Barbelith Underground > Policy & Help > Moderation requests & discussion thereof

On reflection, our other precedent is probably Cholister, who has waves of going through hir old posts obliterating everything that could be used a a personal reference point. However, a) these requests were largely accepted or altered to retain the sense of the thread in posts and topics that had been dead fro some time and b) this only happened after ze had stopped actually posting on the boards. Also, c) there was a suggestion that at least to some degree this paranoia might have originated in a genuine threat.

So, hmmmm. Personally, I don't think that "I know a mixed-race person who has a child" is exactly going to have the imaginary forces of evil in PW's world crying "At last, he's made a slip! Round up all the mixed-race women in London with children! There can't be more than... oh, fuck." Were I seeking to unravel the terrible, gnarly knot of PW's secret identity, which strikes me as a very dull way to pass the time, there really are easier ways to do it. So, I think that to accept the mod request on the grounds that PW no longer sees Barbelith as "safe" to reveal this utterly useless bit of personal information is a bad idea, because it further validates his feelings of victimhood. To accept a mod request which is framed as an order, of course, gives a false impression of how Barbelith functions, and extends the idea that the one who is demanding has a right to something nobody else on Barbelith has - to use moderators as a rubber-stamp on hir own decisions.

So, that's all tricky. Had I written that, I might subsequently have wished sincerely that I had not, because it would appears to be a case of me (if not a white person, then certainly one perceived generally as white) using his nonwhite chums as tools to claim superiority in a discussion of race. This ties in, by the way, to some of the PMs I've been receiving, but that's a somewhat different matter. I hope that if I asked for it to be moderated, I would acknowledge that this was the reason, as for me it would be - I might have a crack at the Pokemon passage as well, for that matter - and try to suggest an emendation (politely) which kept some sort of the sense - such as "There followed a touching but slightly bizarre story about assumptions made about people on the grounds of their appearance. No serious attempt by PW was made to tie this in to the topic under discussion, leading to a degree of confusion. It has been moderated because -" followed by some comprehensible explanation, which I would not presume to try to dredge.

I would not start to say "fuck you" to moderators when I didn't get my own way, and if I did, were there any subsequent point where I returned to coherence, I would probably apologise, nicely and without four paragraphs of the usual tedious hedging.

However, that's just what I'd do, and I can't speak for anyone else.