With apologies for the inexcusable delay, we'd like to share our support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and give some links where you can support the protests as well (bailproject.org and blacklivesmatter.com to start). Court Records aims to create a space where all of our users can be safe, including and especially users of color and black users. We apologize for any ways we've failed to do that in the past, and promise to do better in the future.

To that end, please let us know if there are things that need to improve.

Thanks,
Court Records Staff

>Someone who's not a part of the community making a statement for said community

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^She's more making the statement on behalf of the C-R staff, which she's very much a part of.

Thanks for doing this Lumos, even from across the pond, I'll keep hoping for the change needed in America and do what I can do support it.

Yeah fully support this. My own organisations are releasing similar statements today as well so it's good to see this get so visible even in this tiny corner of the internet.

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All lives matter.

I live by the rule of treating everyone the way I would want to be treated no matter their skin color.

Signed by a brown person

This is just to say that Lumos is a valued part of the Court Records staff - just because her work is mostly behind the scenes doesn't mean she's not a part of this community. The statement was made and approved by the CR staff, and the fact that it's on the home page should be proof enough of that.

I would also like to state that we have very little tolerance for people making statements to do with anything anti Black-Lives Matter or 'All Lives Matter', the latter of which we do not think it is the right time for.

Thanks.

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You know, I just want to say it's rather mature in this climate to say "All Lives Matter" isn't inherently toxic. It's gotten a bad rap because of how it's been misused but I really appreciate that you didn't throw the underlying sentiment under the bus because a bunch of sour bigots tried to use it to undermine the issue at hand.

Now, all that said, I wasn't aware this community even had a pulse anymore. I stopped coming here because the last news post is literally approaching a year old...

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When's the next Ace Attorney game coming out?

Whenever Capcom decides to announce it. And what does that even have to do with this thread?

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And what does BLM have to do with Ace Attorney?

Absolutely nothing. We may be an Ace Attorney fansite, but we are under no obligation to talk only about Ace Attorney, as our "Non Phoenix Wright" boards demonstrate.

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This site should have just stayed quiet and devoid of news if it had nothing to report on.

And General Luigi.

Never stop being you.

Seems a bit mean-spirited. We're not a news site after all, made some good friends here.

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The staff chose to formally endorse Black Lives Matter and users are within their rights to express their disagreement with our decision so long as they aren't jerks about it. With that in mind, riddler1337's remarks did not strike me as mean-spirited, even if they were blunt. I get where they're coming from with their criticism even if I'm ultimately on board with our endorsement of Black Lives Matter.

An organization that's politically neutral on paper endorsing a particular political movement and/or condemning an opposing movement is something I've admittedly been pondering for a while now and haven't been sure how to put into words, so I'll probably edit this post later; it's a complicated and sensitive topic that deserves to be handled carefully, and if I misword something, it could just make things worse (also, apparently, my browser doesn't think "misword" is a real word).

Edit: Hu boy, this sure took a while, and I'm still not entirely confident that I worded everything in a way that will avoid misunderstandings. I should make clear that I speak only for myself in this post; each staff member has their own reasons for wanting Court Records to endorse Black Lives Matter.

Another edit: And of course I spot something in my post that, in hindsight, may have come off as confrontational. My apologies for that. I went ahead and edited my post.

Under normal circumstances, I’m against Court Records formally endorsing or condemning any political movement. We are an Ace Attorney fansite first and foremost, so politics generally isn’t something we try to involve ourselves in. Political discussion (as long as it’s civil) is permitted on the forum, and staff members are allowed to express their political opinions as individuals, but that’s not the same as the site itself having an official stance. That said, some official stances can be inferred from one of the forum rules.


This rule hopefully makes it clear that there are some political views we have officially taken a stance against even if we’ve never explicitly said as much. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other such prejudices are elements of some people’s political views and those elements may not be expressed here. We try to be welcoming to (or at least tolerant of) as many people as is reasonable, but “as many people as is reasonable” is not the same as “everyone.” If one group is by nature hostile toward another, then we will look into the nature of the conflict and decide on a proper course of action.

Let’s consider the following hypothetical example: Someone on this forum—for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them Jon—hates users who don’t specify their gender (to my knowledge, we have no one like Jon). Jon posts rants harping on users who don’t specify their gender, making said users uncomfortable. Thus we have a conflict and a few options. We can tell users to specify a gender, thus effectively siding with Jon. Any user who didn’t specify their gender thus has to either specify their gender or leave. Maybe they’ll all stay, maybe some will leave, maybe they’ll all leave. Another option is to tell Jon to knock it off. Jon can either stop harping on the people he hates or leave. Maybe he’ll stick around, maybe he won’t. Finally, we can just do nothing. While this does mean Jon is free to continue harping on users who don’t specify their gender, thus angering said users and possibly even encouraging some to leave, it also means users are free to continue not specifying their gender, which will annoy Jon and possibly encourage him to leave. No matter what we do, there’s a realistic chance of at least one user leaving over it.

