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Right. A lot of words to get through here.
Going back to ignoring, I think the ignore function is a questionable piece of functionality. It's taken me a long time to get to this conclusion, but generally I think that as a matter of duty, in particular if one is a moderator or simply has an interest in maintaining the quality of the board, putting people on ignore rather than engaging with them is probably not the way to go. Probably the most ethical use of it would be to deal with somebody who is unlikely to say anything specifically offensive or awful but who you do find terribly irritating - I did this with one obstreperous poster, until people started responding negatively to things he was saying in fora I moderated, when I felt I had to unignore.
However:
you'll notice I say it's the thread that lends a passive aggressive layer to anything in here.
This deserves a second look, I think. Passive aggressive disorder, if one believes that it exists, often concerns instances of disavowed negativity - for example, saying that a form of communication is passive-aggressive rather than that a person is behaving in a passive-aggressive fashion. By not making a direct accusation, and instead blaming environmental conditions, the ability of the other party to respond directly is ablated. However, let us not dally too much: if I had my way, "passive aggressive" as a term used in Internet arguments rather than therapy would be removed from the language just as it was removed from the list of Axis II personality disorders. This is because it is always profitless, and does nothing but damage the chances of a cordial exchange taking place. I would in fact go further and point out that people on the Internets seem to enjoy the term so much that it appears not to incur the same Barbelith self-moderation mechanisms that describing people's behaviour in terms of other mental health conditions. Things this tempting are rarely entirely healthy.
That said I'm not really sure how to respond to your posts above. I'm not even sure if I should. But honestly it makes me feel really fucked up that someone I respect when given the option of communicating with me directly choses not to but instead posts here. What you are expressing about my behavior in Policy is something id and TTS were able to directly inform me of. By doing that it allowed me to hear them and respond. I don't feel that I'm able to do that in the context of your barbannoy post. It doesn't even directly state who you're talking about but a quick read of Policy leaves no doubts.
Right. Let's start at the beginning.
i) I honestly don't see why you should feel unable to reply. Other people in this thread have already replied to my post. You have replied at some length yourself. Why should it be the case that you feeel somehow excluded from that - that there is this one corner of Barbelith where you are not able to post, even when you have? This is not, I fear, something for which I feel able to feel responsible. If there is anything I can do to ameliorate it, though, please do tell me. I will do my best to oblige.
ii) As I said above, while I was composing a reply to your PM my browser crashed. In that interval, a number of people asked what I meant here. I responded by reproducing here roughly what I had written in the PM I lost, having acknowledged that occurrence:
Sorry - and sorry to the person who very kindly PMed me about this also, and to whom I was responding when my browser crashed.
You can read that as some process intended to shut you out, but I would rather substitute the principle of economy - the one answer worked for both requirements, as did the one mechanism. A wise person once suggested that one should attempt to assume the best possible intent when reading somebody else's comments. I do not feel that this advice is being followed here. As I said above, I have no idea why you feel that posting in an open forum that you were reading and that you were able to reply to, and did reply to, constituted denying you the ability to reply. Forgive me if I have missed it, but you have not yet as far as I can tell favoured me with an explanation to that.
iii) This is not actually about you, and it was not my decision to make it so. What I said was:
This compounded by the people who are generally identified as genuine contributors of value to the board and to the Temple arguing in the Policy about what constitutes safe and considerate treatment of somebody who after some pages of wrangling once apologised for calling people's mothers whores.
That is, the people - plural - who generally add value to the Temple are instead spending their time and energy in this rather surreal argument about how much consideration should be extended to a person who is not actually participating very profitably in the thread in the first place. The point was that the member under discussion and all the members in the argument were Temple regulars - thus, the location of the threads - the fact that neither of them were in the Temple - was not really the point. By the same token, Zoemancer joined for the Temple, apparently, but started his Holocaust denial in the Switchboard and went on into the Head Shop.
However, none of your responses have taken this interpretation, which I thought was the obvious one, as the correct interpretation. I regret that I failed to communicate clearly enough and thus led you to waste your time answering statements that were not made.
So, to answer:
Frankly I'm tired of trying to guess what you'd like me to be doing differently
I would like you, in this case, not to believe that by tallking about a situation rather than addressing you directly I am seeking to insult you. It is simply that you are not necessarily the owner of the discussion or the situation, and so mention of the situation need not be addressed directly to you, I believe.
I apologised fully for the comment about your optimism being phrased in a manner you found condescending, and I am disappointed that you have chosen to ignore that while citing it here. I do not believe more needs to be said.
So, to address your tiredness: it seems that I should seek to address you directly if I am talking about something which relates to you. I'm afraid that I draw the line at being obliged to respond to PMs when the principle of economy allows for a public response to a common set of questions. Conversely, I would request that you not assume that things are aimed at or about you on shaky evidence, and therefore try not to feel justified in breaking out the aggression, passive or otherwise, having decided that comments made not about you are in fact about you. Beyond that, I think we're back to the "if confused, ask" principle, which no doubt we both and many others could benefit from. |
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