[Ckg]

*snip*

First off, thanks for responding.  I will agree with Gabe's comment that me calling into question your judgement was unwarranted and rude.  It came from a place of emotion and anger and I apologize for that.

To explain my reasoning for the assumption of a community ban:
Based off the precedent that has been set in the community, the punishment for months of harassment/targeting has fairly consistently been a community ban (i.e. Lily, ThePheonix), so that is why I jumped to that conclusion.  In my mind an accusation of a months-long campaign of harassment and targeting is a comparison to these previous cases and since a community ban as a punishment was the result for these previous cases. That is why I decided to call it a "dog-whistle" to those previous cases.  I definitely could have worded it better/more clearly, but, unfortunately, my emotions got the better of me.  That was my reasoning behind the logical leap to suggesting you were leaning towards the end result of a community ban.

Addressing the harassment claims:
Everyone should be allowed to voice their opinion and if there is overlap so be it.  While I agree mass -1'ing is bad, I do not think that people posting the same responses is the same.  (This is a big part of why I advocate for a removal of rep, since it would force people to actually put words to their opinion rather than being able to hit a button without contributing any input.)  I do not believe that simply because people have the same issues or reservations to someone that it should be disregarded as toxicity, rather than a similarity of opinion formed by a similarity of experience. 

Also to the subject of the multiple threads: While unfortunate, it is the logical result of closing the discussion on the post where the issue stemmed from.  If people still have things to say, closing it is just going to cause a bigger storm and either force the discussion into another thread, or spawn multiple related threads where it will continue to be discussed.  With something controversial, closing the thread to calm down the discussion will just have the opposite effect, as has been demonstrated a multitude of times.

Overall:
I would like to clarify that I am not advocating for a demotion, but I am of the belief that there should be community input for decisions like this.  I am advocating for a revisiting of the issue so that everyone's input is taken into account, as opposed to making a decision then dropping it on the community with the expectation for us to just accept it as a settled matter.  To liken it to a court (since this is, essentially, a court of public opinion), this is not a case of double-jeopardy where someone has already been approved by the community and has been forced to a "retrial", but rather a case where there was no opportunity for community input in general.  If the decision of the community is that Laced should keep his position, so be it, but we should not be expected to just accept it when there was no discussion in the first place.

It is hard not to draw a comparison to the original Addressing Toxicity post from back when a lot of the people complaining about the decision now were playing.  While much more severe and impactful than this decision, it is another example of where the admins made a unilateral judgement without community input and had it blow up in their faces (i.e. over half the staff team leaving).  For me, it is hard to remove the association to that decision when an issue like this comes up.  That is why my response may seem disproportional to the actual event, because this decision did not happen in a vacuum.  It follows a pattern of admins making a decision they knew would be controversial and then doubling-down and refusing to admit fault when pressed it.  It seems now that it the rule and not the exception that when a controversial decision is made unilaterally that the response will be to "suck it up because nothing will change" and that the current admins either learned nothing from the mistakes of the past or seemingly don't care since they know that they have the final say.