Apparently "reddit legal" thought that was a credible threat. I find that strangely encouraging.
The fact that people openly cheer on re-introducing this, or on those following through with such plans (Luigi), is just showing how fed up wide masses of society are - and Reddit's admins have been hellbent on quenching even verbal forms of dissatisfaction.
The problem is, all that does is keeping pressure bottling up and eventually, if the issues with inequality and absurd amounts of power grabbing aren't dealt with, the explosion will be much harder than if people had a relatively safe way of voicing their dissent.
“Civility” is the first recourse of the privileged.
That's my point. When people see no other way out of resolving the exploding wealth and power inequality crisis than violence, it shows that democracy is on the verge of failure.
It's horrifying, agreed, but it happening is completely understandable IMHO given that democratic systems seem to be completely and thoroughly corrupted by big money.
It's no longer a question if open violence erupts, it's a question of when - and Western governments all seem to ignore the issue and show zero intent to actually do something to ease the life of the wide masses. The system is headed straight for collapse.
There’s a good book called “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher Browning which explores this. The Reserve Police Battalions were created by Germany to police captured territory, but they were seen by ordinary Germans as a way to avoid the war and conscription. The members were not Nazis, and almost to a man they joined because it was an honorable way to avoid participating in the evils happening all around them. They were only trained for ordinary honest police work, but in the end many of them were being used to hunt down and murder Jews. They were sent out into forests to comb them for underground shelters. They rounded up Jews and herded them into mass graves.
Almost none of them complained or tried to avoid participating. No one punished them if they didn’t participate. No one coerced them into participating. A few asked for and received transfers, if I recall correctly. The best that can be said about the rest is that many of them are believed not to have actually fired their weapons. Some of them probably went the whole war without actually killing anyone, technically. They were just assigned the job so they did it.
Your second paragraph gives a single example which is apparently supposed to support that conclusion. That's a definitional example of cherry-picking and hasty generalization.
The projection comes in because it's difficult to see how you would reach those conclusions from the available evidence, unless you're projecting.
And if you want more evidence than that, then I suggest reading about Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments. A little quote:
Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become
patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions
incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively
few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
If you're unaware of all the criticism of Milgram's experiments, then you have some studying to do before we can have a meaningful discussion about this.
While you're catching up on the history of social psychology since 1961, you might want to ask yourself why it is that you're so eager to believe that "ordinary people are mostly evil". Do you have a religious background, perhaps? "Original sin" and all that?
Some of the criticisms are valid, and the results to not reflect well on us as people. The 33% of people who can keep to their stated ethics in the face of authority probably have a really hard time believing that 66% of people cannot. To them it seems easy and obvious that you just don’t violate your ethics. But imagine it this way: for hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in tiny tribes wandering in the wilderness. Failure to heed the orders of the tribe’s leaders would have been a virtual death sentence for most of that time. That environment literally breeds for people who obey even when they think it’s a bad idea. That’s apparently not long enough for the trait to have become universal, thankfully.
I don’t know about the TPSE though. I didn’t cite it either.
Launching someone in a rocket to space is clearly beyond the reach of any single individual. It's also not particularly violent in the scheme of things. It's clearly intended to be hyperbole, and hyperbole against a public figure is common. Musk himself, despite his thin skin, has often said much worse, I guess his ban from Twitter should be coming any day now?
However, the lawyers reddit employs are apparently similarly confused on that point.
In addition to platform-wide bans most popular subreddits also use subreddit bans to create false impressions of consensus.
Last scandal I heard was they banned people who upvoted memes about Mario's green brother.