Considering the aforementioned rule, it should go without saying that Jon’s the one who gets told to change his behavior. Admittedly, Jon’s reasoning could have nothing to do with transphobia; it could just be that he sees users who don’t specify their gender as afraid of being treated differently over their gender, so it’s not as clear-cut as if, say, Jon routinely posted homophobic rants instead. I’d still be on board with telling Jon to change his behavior, though, as we do have nonbinary users who aren’t comfortable listing their gender as male or female, and even if Jon didn’t have them in mind when posting his rants, his behavior still would make some—if not all—of them uncomfortable. Prejudice is something a person can grow out of, but the same cannot be said of a person’s gender. To paraphrase the Judge in 1-4, meaning no harm and doing no harm are not the same thing.

Black Lives Matter is less clear-cut than the hypothetical scenario I described, though, as the movement has no central organization that can speak on behalf of the movement as a whole. The only thing we can take as a given with regards to Black Lives Matter is that they object to racist tendencies in law enforcement—particularly the far greater likelihood of lethal force being used against a black person than against a white person. The movement has existed for years, and we’ve only recently formally voiced our support for it. At this point, I feel I must reiterate that I only speak for myself on this matter; other members of the staff may have had different reasons for supporting our decision to endorse Black Lives Matter.

For me, the decision ultimately boiled down to recent surge in support for the movement and the nature of the movement’s opposition, which in my experience varies between open racists who disagree with the idea that black lives matter, people who think the protests are an overreaction to something they believe isn't a problem, and people who agree that there's a problem, but oppose the movement because they disagree with its methods (or in a lot of cases, the methods of its more radical elements). By remaining silent on the issues Black Lives Matter protests against, we risk being mistaken for the second or third group and appearing ignorant of and/or callous toward said problems. Between that and the movement’s increased prominence, neutrality simply no longer struck me as the right choice.

On a more cynical note, now that our endorsement has been out there for over a month, even if I were to change stances and concede that we should have remained silent, a retraction would almost certainly come off as us speaking out against Black Lives Matter, which I have no reason to believe anyone on the staff is in favor of doing. In other words, our statement is a fait accompli.

All this said, I don’t intend for this kind of political statement on behalf of Court Records to become a regular occurrence and don’t see myself being on board with us making official political statements in the future unless, as with Black Lives Matter, I feel that such statements are both in line with our existing policies and necessary to avoid being mistaken for supporting the opposite stance.

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I go to gaming sites when I want to enjoy the escapism of video games. I go to news sites and blogs when I want to read about political news and opinions.

Please can we keep the two separate?

To be fair, this was one post made 2 months ago. It hasn't fundamentally done anything negative like prevent AA news being shared (atm there hasn't been any for ages), or impacted any other threads.
If the staff all felt the need to voice their support, it's best to respect it, move on and not let it get to you too much. I don't believe it's fundamentally affected any user negatively.

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That sounds like something a racist would say.
If you're not receptive to being told what to think at any given time then I think you're obviously against women and minorities.
You should probably check your privilege, SOME people can't find their self worth or identity without making it a political issue they need to talk about online to think they're helping.

If you think any given hobby online can be separated from the plight of the Disabled, POC, members of the LGBTQ+, or trained Marxist. You probably don't know what oppression is like, a good solution to that is riots that burn down your cities or getting doxxed by them.

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It's not healthy to engage in "with us or against us" mentality. Specially if you're trying to gather support for a cause. That said, the MANTRA of "black lives matter" is an excellent one. The actual activist organization though is kind of a very touchy mess of various controversies. Try not to assume that because someone thinks "all lives matter" that they're necessarily disagreeing with your movements, or that people want to keep politics out of their hobbies means they're secretly all racists. It's bad optics, and really mean.

You are free to voice your disapproval of the staff's decision, of Black Lives Matter, and of the violence its more extreme elements engage in, DoMaya. Mockery is over the line, though.

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It's telling that your only rebuttal to my statement is to ban me and tell me you didn't like the way I said it.

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You misunderstand, DoMaya. You violated the "Be Cool" rule by mocking your opponents and were punished accordingly; the ban was never intended to be a rebuttal to your statement. As for why I did not rebut it, it's because I didn't see it as relevant; it struck me as just general mockery of the left rather than any sort of criticism of the staff's decision to endorse Black Lives Matter. I'm perfectly willing to discuss politics in general elsewhere (though as before, I must insist that you be civil about it), but the scope of this particular thread is limited to the site's endorsement of Black Lives Matter.

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Thank you. I don't even agree with the whole thing but you're showing support for a movement that you believe is a good cause and I think that's Commendable. So thanks