| Preferred Disciplinary Action: |
Ban (anything from 1 week to 1 month) |
Reasoning: While I feel sympathy for Ratif due to the hostile and unprompted nature of Arma's initial message, his behaviour is serious enough to warrant more than a warning. By recklessly sending a slur as response, Rat ended up using the r-word towards an autistic person in a hostile manner. Although Ratif is himself autistic, this was regardless inappropriate.
In the quarrel that followed, Ratif continued acting immature by sending waves of insults to Arma. This is an equal reason for the disc for me. Arma was indeed the one to begin the argument, but the blame for it cannot be placed solely on either side, as it lasted for 10 messages, any one of which could've been the last had the other party so wanted. When Arma continued messaging Ratif, we escalated their disc from a year to a perma. It seems unjust Ratif doing essentially the same thing is ignored, especially when he used a slur and sent equally hostile messages in response to Arma.
To the argument that this was off-site, I point out that we already disced ArmaDoggo heavily for this quarrel, and ArmaDoggo messaged Ratif specifically about Ratif's actions on our site.
The argument that banning Ratif won't have an impact due to Ratif having left the site is flawed. This vote is about whether Ratif deserves to be disced for this case. In general, an user's current level of involvement (which may change rapidly) shouldn't impact disc votes. If taken to the extreme, people could avoid bans by leaving before the ban and then coming back when staff decides to not enact it.
