Regarding racism/homophobia, staff punishments vs player punishments, etc.

[Adman]

-snip-

I wasn't talking about when you are doing it with a friend, I was in fact responding to Toast's response about hate speech not being a crime. In regards to the last quote, yeah I don't really know where I was going with that; ignore it.

You clearly did end up insulting someone as this fiasco occurred. Of course it wasn't intentional and in my opinion it was an overreaction but I see both sides.
I know it is a joke, I do it constantly at school and with friends but you have to understand some demographics may be offended by certain language and obviously if it becomes a direct rant/insult at someone as opposed to a meme/joke with a friend that is when problems occur.

At the end of the day, you used a popular meme as a joke with your friend. Someone reacted to it, in a over the top fashion if I am being blunt, and thus this whole scenario occurred.

The rules are to prevent this situation and here is how I see why. You have two scenarios as we have witnessed. One is the 'joke' scenario where no-one is directly trying to insult another person and we have the 'insulting' scenario where someone is intentionally trying to insult someone due to their race,gender,skin colour whatever.

Of course, we could have a system whereby each and every case is handled separately; evaluating the context of the situation. This, however, would be time consuming and perhaps ineffective as either side (The 'offender' and the 'offended') may not be happy with the result.

The alternative system, the one we currently have, prohibits ALL forms of language that could be interpreted as 'insulting'. Now of course I understand that most of the time they're used lightly and not meant to offend anyone but sometimes they do and it is much simpler to simply prevent ALL forms instead of picking and choosing which situation it is acceptable and which situation it isn't; this inevitably suffers from things such as favouritism, bias, one's own interpretation of offence etc.

In short, it is easier to have a system whereby no forms of racism etc. are allowed then to have this 'pick and choose' system.