No I was referring to the OP, who stated they're from Florida. Sorry if that was unclear.
ChairmanMeow
Your sidebar also says:
Small instance with respectful moderation staff
Yet here you are, telling another user who tried to give you constructive criticism to "grow a pair", "pound sand" and that they're "tolerant of such bigotry". That doesn't seem very respectful to me. You could also have addressed the criticism directly, but opted to instead misconstrue the argument and presented a slippery-slope fallacy.
If you're not going to treat other users with respect, then that's a block from me.
Your sidebar rule explicitly talks about "hatred". But I don't see that at all in this comment. At worst it's a critique of the US education system, which at this point I don't think either side of the political spectrum is really happy with. It's also well-known that the state of education differs greatly between US states.
If he commented something along the lines of "Probably the USA, because you have to be a moron not to know this", I could see your point. But they didn't. They didn't even pass any value judgment about Americans at all.
It could even be a sarcastic reply, because the OP also posted what state they were from, so they "probably /s" are from the US.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about this user and their mindset when they wrote this comment. As you've seen from the immense feedback you got, the vast majority of users heavily disagree with you that they violated the sidebar rule. Being too heavy-handed on the moderation damages communities, it does not protect them.
In my opinion, this user should have been let off with a warning, and the comment should have stayed up because it requires a very subjective reading for it to come close to violating the sidebar rule. Alternatively you could have issued a warning and removed the comment if you want to err on the side of (excessive) caution. But a full ban was not appropriate.
... How is this "hatred"?
ICBMs are spaceflight rockets, imo it's best to count them. The US hasn't had such large accidents with ICBMs, mostly minor ones.
Even if we exclude those it's not true. The US has sent significantly more people into space than the Soviets did, so NASAs accident rate was lower (hence safer), even if the absolute number of deaths was higher.
The Nedelin disaster claimed more lives than NASA did over its entire existence.
According to Krafton's statement the remaining employees are getting their bonus though.
So this is the application form:
Mamdani was born in Uganda to a Ugandan father and an Indian (Gujarati) mother. Which box would you tick?
Mamdani opted to tick "Black/African American" as well as "Asian", and at the "Other" box wrote "Ugandan".
I personally fail to see the problem. Given the constraints of these boxes, this seems to be the most accurate way of describing his ethnicity? Am I missing something here? Why is NYT presenting this as an issue at all?
Trump saying he's white despite him being orange seems like a bigger discrepancy.
because you can be watched or recorded as you were filling it out
You expressly can't do this. This is why there's a voting booth and observers who make sure you're alone in the booth. And after you fill out the ballot, it gets folded inward and placed in a box that is closed off until election day is over. There's no way to verify who you voted for, as your name isn't on the ballot.
In your home, someone could force themselves in, force you to vote for someone and verify you did so.
With anonymous voting at a polling place, sure someone could force you to go there, but since the vote itself is anonymous (and there's people around to check it is), they would never be able to verify that you indeed voted X or Y way. It's also why most countries ban taking pictures of your vote; no proving to anyone how you voted!
Chargebacks are incredibly expensive, yes.