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Entertaining repugnant questions

  
  

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Ganesh
11:05 / 02.12.04
What an amazing time. What a family...

... but one of the criticisms periodically aimed at Barbelith as a community is that its excessive 'political correctness' constrains debate in certain areas - that and our apparently scary/intimidating 'immune response' to anyone who puts a toe over those lines. Since we in the Policy seem to be undergoing another of those protracted moments of self-examination, I thought now might be a good time to think about this.

Firstly, I'm not talking about fatuous, misguided stabs at humour - smelly gypsies, shit-eating Japanese, "crazy negro dancing", etc., etc. I agree, broadly speaking, that these casual, lazy generalisations are of relatively little worth. Rather, I'm thinking of apparently genuine attempts to explore the underpinnings of ostensibly repellent stereotypes and viewpoints from which we might instinctively recoil.

This has been done already, of course, usually in Head Shop threads. Foust's 'Affectations' asked why (some) gay men "lisp and toss limp wrists about". The question was perhaps worded a little clumsily, and Foust initially received a light roasting - but the question is actually an interesting, pertinent one, well worth the asking, and the thread developed nicely.

There are other examples. Sometimes the threads are answered seriously, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes - as appeared to be the case in the 'Do Jews Run The World?' thread - the subject matter is such that the question itself is deemed 'beyond the pale'. I suppose a comparable homo-themed question would've been 'Do Gay Men Spread Disease?' or 'Do Gay Men Prey On Children?'.

Now, perhaps it's a result of my having spent a considerable amount of time on Christian-affiliated boards, where such questions are regularly asked - apparently in a spirit of genuine curiosity rather than the urge to cause mischief or troll for outrage - but I do wonder whether, in some instances, we're too quick to roll our eyes and/or judge those questions trollsome. On the aforementioned Christian boards, one could choose to take the question itself in good faith (making the assumption that those who post on Christian message-boards are likely to be less knowledgeable on matters 'worldly', for example) and engage with it on a different level. In the case of 'Do Gay Men Spread Disease?', say, one would suppress the reflex to post a sarcastic rejoinder and instead link to HIV statistics - and develop things from there. Entertaining a question which, on first reading, appears repugnant - taking it at face value - can lead to a fruitful, valuable discussion.

I wonder if, perhaps, we Barbeloids are sometimes a little quick to assume malign intent (or irredeemable stupidity) on the part of the questioner, and dismiss some subjects too readily. I'm aware that there are considerable risks inherent in taking the 'well, it's a question worth asking' approach, but I wonder whether there might be some mileage in entertaining unpalatable, even repugnant questions more often, or more patiently, than we do.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
11:48 / 02.12.04
Gary Younge has good things to say on this subject.

Sometimes... questions can be so pregnant with assumptions that they are, arguably, better left unanswered. Not because they do not relate to important issues, but because they are so loaded with prejudice and crippled by ignorance, thoughtless in tone and reckless in content, that the manner in which they are put renders them incapable of addressing important issues. To engage with them would be to legitimise their bias.
 
 
Ganesh
12:12 / 02.12.04
Gary Younge has indeed good things to say on this subject, and I agree with many of them - particularly this:

It's time to flip the script, to lay bare just a hint of the assuming subconscious that infects the most common questions I have either been asked or heard. To ask the kind of questions of white, British people (some are just for Christians) that they often pose to "others" but are never asked themselves.

I think we, on Barbelith, are actually pretty good at this particular response. I'd argue, however, that this means we should be entertaining - and, crucially, asking - more questions than we dismiss. At the end of his article, Younge lists a screed of such rarely-asked questions. I'm not sure if he's asking these rhetorically, but I actually think they're all seriously worth asking (ie. unpacking rather than merely using as debating gambits or flourishes), ideally within the same discourse. I guess it's like when I'm asked, perfectly innocently, "how did you know you were gay?", my stock answer is, "well, I tried sex with women and sex with men, and made an informed decision; how did you know you were straight?" - and I then pursue the point. Done without aggression, this can usefully initiate discussion of societal defaults/orthodoxies.

On balance, though, I think the benefits of taking 'charged' questions at face value usually outweigh the disadvantages ('legitimising bias'). More often than not - and obviously depending, to a certain extent, on the perceived intent of the questioner - I think these questions are worth entertaining, if only because they can then be flipped around, as Younge illustrates.
 
