Ilya N. wrote:
Let's use Middle Eastern cultural norms and ban all Pedophiles in addition to jewish people, homosexuals, christians, et al
(No need to call PC on me I am jewish myself)
shall I go on?
That's exactly my point---there are plenty of things that offend many millions (billions?) of people in the world, some of them very gravely. We simply can't afford to start banning people to avoid negative PR, because it requires banning too many people.
An alternative is only to ban people who would generate negative PR in European and American culture, and tell the other cultures to fuck off, but I don't think that's a reasonable approach.
Yet a third approach, the current one seems, to be to ban people who a certain subset of Americans and Europeans, represented in proxy by Jimbo and the Arbitration Committee, deem offensive. Presumably this lines up mostly with U.S. and European cultural norms, but might reject some of them (like banning Satanists or Stalinists). As you might expect, I don't think that's a reasonable approach either, especially for an encyclopedia that strives not to be provincial.
-Mark