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Well, we have somebody who, if not a joke suit, has a lot of anger - against the homosexuals for ruingin fashion, against the world for performing genocide against the goths, against black people for ruining music and against his mother and his sister for listening to their fake music. Which is fine, if whe and we are ready to tease out that anger. What concerns me immediately is that he is consistently misunderstanding why his anger might be taken badly - most obviously, he believes that as long as he does not use the word "black", nobody is allowed to question his views on black people and their deleterious effect on music. This is a bit of a problem. He's not wildly open to negotiation - there's a hilarious bit where he decides that he will not listen to any music recommended here because people clearly wish him ill. OH NOES! I was tricked into hearing a song. NEVER AGAIN!
Jack: I think it's not just necessary that Flyboy and you have different views on this, but perhaps desirable. Essentially, we have two schools of thought here. the first, expounded by, among others, Flyboy is that people should not be given a free pass after they have done something apalling in a previous thread simply because they have started a new thread. If somebody denies the Holocaust in thread a), it is not necessarily a moral duty not to interfere with their discussion of Jack Reacher in thread b). The thinking behind this is probably various, but the short version is that in the absence of any immediate power to ban, making people accountable is the only way to make people who may not read the whole board aware of the attitudes of the person with whom they are engaging, and also the only way to make it clear to other members or potential members who might have more to add to the Board that they are not in an environment where hateful language or ideas are tolerated to the extent that they can be spoken and then left in the driveway for people who encounter them next to endure while the person who produced them wanders off to the mall.
The other viewpoint, as advanced by yourself and others, is roughly that the damage caused by threadrot and dispute to threads does not justify the benefits of holding members accountable for their actions.
It's a difficult balance. However, the fact that people are banned on the strength of what they have done in a single thread, although often after a number of warning signs and warnings - see the Fetch, zoemancer, Hawksmoor and, after a lengthy interval, VJBjr - suggests that to an extent it has already been decided.
The next level along from that is, of course, that one should not risk threadrot by calling people on their statements in-thread. It is unfortunate that, speaking anecdotally, these arguments seem to be advanced far more often when apparent sexism, racism or homophobia are challenged than when the thread wanders off on a lengthy ambit around Transformers, but that would require further investigation, and as far as I can tell nobody is yet arguing that one should uncritically accept 33's views on the homosexuals' deleterious impact on fashion - only that they should not mention them in another thread about black people's deleterious impact on music - only that each should be addressed in its own thread.
As Ganesh says, I'm not convinced that 33 is homophobic (sorry, pillockish) in the generally accepted sense as much as credulous and isolated. If he shows any willingness to look at his statements in a manner reflecting the slightest familiarty with the cooling taste of grown-up juice, then we can go from there. Alternatively, we have to try to work out how we deal with people who might be considered in a sense ... conceptually less able? |
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