That said pulling up the "code cant be racist" argument is as ludicrous a

I mean, obviously code can be racist should the human input racism into it. 'tag all black people as inferior' for example. But that's just picking at straws, of course I meant, code itself, without human influence is not racist because one can openly view the code and see the ruleset that was put in place.

It had nothing to do with race, but the behaviour of voting in context of the controversy, so unless we assume the code is sentient and anti-Korean, it's a pretty safe bet. It just so happens that its Koreans who back the ability to spam the blockchain to upvote themselves. Nobody is saying that is an inherent trait of Korean society. Certainly not the code (publicly available).

I would say its more like people were specifically excluded

Same difference

except the people you don't like

I can tell you from personal experience, most of these guys don't like each other much at all. They are not removing each others' stake, nor anyone else they don't like on any other subject. Otherwise, flat earthers would have their stake removed too.

Enemies came together over a common enemy. I mean, just look at the state of Steem now. Again from my post, totally centralised around justin, all witnesses approve publicly of him. Terms of services changed so nobody can discuss third parties, blacklist literally removing posts of things he doesn't approve of personally, front page filled with pro-justin pinned posts.

Of course the people who have spent years fighting for decentralisation are going to move away from that. It's not about simply something you don't like, but defeating the entire point and philosophy of the thing they were building for years that just got shat on by a millionnaire.

And on censorship, yeah you can argue anything. But if we argue not having the stake is censorship, then we can A) argue that we are all censored because there are whales richer than us B) downvoting is censorship because it removes that influence of stake. In which case, you might want to leave Steem, too.

wasn't going to tank in price over this.

The price is going to tank because there is an almost unanimous agreement that Steem has been ruined by Justin. If not, then everyone would just stay on Steem and its value will be fine, no? Hey, thats still even possible. Centralisation works for Facebook, twitter etc. Why not Steem?

And yeah, the exclusion is thus about hive. I already said in my post I disagree with the way it was done without nuance, and many of the top witnesses are the same (fredrikaa for example) -look at that, disagreements! but as long as those who were caught inthe crossfire have a way to appeal, I don't see the problem. I feel you ignored that part of the post.

There was a "human touch" when the developers wrote the code as well.

A small group made a rushed code, with errors, to get something done quickly. It happens. Hard forks typically go far worse than this with elements that people constantly disagree and fight over. Nobody can win on an initial fork. The community element lets the people, not the rushed, clique coders, iron things out. I'm cool with that.

ts not like everything was going to collapse if this thing had to be pushed off another couple of days.

Absolutely not true. Justin was constantly replacing the top witnesses with more and more stake, bringing in pro-justin witnesses barely a day old. At the same time he was doing very suspicious activities on exchanges with Steem that implied many dangerous outcomes. Time was of the essence, of that I'm sure.

An exclusion list based on not agreeing with a pretty controversial action is definitely a hostile to counterviews.

It's hostile to one single counterview which defeats the entire concept of the chain. Again, all other views on the face of the planet are unharmed.

If Facebook blocked one of its boardmembers who wanted to remove the social media element of Facebook, is that a 'hostile' act against controversial views, or is it preventing the core point of Facebook from being removed?

Nobody is preventing Koreans, Chinese, any race, any belief about anything else from having their airdrop. Trust me, I hate this place because of all the anti-vaxx, natural medicine shit. I follow science. But I have to accept the majority here oppose my views on reality, because that's what it is. They are all welcome, like it or not.

This is whataboutism.

That's now how whataboutism works. It only works if I failed to counter the argument and simply deflected with a whataboutism.

For example: A: Trump lied about the Iraq War! B: What about Obama?? He lied too!

On the contrary, I countered the points properly, and also mentioned the alternative