Barbelith Underground > Policy & Help > What exactly does get you banned on Barbelith?

To be quite clear, PW - I think your binary opposition there is unhelpful, and further that it chooses to speak from a position of assumed knowledge of experience of prejudice based on race, gender and sexuality, and tells those who have that if they decide, with that experience, that they do not want to share a space with somebody likely to reacquaint them with it that they are acting to further ignorance. I would very strongly suggest that you drop this line of argument, or we're going to go back to taxi drivers and the freedom to be reasonable, which I very much hope we have got past. Secondarily, the point of Barbelith in the long run is a far, far bigger topic than "should we ban 33?", or indeed "what exactly does get you banned on Barbelith?", although the one is probably relevant to the other, and deserves its own thread.

Back on 33. As far as I can tell, 33 is saying that his behaviour was as a result of a bad period in his ongoing medical issues. To clarify, I am seeing "his behaviour" here as encompassing:

1) Generally unpleasant assertions made about groups of people, which might make members of those groups feel that they are being as members of that group affected by judgements hostile to them. So, for example, gay men control the fashion industry, are making men ashamed to be male and are embarking on a programmne of genocide against goths and punks, or black people are responsible for the destruction of quality music.

2) Specific references to individual members of Barbelith which is considered to be offensive to them, and to rely for that offence on disparagement or insult on the basis of their gender (although not so far their race or sexuality) - to wit, referring to OLOTF as "glower girl" and MW as "Miss Wonderbra", following up the latter with a demand to know the size of her breasts.

Now, I'm a big fan of cutting people a degree of slack when they are going through particularly difficult times, if only out of self-interest. There is, however, a significant difference between saying "I am very sorry that I behaved like an arse during period x or incident y, I was exhausted/had just broken up with my beautiful and demanding loveur/had been told I was being thrown out of my house" and "The fact that I was [misfortune] means that it was ok for me to perform [betise]". There is a further difference between doing this (and acknowledging each time that one risks and increases one's risk of being banned before one has a chance to calm down and be contrite), and claiming as a result of one condition or other that one is entitled to disregard the expectations of conduct that others abide by. 33 appears to have started off with this second position and has now revised it to the first position - that a particularly bad period made him unnecessarily offensive. One would hope that the last several pages of discussion can then help to demonstrate the consequences of this, and will thus help to argue against such a coourse of action in future episodes. Whether that's a risk the membership of Barbelith wants to take against the benefit of the positives of continued membership to Barbelith and to the member would then be the discussion.

All that said, I don't think it's unreasonable to try to establish that 33 understands what he did that was out of order, because that understanding will help to prevent such mishaps in future.