 
Grey Area
12:14 / 02.12.04
Sometimes... questions can be so pregnant with assumptions that they are, arguably, better left unanswered. Not because they do not relate to important issues, but because they are so loaded with prejudice and crippled by ignorance, thoughtless in tone and reckless in content, that the manner in which they are put renders them incapable of addressing important issues. To engage with them would be to legitimise their bias.

Surely if we take this attitude then we are evading issues which would deserve dissection in a thoughtful manner? Just because somebody has been steeped in prejudice to the point where they cannot help but phrase a question on an issue in contentious manner doesn't mean they are not willing or able to engage with the topic in a mature way. It could just means that at this point and time they have no other means of voicing their question. Engaging with the question does not legitimise the bias. Failure to attempt to educate the questionner perpetuates it.
 
 
Ganesh
12:29 / 02.12.04
Wellll, I was sort of avoiding the 'education' word myself, because, often, a large part of me really can't be arsed with taking an apparently repugnant question seriously. When I do, though (and it happened a lot, by necessity, on Cross+Flame), the end-results were often rather satisfying, not just in terms of 'educating' others, but also me finding out interesting new stuff through bothering to go back to first principles and do some research. There are frequently fringe benefits to having to explain why a certain viewpoint is insupportable.
 
 
Tom Coates
14:42 / 02.12.04
One answer would be to attack these things head on. Assemble a list of the most likely questions, post them as part of a series of "Barbelith takes on this question: " style threads, and let's rip them to pieces. Then if someone starts up on one of these themes in the future we can just direct them to the pre-existing conversation. I'm quite happy with that.
 
 
Ganesh
01:34 / 03.12.04
Well and good, Tom. I'm still a little unclear on the 'Do Jews Rule The World?' thing, though. Was that thread deleted?
 
 
Tom Coates
07:43 / 03.12.04
It could very well have been. I may have proposed it for deletion myself. I can't quite remember the context but if it was deleted, I can't say I'm terribly unhappy about the whole thing. I can investigate if you can remember the full title of the thread.
 
 
_Boboss
10:17 / 03.12.04
i think any sensible newie, checking the wiki to find out how things are done hereabouts, would run like bloody fuck if they saw that there was a handy section giving the definitive barbelith answer to topics like 'should all nonces hang?', 'is hip-hop for monkeys?' or 'should all gays be sent to live on the far side of the village?'. it would indicate to me, i think, that everyone round here was nuts. it's the notion that an argument, especially potentially explosive ones, should ever be considered 'finished with' that worries me there i think. i fear only bad things can grow in that kind of enclosed environment.

i think there's no reason why tricky topics like 'do jews run the world' shouldn't be interrogated here (i also think it's important that the titles/abstracts for those threads should be worded so it's clear that an offensive statement isn't being made, even though tricky terms are being used, and that any flagrantly racist statements be dealt with by *a bit of* the usual throat-jumping, and a simple, non-argued, two-mods banning if it persists).

i seem to remember that the 'djrtw' thread discussed the propriety of using potentially discriminatory language (the 'happy birthday' of barbelith songs), when there was a real meaty topic waiting to be investigated, i.e. 'why is there a historically significant trend among certain communities to think that jewish conspiracies run the world?'.(i read in a paper not long ago that sales of the protocols of zion are currently higher in the arab world than ever before, that 'jews run the world' is a given for many people, and as such has an impact on our current international political reality. anyway...).

i think barbelith is, or should be, particularly well-suited to thinking about difficult, even verdammt, topics which other communities on-line or in the meat are not able/willing to. this is backed up by the credo outlined in the wiki. i think a lot of the board's time is spent unproductively in this respect, worrying about acceptable terms of debate, with the result that a lot less useful debate goes on than otherwise could. unsavoury opinions/premises should appear on barbelith, because otherwise how are we going to know what opposition our groovy thinking is coming up against?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:58 / 03.12.04
By talking to people who aren't on Barbelith?

any flagrantly racist statements be dealt with by *a bit of* the usual throat-jumping, and a simple, non-argued, two-mods banning if it persist

We could do this... but at present there is no mechanism for mods to ban people. Tom is the only person who can. Also, it means either that a moderator could be targeted for trolling by somebody whom they unsuccessfully moved to ban (if disclosed) or that people would find others being "silently" banneed (if not) - which might be a problem, also. Again, we'd need a code of conduct with a firm line on when, whether and how to ban - and a change in the mechanics of the board.
 
