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Haus, please take into consideration that one possible response to the feeling that one is being sniped at unfairly is to try not to dwell on it. Thus, examples of unwelcome behavior may not be readily at hand, precisely because one is not a troll, and is therefore not keeping a logbook of one's own sensations, to use your apt term.
That's a good point; as I said, I didn't remember exactly how the example Dudley cited went, and if I had relied on my imperfect recall would probably have gone through it differently. Somebody else, without the advantage of another providing an example. If that example is just a feeling, well... you get into this difficult situation where one person says "I feel that other people on Barbelith are being rude". The problem with that being that in the absence of any corroborating evidence which could provide an idea of what that individual perceives as rudeness, it's quite hard to know what to do next, except resolve to be extra polite either to that person (which shifts the burden of record-keeping onto the hypothetical general user), or alter one's entire behaviour towards the entire board in the hope that the value that imparts is greater than the value it removes, from your experience of Barbelith and Barbelith's experience of you. That's tricky.
Also, at times I think being rude is perfectly reasonable. Opinions vary on this, obviously, but (to provide examples) in a case where, for example, somebody has said that he would not like to go to India because if he banged the locals his cock would drop off, I believe that rudeness is not unreasonable. I would not be polite if somebody said this in the pub, and I don't see any particular need to be polite about it on the Internet. Rudeness can, I think, be a useful mechanism, although not a complete one, for showing somebody that their behaviour is not acceptible on Barbelith, and in the absence of moderators kicking people off or deleting their posts, social mechanisms are the most functional way to do this. When this is deployed and how people react to it is a personal question: qv the recent Morpheus issue.
However, that doesn't address the unsubstantiated feeling. As Ganesh says, the people who are inclined not to rack up a list of grievances are, I think, generally also going to be the people who do not start threads like this, because they will see them as unproductive. Beyond that, if such a person wants to record their perceptions.. well, one can say from the outset that this is just a feeling, without valid substantiation, although that would for me raise the question again of what one does with that feeling. Otherwise, one could think about reseach tools - identifying examples that have informed that feeling, and deciding how much time and effort you want to put into being able to explain to oneself and others where that feeling may have originated. King Mob decided that his feeling of a general and prevalent attitude could be suported by reference to one specific incidence, which was discussed, but declined to provide further examples. