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Okay, I've been thinking about this a lot recently and I reckon we need to get a lot more hardnosed about what constitutes appropriate posting in the Temple. We now have yet another person on the board who clearly came here for the magical discussion and who has proceeded to conduct himself poorly in other fora.
I believe that the "Temple cat-flap effect" has been somewhat overstated (the Greenland posse came here for the lab, the Fetch has dragged his shit all over the internet from current affairs fora to occult groups and everything in between, and Zoemancer and Raelian Autopsy found the Switchboard and Headshop equally tempting as soapboxes).
However, it is undeniable that we have a situation now where people with a limited willingness to communicate or engage meaningfully (and often having disturbingly bigoted views) feel that the Temple as a magical/spiritual/occult forum will give them a warm moist environment in which to propagate. It is true that many other magical/spiritual/occult fora turn a blind eye not only to general fnording and lengthy vacuous theorising of the "so who would win a fight out of a Goetic demon and Baron Zauguin" variety, but also to racism, sexism and anti-Semitism.
I'm sick and tired of the apparent faliure to communicate to potential members that these things are not okay in the fucking Temple. For a start, it is not okay to spout shite about how the IJC ate your hamster, or how women make rubbish magicians because they lack the male geek instinct. Plainly anti-Semitic or otherwise racist material should be an automatic airlock. (Sexist material is a bit more of a grey area, partly because there are few things the board as a whole is less willing to recognise.)
But there are other issues which I think are important. The basic level of discourse in the Temple should be kept high. Firstly so there's one publicly viewable occult forum on the web that's not full of untested shite, elaborate theoretical rituals and techniques that never get put into practice, and credulous muppets sitting around going "ooh" at them. But there's another, more subtle issue here, and it is this: lack of rigour and fuzzy thinking actively work to create a breeding ground for bigotry. This whole "oh well that's just like your opinion, we all create our own reality maaaan" bit that looks so soft and fuzzy on the outside? In practice it always but always goes hand in glove with a lazy, thoughtless tolerance for the worst kinds of bigotry and a corresponding refusal to stand up for any kind of principle. Hey, so what if this guy is using Gematria to prove that the IJC was behind 9/11? Doesn't matter! We all create our own reality!
Fuck that.
So there's that. There's also the little matter of whether we consider magic to be a real, active force in the world or not. If you believe that, then it matters whether what you've posted is based on knowledge and experience, or pulled out of your arse. It matters whether you're accomplishing something or just writing magical fanfic.
So I'm dropping the softer mod approach I've used hitherto and going zero tolerance on posts and threads that I do not see as having sufficient merit.
For example: the baby-butter thread? The pyrite thread? Neither of those topics merited more than a quick post to the Stupid Q's thread. Why are we putting up with this shit? Next time this happens, I'll be posting a polite note directing the person concerned to Stupid Q's and putting in for a lock. There is no Earthly reason for us to have to put up with a bunch of content-free threads cluttering the forum, and several good reasons to ensure that we don't.
I'm not talking about going on the attack. We're all n00bs sometime, somewhere, and it can take a little while to find your sealegs here. There's no reason the kind of action I've described cannot be done with courtesy and compassion.
Ah yes, the c-word: Compassion. So often invoked, so little practiced. I'd like to invite those who might feel that the above lacks compassion to extend a little compassion to, for example, the notional woman who has to read the next Epop, or the Jewish people who had to read not only the Fetch's rabid foaming but the defences put forward by his self-appointed posse.
I'd also suggest that it is compassionate to encourage things like a willingness to learn, a willingness to evaluate one's practice in a meaningful way, the development of the skills required and the habit of so doing. I do not believe it is compassionate to enable stagnation, weak approaches, or outright dangerous practices.
Thoughts, input, suggestions? Ativan? |
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