Endangerment

Posting material depicting child-abuse or animal-abuse, grooming, or commiting serious crimes, are already prohibited by other rules.

Exhibiting a pattern of behaviour which is deemed to strongly indicate that you have a tendency favouring the sexualisation or abuse of children or animals, gratuitous violence, or other evils deemed at least as severe, is prohibited.

⚠️ Terminal: Violators are subject to reprimand without warning.
⚠️ External: May apply to activity outside of Cabal.

Rule Form

Our other rules prohibit actions directly. The form of this rule differs. It is considered a practical necessity to do this. The following sections explain why.

Association

Free-speech environments like Cabal emerge from a demand for open dissent against unjust authority, and participants are assumed willing to defend actions they take in such dissent.

This does not, however, imply unlimited willingness to associate with any given disfavoured position or speaker.

We reject association with the evils this policy covers, for moral and ethical reasons, as well as for our own protection.

This hazard is so severe that even for non-provable cases, this policy has been deemed necessary.

Accusation

Reprimand under this policy is not an accusation of the acts or tendencies it concerns, and will usually be done without public fanfare to avoid potentially-undue defamation.

This policy will sometimes be applied where the level of proof is not sufficient for legal certainty, but is sufficient for a pragmatic judgement.

We do not possess the infrastructure of a nation-state to forcibly investigate such claims, but in some cases the individual in question makes their position obvious to any reasonable observer.

Assessment

Great caution must be taken not to overuse this policy. It must not be used for lesser ills than stated above - only these most blatantly unacceptable tendencies.

This policy exists not as a cudgel to empower preferential treatment, but as a stopgap for ridiculous suspensions of normal free association, for cases of shameless but blatant individuals who clearly hold and promote these most severe preferences and behaviours, but don't otherwise break server rules.

In most cases, consultation with the equivalent of a jury will occur before action is taken using this policy, but due to the potential sensitivity of such cases, the details may not be made public.

For a server of the size of Cabal in late-2025, this policy should be expected to be used no more than about 2 times per year, averaging once per 2 years over time. Initial use immediately after the rule's implementation may spike higher.

Free Expression

A literal interpretation of free expression will, in some cases, be detrimental to free expression in practice.

Those dissident thinkers who the principle of free expression is supposed to protect often cannot risk speaking freely in a marketplace of ideas which hosts even a small number of individuals of kinds this policy concerns.

Much like a society with some laws has more freedom-in-practice than a pure anarchy, even if its literal freedom is lesser, a free marketplace of ideas which removes likely-pedos is far better optimised towards the actual purpose of freedom of speech.

Conduct

While speech may be used as an indicator of conduct, it is not the speech itself which is being reprimanded for, but the tendencies demonstrated by that speech. Given the platform's format, speech is often our only means to infer such tendencies.

Discouragement of Propagation

For the same reasons that removing all examples of child-sexual-abuse-material is ethically worthwhile, removing those who are likely to be propagating such material elsewhere is too.

Cabal provides value to those who use it. It is not right for us to provide this value to pedophiles, for the same reason as it is not ethical to allow propagation of abuse material. This comfort must be aggressively withheld from such individuals, even to the extent of this policy.