Returning to the discussion about Besada's protection of minority groups: I think this is a good foil to discuss the broader challenge of moderating a large, responsible forum like GAF.
In the broadest abstract, I actually agree with Besada that minorities need to be protected. The tyranny of the majority is a real thing, and at the very least we need to offer some protection to disadvantaged or small groups so that they aren't simply overwhelmed. The idea, out of context, is sound, in my opinion.
But there are a couple specifics I feel most of the other moderators (not just Besada here) were missing, or at least which I think were important:
1) The most important kind of minority is not a racial minority or a religious minority, but an intellectual one. Often these go hand in hand (i.e. different religions have different intellectual bases), but they are not identical, and if I had to pick one type of diversity to defend first and foremost (I'd like to defend them all, of course) it would be intellectual diversity. It often seems that many people focus exclusively on more superficial types of diversity, and that seemed to be the case with several other moderators, to me.
2) What defines a minority is significantly context dependent. For instance, I am a white guy living in America, so at the moment I definitely do not qualify as a minority. But if I were to move to China -- as my sister has -- then I would rather quickly face at least some of the issues a minority faces, where my sister is often ignored or overlooked because she is not naturally Chinese. Again, just an example. Similarly, on GAF, conservatives were a minority, and I felt deserving of some protection simply because their voices were being drowned out. It didn't even have to be mean spirited drowning out -- if one person advocated a conservative position, he would often get 8 retorts back from liberals, simply because there were so many more liberals than conservatives. Even if none of those people was inherently trying to "pick" on the conservative, the end result must have been exhausting if you happened to hold political views that were not majority GAF opinion.
So I definitely agree that protecting minority rights is important, just like Besada felt. However, I think "protecting minority rights" means different things at different times. If I were moderating FoxsNews.Com forums, I would probably have found it necessary to reach and give special protections to liberals. If I were moderating MensHealth.com, I would probably feel obliged to make sure women who happened to post on that forum felt comfortable. Being a minority is context dependent, and most importantly can include being an intellectual minority. This, in essence, was a consistent sticking point between me and much of the other moderation staff.