 
_Boboss
11:21 / 03.12.04
oh, i'm never very good at mechanics. perhaps a two (or more)-mod banning function could be added? send them an email: 'you've been banned from barbelith because of xyz, if you want back in you'll have to email these three moderators plus tom and do some begging.' (don't wish to add too unnnecessarily to anyone's workload mind)

and the thread that shall not be named is here: http://www.barbelith.com/topic/17464 i'll give it a look-over and decide if ii want to revive it.

but you notice raelian autopsy's not about much lately (maybe he's gone to live on a clone-ranch in outer space where net access is strictly monitored): barbelith is reasonably well self-policing - the moldier bars of fruit and nut don't receive enough positive reinforcement to hang around for long.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:32 / 03.12.04
That's true, to a large extent - people flounce off, basically. On the other hand, if memberships are reopened, there's the danger that people will google "Jews running the world", say, and we get an influx of right-wing nutters... I think the problem could be solved by:

1) A code of conduct that has to be agreed on signup
2) Some form of access control (posting limit, proper email required, cash donation) - this is a problem, though, for techy reasons.
3) Moderators being able to ban, or to suspend users temporarily while Tom's view is sought, which may be better in the sense of not giving mods power they don't want.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
14:40 / 03.12.04
Just had a quick scan of THAT thread...
...on balance, there WERE some good comments made there (albeit largely on the very subject we're discussing now, rather than the topic's subject). As far as I remember, though, at the time that thread was a result of various other threads which were still knocking about, putting it into an overall context which gave it a much nastier aspect. I don't think a HUGE amount came out of it, though, other than the somewhat reassuring fact that a large proportion of it was, to my mind, reasonable comment on why the question as posed was blatantly ridiculous. I do, however, agree that the thread title was fairly (okay, fucking) inflammatory and, were the board open, attract a lot of people I personally and I imaging (and hope) the majority of others wouldn't really want to have anywhere near us.
So maybe there is still a reasonable discussion as to why that sort of bullshit still exists, but I wouldn't have thought reviving that particular thread was the most helpful way of starting it.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
14:52 / 03.12.04
I'm wondering about whether the whole 'if we have the question, it will be googled, the right-wing will come' isn't a bit false. After all, that right-wing thread from the Switchboard that got deleted (which you can still find using the search function) had everyone pretty firmly taking the piss and arguing about why the person was wrong. Yet it was still bad to have it, as though asking the question made Barbelith a bad place which all the answers could do nothing to dispel. And I still don't understand why that is. Wouldn't Mr Crazy Rightwinger come, see that everyone pretty much disagreed with the idea and leave? If he started something would he not get banned? Is he not as likely to find the board without that websearch?

I just genuinely don't understand why this is a problem to a bunch of people who are normally quite eager to start a fight with their own shadow when they get bored.
 
 
w1rebaby
15:33 / 03.12.04
It's not so much your average right-wing troll that's the problem here - Barbelith is too small for them in general I believe and they wouldn't stay long as you say.

It's your chap or chapess who has a revelation that they really must get out, and they find somewhere they believe appropriate or receptive and set about trying to convince everyone there. I don't pretend to know exactly how appropriate or receptive places are found, but I suspect that Google is one possible vector.

The main reason for banning people in this sort of instance, I think, is so that they don't offend large numbers of people with worthless fascist drivel. But I have had personal experience of modding boards where you can tell that a proponderance of, say, bizarre 9-11 conspiracy threads that are active (even if that activity mostly consists of people saying "bollocks") attracts people to join and post similar. Not that that's so much of a danger with the current sign-up policy here and Barbelith's relatively low profile.
 
 
w1rebaby
19:19 / 04.12.04
On the original subject of the thread, I will admit that I am one of those people who is relatively quick to assume "malign intent (or irredeemable stupidity)" on the part of people posting what I consider to be bollocks, but I don't entirely think I'm being prejudiced and irrational. (Clearly. Or I wouldn't do it.) I could probably add "practically irredeemable ignorance" to that list as well.

