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(Firstly, Flyboy and LM, if you are going to have a fight about the use of the word "feminazi", please, please take it out of this thread, because I can just tell it's going to get lengthy. [Hmm. Clearly, unlike Haus, I have no objection to sounding either bossy or like a schoolteacher.])
I think this:
Concepts which were once entry level now seem to need explaining on a weekly basis
is key. I stand by my knuckle-rapping of Fly, and I really enjoyed the subsequent devastatingly articulate and clever posts by him and Bengali, but I feel like there's a problem with new people coming in one by one, who might genuinely not know why something is an "entry-level" concept (I've been reminded by recent events here of the learned anti-Semitism of my younger self ewwwww), versus the older posters who are sick to death of rehearsing the same old things over and over again and thus respond as if it was the same poster coming back and back to have the same argument ("Why do you make me go through this again? Didn't you learn anything from the Barbewars of '99?" "Er, no. I just got here, and I was ten in 1999"). The barbe-lexicon thread is a useful resource for this, I think, but I wonder whether it might be useful to have a "beginner's guide" archive somewhere - in the wiki? - which could just be linked directly to in these cases? Haus's strategy of linking to threads is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, but given that half the people who participated in the Whiteness thread admitted they couldn't be bothered to read all of it (yes, I'm still fucked off by that) I'm not sure how useful/hospitable it is.
The advantage of using the wiki or a locked thread as this "permanent archive" of "entry-level concepts" would be simply for ease of reference - to avoid the thing turning into an intimidating, sprawling, ten-page thread. I'm aware, on the other hand, that the idea of a permanent archive might suggest that there's a consensus of opinion on the 'lith about these issues (concocted by the inner circle, no doubt*) and anyone who dares to disagree will be slapped down/torn to shreds/etc. But I do think that the "political correctness run maaad" debate and the "You're oppressing my right as a white boy to dispose of all language as if it were in my sovereign gift, nigga!" argument, for example, could be summed up usefully and then linked to on a weekly basis, which would save the older posters from frustration and prolonged argumentation. Would it be possible to do that in a way that wasn't, like, This Is The Word Of The Lith but was more like you can argue against this, but you have to show you've actually engaged with these 'entry-level' concepts before we will take your arguments seriously?
*This does not imply that the inner circle is comprised of members of the band No Doubt. Though that would be kewl. |
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