the ownership of users' work that could make me pull mine; that just goes to show you how far I was from imagining anything this fucked up could actually be permitted here. Not even Wikipedia, that hulking monster of bad decision-making, has any policies quite this stupid.
In short: If this is who we are now, it isn't »we« anymore; it's »you«. I'm out.
That's it. That's all.