Consider the following post, which appeared on another bulletin board in a thread that was actually about the practicality or otherwise of peaceful resistance in Iraq:

This whole thing sounds like its more and more a hate America excercise.
Both sides want the same thing and yet if the insurgents stop this fighting and begin to work politically,
but they cant since they arent Iraqi............
you assume that America is going to "rig" the elections?
Understandably we are not going to let the bath party exist
nor are we going to let some iranian controlled mullah take control.
we didnt go there and oust saddam just to give it back to another hateful dictator.
I cant imagine a militant government being elected
the people there dont want it.
they need someone who will lead them out of this mess.
The truth of the matter is after the elections and the after the country calms down we are gone.
To the america hating muslims it would be a disaster if we just left. above all else they do not want that.
I just talked to my friend that just got back he's a contractor and he told me that most of the insurgents are Iranian and Saudi,some Jordanian and a good number of Egyptians.
They hate us because they have been tought to hate us.
Tought since childhood.That is what the hamarabi schools are for, teaching children the quoran and to hate all infidels.

the whole thing is such a stupid waste.

Now, there are such immense levels of wrongness there that I don't really know where to start. There's an ignorance of facts which is not helping. There's prejudice, mostly I think media-derived. (I'm not sure what "hamarabi schools" are exactly.) There's blind naivete and trust in the overwhelming goodness and good motives of the US. There's self-contradiction (America not going to rig the elections, but of course they're not going to let some people win). There's the unthinking defensiveness that says that this is all "a hate America excercise" (sic), like the ones provided by all Euro lefties, which makes challenging any of the former more difficult. In short, you'd have to write page after page of painfully polite and fact-checked prose just to possibly change the opinions of someone who probably doesn't give a shit about the argument anyway, is not that interested in what you have to say and is likely to disappear at any moment - amongst dozens of other posters calling him a stupid cunt and telling him to fuck off if he doesn't like it. Note that this is a fairly typical post from this particular person, who I don't think is actually hostile, just extremely misinformed - not at all the worst I've encountered.

Is that really worth it? It's not impossible but it's a massive job and I really don't have the patience any more. The attempt would derail the thread, by addressing the propaganda-derived points it legitimises them and distracts from further progression as Gary Younge says, and it's not like this is an unusual position for people to hold online, so I'd never be finished. As far as I'm concerned this is a practically irredeemable poster, and it's not like I haven't tried in previous situations in the past.

It's different if you're going into a hostile environment, because you can pick people who seem to be more sympathetic to the argument you're trying to promote and concentrate on them.

I'm quite happy for other people to argue in these cases, as long as it isn't disrupting things, and if they aren't and the frankly dumb statements still roll in, I'm quite happy to either ignore them or suggest that they be moved to a separate thread. Unless I'm in a particularly bad mood I wouldn't be engaging in insults or sarcasm, not too much sarcasm anyway. I wouldn't ask for them to be banned

It's just that as far as I'm concerned it is a waste of my time to even go there, and actively harmful, in that it will be dumbing me down - it is a deliberate propaganda tactic to introduce evidence-free talking points into the mainstream such as "insurgents are all foreigners and 'anti-Iraqi'" simply so that discussion will be bogged down in disproving them and not progress, mainly and successfully aimed at the media but there's no reason we should be caught up in it too.
 
 
Ganesh
19:40 / 04.12.04
I may have proposed it for deletion myself. I can't quite remember the context but if it was deleted, I can't say I'm terribly unhappy about the whole thing.

I can't say I've wasted weekends weeping about it either, but that's not my point. My point is, I think it set a precedent of sorts - and I suppose that's partly why I'm talking about it now. The decision to go for deletion (and, if I'm remembering this correctly, the thread in question wasn't just deleted; it was the subject of at least one 'why the Hell are we even thinking about tolerating this stuff?' discussion here in the Policy) seemed, to me, a little... I dunno, hasty, for Barbelith. Perhaps, as has been alluded to, we may have been a little more panicky than usual because we'd just been spidered by Google.
 
 
w1rebaby
19:55 / 04.12.04
A point in favour of deletion of threads, even if the original point has been satisfactorily argued into the ground and dealt with, is to avoid the "oh GOD not THIS again" feeling when someone starts it all up again three months later with a post saying "I haven't read all of this thread but don't you think you were being a bit hard on X? I mean, when he said Y, well, it could have been true...".
 
 
The Falcon
10:34 / 14.12.04
I read '...prey on chicken' in the summary.

