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"Irene" for "Ierne" a one-letter transposition? You are doubting the accuracy of my recall over a TYPO? Ha ha ha, good one I sometimes forget you have a sense of humour.
The same "typo", in fact, every time you have used the name. Maybe you have something wrong with your hand that just makes it come out that way, but it is funny how one's own mistakes are always mere typos and those of others a clear sign of ignorance.
As I say, if I were looking to undermine your credibility I'd probably start there, and move on to your claim that all the evidence supporting your claims about the Head Shop had been mysteriously bundled into a black helicopter and flown away.
Fortunately, I'm not looking to undermine your credibility. So, I'm asking instead, in line with Chris23 and Iconoplast (if you want to get more of this confused and murky event, Icon, try a board search on the phrase "blind date"), *why* exactly one would wish to kick over the traces of the event. You don't seem to have much motivation beyond the satisfaction of a dislike of Babooshka, or "Irene". Now, it occurs to me that it might be a useful *test case*, but it 's not the aim of this thread to sort out whose subjective memory is the "true" one in this instance, and maybe it would be better to do it in another thread.
As a case, however, we can certainly say that it was a major example of controversy in or around the Magick. Some other points might include the Transducer, which I have heard cited as an example of a group working that subsequently fell into questionable waters.
To return to the questions, I'm interested by
I think part of the problem is that the same permissiveness that we use when we regulate talking about something : magic, bombbuilding, whatever, is not as appropriate when applied to actually doing the thing.
Doing something and Talking about it are different. Free Speech and Free Action are different. Ought there to be a separate set of guidelines for threads that are not merely descriptive, but are in themselves performative acts?
This strikes me as one of the keys - language can behave differently in the Magick, because it is generally supposed to have the power to alter reality in a number of ways. I can think offhand of at least one member of Barbelith who suspected that he may be coming under magical attack through PMs. As such, perhaps behaviour of the sort described as:
Harassment does not leave room for discussion or debate. For example: receiving Private Messages every day, at the same time each day, with no pertinent message except a declarative sentence with the word “pink” in it does not invite any response but “WTF?”. The receipt of Private Messages spewing forth threatening sub-satanic drivel would, under normal circumstances, usually garner a chuckle and a delete. When they combine and alternate, coming at the exact same time each day, from the same person, I would say that is abuse of the Private Message function. Private Message interaction with the intent of causing discomfort to another poster, even if the content isn’t specifically threatening, constitutes harassment.
Has a different flavour wrt to Magick than another thread - the repeated daily "pinks", if such a thing there was (and at present, while we cannot ascertain the existence of those PMs, we also have no reason to disbelieve their existence either - much like that proof that has gone missing from the Head Shop) sounds like a modernized binding ritual of some sort.
So, words have a different sense in the Magick, perhaps.
On the question of "proving" harrassment by PM - I think that if we are to go down this road, hopefully as a foundation to working out how to handle it, we may have to take some reasonably strong measures. To whit, anyone implicated who wishes to demonstrate their case, and is prepared to go a decent distance to do so, should probably give their password to a neutral party, who can then check their PMS and reproduce (on this separate thread) the content of those PMs that the person feels are relevant. I suspect that would probably be worth putting in the Policy, however.
So, that's one question. Another is the ethics of group workings, or of workings more generally. The reference to "bomb-building" strikes me as apposite here. On occasion, somebody has cropped up on the Magick, either weith the cited "how do I use a servitor to get a girl to go out with me" question, or "how do I curse someone", or in one classic, "should I kill or just cripple this man using magic?". Now, if somebody were to ask these questions in the Conversation, but replace the active ingredient with "firearm", say, the reaction would probably be a little less polite than the responses to these threads usually are - there seems to be a reluctance either to consider the ethics of magic seriously, or possibly a reluctacne on some level to admit that magic is "real" when it is inconvenient so to do. Let me make it clear that I am not suiggesting that magic is not real, nor indeed that many people here are willing to throw themselves into discussions about the morality of its use, but there does seem to be a kind of permission. I'd need to dive into the archives to find instances of that, so if anyone already has some ready to hand, they might want ot go for it.
So, *morality* may be very hard to pin down, but in a sense that need not affect the *ethics* by which the forum is administrated, and one of those could be that moderators take on the responsibility of dealing with advice that would be of dubious legality if the tool being used were a gun or a knife rather than a djinn or servitor. Another might be, if it is needed, a metric by which to identify "harrassment". We could work from the Knowledge scale on this one, say, with sending packages to home addresses at one end and what could charitably be seen as a desire to communicate far beyond one's ability to do so at the other.
So, for example, somebody sending several PMs without receiving a reply between them might be seen as harrassment. Somebody sending PMs because their abusive content would attract attention in an open thread could certainly be seen as harrassment, as could PMs containing threats of violence, either physical (usually a reasonably empty threat around here, at leats outside London, but nonetheless not really cricket) or magical.
Now, different people have different attitudes to PMs. Personally, I would not quote the content of a PM to me without permission unless I felt that the circumstances where extraordinary, or I had received the permission of the person who sent it; that seems to me a good way to keep the distinction between board and PM clean. Others treat them as generally quotable, and only "private" in their delivery mechanism. In general, best to get permission first, but one should by the same token not be constrained from sharign PMs that you think are harrassing, or draw attention, perhaps in the Policy, to what you perceive as on-board harrassment. I think we need to work more on how to define it, though, lest the coin be debased by tactical usage of the term against people who have in fact only disagreed with you. Worth noting that these ideas extend beyond the Magick, of course.
To return briefly to "Ierne's Blind Date", then, since it seems as-yet-uncompleted in the Barbehead, it occurs to me, and Ierne might with hindsight agree, that the problem there was that she quoted without permission PMs apparently supporting her claim that Mod3 was being a pain in the arse (I had given up on the Magick by then, so have no opinion on the truth or otherwise of this contention), and thus any point the thread might have had was lost in a chorus of disapproval and anxiety that PMs had ceased to be P so abruptly. Had she quoted (and I may be getting the timeline wrong here - the perceived harrassment was perhaps a response to the thread) the "harrassing" PMs instead, things might have been simpler, especially had she asked permission to do so first of the alleged harrassers, with all acknowledging the egregious nature of the action.
If people *want* to spin off into another thread devoted specifically to this particular historical feud rather than the more general things we might put into place to stop such a thing happening again, then I suggest that, sinc the Ierne suit is dead, some trusted neutral be given the keys and a set of criteria and pastes up the PMs it finds, assuming they have *not* been deleted.
Otherwise, onward. Lupus' suggestion of three stages on group workings seems sensible, if one is to have group workings - then it comes down to whether people are uncomfortable with the idea that two or three people could still push through a group working without taking on board any of the ethical issues raised - that is a problem where it comes down to whether you'd rather have people inside the tent or outside it, I guess... |
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