No real point here, but that'd be okay, I think.
 
 
iamus
07:03 / 19.12.04
As a Barbelith newbie, I know that it can sometimes be hard to place these arguments into the board's historical context. I see that it could be relatively easy for somebody to post something inflammatory with a poor understanding of how those sorts of things have panned out in the past.

While it's not an act that I condone, it's easy to see how somebody could post an ill thought out remark about Jews or Gypsies without a proper understanding of how it will be recieved or exactly what it is they are saying. For example: here. I do think from what I've seen that board members can be sometimes be overly jumpy when taking on such attitudes, but I also see why there is good reason to be so cautious. While it may seem like everybody should understand the seemingly irreverent and politically incorrect tone in which such things are phrased, this is often not the case and such comments could easy start a landslide of similar but far less well-intentioned rhetoric.

Personally, I am far more willing to engage people with viewpoints I find repugnant, in a friendly and approachable manner. Predjudice comes from ignorance, that's why it is important to educate. However, the problem I have seen is that such "education" here as often been known to degrade into little more than shouting matches, with neither side willing to truly engage with each other's viewpoints or truly get to the root of the problem. Hackles get raised and from there on it becomes difficult to have any sort of meaningful dialogue. As a result, arguments tend to end only when throats are sore, with no real resolution to the problem other than "Let's not discuss it". Problem is that when this happens, the issues will invariably turn up again.

Above all I think it's important to keep Barbelith a welcoming place for everybody, because I honestly believe that there is nowhere else like it on the net. But Barbelith being such a special place is also the reason I think it's a bad idea to delete offensive threads. Because it's so special, I think it's very important to preserve its history, warts and all. These things happened, and it's just as important to continually educate ourselves on them as it is to educate others.

I think, as was mentioned upthread, that it's a bad idea to offer a Definitive Barbelith Viewpoint on anything. We are a discussion forum, first and foremost. But was is clear is that something has to be done to formulate a stance for the Barbelith collective's general feelings on these matters.

This is what I propose:

We have a page on the Wiki specially designatated to such hot topic threads. The threads which have caused the most ire can be posted in their entirety in an easily accessible place. Using these pages, we annotate those threads, discussing :

Not the questions, but the threads themselves.

After providing a disclaimer, stating their possible inflammatory nature, we should try to be as objective as possible in the dissection of why these things were said and why we feel the way we do about them as well as providing a historical context of where the board was at that time. This way we can say if our attitudes toward them still ring true while at the same time bringing newbies quickly up to speed on what sorts of issues are likley to illicit knee-jerk, prickly responses.

I myself have not had any trouble with this (although yesterday I took a descision to self-censor a rather innocent but potentially inflammatory image here), but I have had to do quite a bit of work to try to find some of these long buried threads to formulate my own opinions of board policy. I think if this sort of resource had been there, it would have helped enormously. It could also help to cut down on a large amount of this sort of thing happening again.
 
 
Seth
00:52 / 21.12.04
Sometimes... questions can be so pregnant with assumptions that they are, arguably, better left unanswered. Not because they do not relate to important issues, but because they are so loaded with prejudice and crippled by ignorance, thoughtless in tone and reckless in content, that the manner in which they are put renders them incapable of addressing important issues. To engage with them would be to legitimise their bias.

Just a quickie to say that I find this quote idiotic beyond belief. All you need to do is highlight the presuppositions behind the question, to engage with the person while drawing attention to their assumptions and prejudice. A few well aimed questions can do this particularly well. You'll have made your points without validating assumptions behind the question. It's within the reach of most people's intelligence and capability, and in my experience most people don't engage because they can't be bothered and they don't care enough about people. Flaming is easier (there have been times when I've been guilty about this).

Attempting to engage with people doesn't always get results, but it's always worth attempting just for those time when it does.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
07:55 / 21.12.04
Unfortunately, when we tried this Tom shouted at us for supposedly supporting anti-Semitism (my lazy shorthand for a much longer argument) and supposedly some people left in disgust...

And so we return to the start and begin again...
 
 
w1rebaby
08:23 / 21.12.04
Actually, in my experience that quote is spot on - not only is it frequently, in practice, impossible to fully delineate the entire belief structure that you consider fundamentally flawed and leading to the attitude that's being expressed here (without writing a book, and getting bogged down with challenging everything else along the way, often with someone who is unwilling or unable to discuss the matters in the first place) it can actually be counter-productive in ways apart from driving you insane and wasting your time.

Concepts and ideas are regularly introduced into the public domain as spoilers, and unless you are extremely careful, whether you agree or disagree with them you are legitimising them and they are serving their purpose of molding debate. (This is something I've really noticed over the last two years of watching the US news media.) You do not argue about whether or not there were WMDs, because the debate mostly pre-supposes that this matters - and even if you are not working from that, your opponent likely is, and also many of the readers. You do not argue about whether or not the white race is superior to the black race because "race" is a bogus concept. Except if you try to explain why not you are accused of avoiding the issue. Sometimes it is possible to drag the debate away from these concepts but often it isn't; if the other person is not willing you won't get anywhere.

I would also say that if you think "it's always worth attempting" you don't spend a lot of time in online political discussion forums - either that or you are superhumanly patient and have tremendous skill in the art of the internet argument, in which case please go ahead.
 
 
Tom Coates
10:05 / 21.12.04
Well thanks for that comment there, that's a really nice way to put an argument behind you and try and move forward...
 
 
Seth
17:36 / 21.12.04
Online forums? No, not a lot. But I grew up in church, and have many friends who are still practising Christian. I’m more than used to talking to people with poorly thought out positions. If you can establish a relationship then you can keep returning to a contentious issue. Sometimes people will see your point, sometimes they won’t.

But sometimes I’ve observed that people care more about the other person backing down and honouring them as being “right all along” than they do about the other person as a person. People judge debate and conversation as whether they perceive they can “win,” and the cost of “winning” is measured in time taken, thought required and words per minute. If engaging with the person takes too much time, victory can still be claimed by popping in to the thread with a quip or flame to prove you’re on the right side of the debate to your audience, those rightminded people who are reading the thread and will appreciate seeing the restated quality of your stripes.

Relating to people is time consuming and hard work. I’m not disputing that, fridgemagnet. I wouldn’t be here were it not for people who chose to engage with me and relate to me as a person regardless of the tensile strength of my ideas and beliefs. But if I ask a stupid question in future will I get left in the dust by all you clever thinkers who are interested in progression of the issues rather than validating the noise that I bring to your signal?

Of course not. If Iasked a dumb question you’d give me the benefit of the doubt. Pillar of the community and all that. But when the new boy enters the saloon it’s always wise to keep your hand by your pistol, ready to defend your way of life. The prophecy is self-fulfilling, they’ll be defensive as soon as they notice that all eyes are on them, as soon as they realise that the pianist has stopped rattling the keys of the honky-tonk…
 
 
HCE
17:50 / 21.12.04
I would suggest, Seth, that there is a time and place for engaging with people rather than arguments, and not everybody agrees that now is the time and Barbelith the place.
 
 
Ganesh
18:09 / 21.12.04
Do we all need to agree on the appropriateness of time and place in order to have a discussion? I hope not.
 
 
HCE
20:51 / 21.12.04
See also Borges:

To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.
-- Essay: "The Avatars of the Tortoise"
 
 
HCE
20:57 / 21.12.04
A discussion about what?
 
 
Seth
07:11 / 22.12.04
But you cannot not engage with people if your format is a message board! The person who comes along and asks a question that you perceive to be silly will have very human reactions to being ignored, theory-bitched at or flamed. Hence why many of them mount a defense of the indefensible.

To me, Barbelith is about change and transformation, and those things come from people. They take time, effort and hard work, and the effects of the labour are sometimes very hard to quantify. I would hate it if Barbelith became about just maintaining a high standard of debate, detached from the thoughts and questions of those who don’t make the arbitrary grade.

For all those people who are bemoaning the time and effort they’ve spent communicating with people they’ve written off as unreachable: communication always involves at least two people, and you have to accept equal responsibility for the failure to get your points across – otherwise you look like a bit of a finger-pointing banana, shirking the weight of your own blame onto someone who you then label ignorant for the privilege of being your can-carrier.

Maybe you’re just not a good enough communicator.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:46 / 22.12.04
Seth, I think you have some valid points. But I think it needs to be said that the kind of "repugnant questions" we are talking about in this thread do not merely relate to abstract ideas or intangible political dogma: they concern people. Real people, and quite often people who have been in some way marginalised or lack power or have been denied a voice. (Equally, some people now seem to be using "theory" as a synonym for "needlessly inpenetrable intellectual exercise", but theory is real! It's some real shit. It doesn't get any realer.)

So caring less about a person who I'm talking to on an internet discussion board than about other people - for example, people who may be the subject of the discussion - is not the same thing as "not caring enough about people". The most important relationship in a given discussion is not necessarily the one between me and the hypothetical misguided-but-ultimately-lovely-really Barbelith poster who just stated or implied that all Arabs are blood-thirsty terrorists or that all gay men are shallow and promiscuous or that the lazy feckless criminal underclass get what they deserve. It might be the relationship between the discussion, and the people whom it concerns. Now, someone might argue that all discussion taking place on Barbelith and elsewhere on the internet is fundamentally irrelevant and will not have any significant impact on the lives of anyone apart from the people having the discussion... But I wouldn't agree with that, and I doubt you would either. The question becomes, to whom do I hold the greatest responsibility?
 
 
Sir Real
15:06 / 22.12.04
Wouldn't whatever marginalized group is being slandered be better served if the slanderer grew to realize the error in his/her thinking? This seems infintly (yes, infinitly) more likely to occur from engagement than from a flame-ridden attack on the guilty party. Unless, of course, you want to work from the assumption that bigots are irredeemable.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:26 / 22.12.04
infinitely

I think a bunch of different things need to be balanced here. One of those is what is gained from engaging in a friendly manner with somebody expressing a bigoted, hateful opinion. Another is what is gained from demonstrating thata bigoted, hateful opinion cannot be expressed without immediate and negative response. A third is considering both those questions in the context of Barbelith.

First up is hierarchy of needs. For example, what do we want to happen with our hypothetical bigot? Maybe:

Best: Bigot is shown that their opinions are unacceptable and wrong, and resolves to mend his ways, starting yb asking for his posts to be edited and going on to be a beacon of liberalism and tolerance.
Next best: Bigot resolves to think more seriously about his or her actions, and is persuaded through conversation that at least he or she should think seriously about the impact his questions might have on others.
Next best: Bigot's viewpoint is not changed, but bigot is persuaded that it is easier, if he or she wants to stay on Barbelith, to self-edit, even if he or she believes this to be an imposition of Political Correctness Gone Mad(tm). Over time, exposure to Barbelith changes bigot's perspective (this, of course, depends on Barbelith remaining tolerant and lovely).
Next best: Bigot storms off, screaming about PC gone mad, is never seen on Barbelith again.
Next best: Bigot goes off on one, is banned.

Balance against that those who are affected by presence of bigot.

Best: Understands and approves of process of redemption, hangs in there and does what he or she can to help.
Next best: Appreciates plan for but does not enjoy continuing presence of bigot's opinions through process (successful or not) of redemption.
Next best: hangs in there and seethes, but does not sympathise with aims of redemption project.
Next best: Leaves Barbelith in protest against ongoing toleration of bigotry.

It's a balance to strike. Hoooever... let's look at some examples.

Raelianautopsy's "Do the Jews really run the world?" thread, on one level, I think lent itself quite easily to this. Raelianautopsy made some very stupid statements, based on very stupid assumptions, and those were critiqued. Where things got tricky was where he started speculating with the same stupidity about the Holocaust. That raised the stakes to the point where Tom felt that continuing the discussion was tantamount to tolerating Holocaust denial. That thread demonstrated, if nothing else, that there are some very stupid people on Barbelith. Was Tom right to go in that hard when everybody apart from the very dim were showing up the weaknesses and failures of logic in Raelianautopsy's position? Difficult question.

Foust's "Affectations", and before that Kegger's " question for the Pride Parade people" again provided opportunities for people to examine and draw attention to the power of invisible and compulsory heterosexuality (or, more precisely "straightness"). I think those threads _were_ quite useful, because they provided a context in which the assumptions that the originators' questions were rested on coudl be examined.

Of course, one difference, I suspect, is that while Foust and Kegger's unexamined compulsory heterosexuality was not *malicious, merely the instinctual action of het privilege, Raelianautopsy's anti-Semitism, based on ignorance and an obsession with conspiracy theory, was deeply entrenched and fiercely defended. Which is part of the problem - it's hard to know which threads will throw up the kind of bad-headed shit that will have people who contribute value to Barbelith wanting to leave it, and which will spark off good, positive discussions. To an extent, it's a matter of individual taste, which is why this probably requires i) moderators having more authority _and more support_ in identifying, discussing and taking action on offensive threads or posters or ii) people being more assiduous in bringing things that make them uncomfortable to the attention of people invested in Barbelith (say, in the Policy) and alos to Tom.

I'm not sure that "consistent" here means "having the same response every time" as "being able to explain coherently why one topic was taken and run with and another shut down, or indeed why one person was spoken to politely and another flamed". I suspect that you'd find that people actually often get cut a lot of slack before the line snaps and people just lose patience with them - see jah, recently, in the Head Shop, or his spiritual ancestor Leap.
 
 
w1rebaby
16:47 / 22.12.04
For all those people who are bemoaning the time and effort they’ve spent communicating with people they’ve written off as unreachable: communication always involves at least two people, and you have to accept equal responsibility for the failure to get your points across – otherwise you look like a bit of a finger-pointing banana, shirking the weight of your own blame onto someone who you then label ignorant for the privilege of being your can-carrier.

Maybe you’re just not a good enough communicator.

I'm sorry, but this comes across as somewhat naive. While of course it is possible that people are rubbish at putting their point across, or don't really know why they believe in it themselves, or in fact just plain wrong, and thus unable to change anyone's mind, in many instances this is not the case.

People don't come on message boards and argue purely to test their beliefs in the fire of honest intellectual debate. Some people come on to discuss things, but have a core that they will not challenge, and you can try as hard as you like but you will get nowhere because they're just not interested in discussing it with you. (Two examples from my own experience immediately come to mind: firstly, someone who claims to want to discuss Randianism but in fact merely spends most of their time dismissing difficult challenges as "irrelevant", and a particular US right-winger with whom I can discuss surface political issues with quite happily, but go anywhere near certain core beliefs and there's no point continuing because he's not going to admit to any sort of flaw in them.)

Some people come onto a board purely to evangelise for a particular position. Unless you rate yourself as having incredible persuasive powers to get into the consciousness of someone who's not interested in listening to you, which frankly I don't and are only tangentially connected to argument anyway, it is a waste of time arguing with someone who, say, is only there to promote the idea that the white race is superior. If you're not sure of your position or want to test your skills you might get some benefit from batting the idea back and forth but you're not going to change the mind of someone who doesn't care what you think.

Communication does indeed involve at least two people and one of the pre-requisites for information being passed back and forth is that both sides are actually listening. This is not always true. In fact, my cynical side tells me that it is extremely rarely true on the net.

This is ignoring the point that the argument might in fact be quite offensive to onlookers. Engaging in a discussion about whether dead people really exist, when you know that someone on the board has recently had a friend who's committed suicide, is probably not the thing to do at that point socially speaking. Similarly, arguing with someone who endlessly repeats bigoted views about Jews might not be the best if there are Jewish people on the board who feel personally offended by these statements. This isn't an abstract philosophical forum, this is a real place with real people in it.
 
 
Ganesh
20:04 / 22.12.04
Of course, one difference, I suspect, is that while Foust and Kegger's unexamined compulsory heterosexuality was not *malicious, merely the instinctual action of het privilege, Raelianautopsy's anti-Semitism, based on ignorance and an obsession with conspiracy theory, was deeply entrenched and fiercely defended.

How do you know? How can you tell? Where, precisely, is the point at which 'non-malicious' shades into 'malicious'? 'Unexamined' is not a million miles away from 'ignorant' - and I'm not sure to what degree we could readily extrapolate from RaelianAutopsy's question a) an "obsession with conspiracy theory", b) 'deep entrenchment' of ideation to the extent that discussing the issue was effectively without value, and c) 'fierce defence' to the extent that discussing the issue was effectively without value.

Like Seth, I've spent time with Christian people - although, unlike him, much of my experience has been online - and I must admit that, in some respects, my time on Cross+Flame was really quite refreshing. Compared with Barbelith, I felt more able to engage with certain subjects in an unfettered way, and this is partly my point: accepting that some Repugnant Questions are asked in good faith and approaching them in similar vein actually forces one to examine one's own strongly-held views, and produce evidence to support them - rather than simply saying 'that's outrageous' and avoiding the question. I found that rather bracing.
 
  

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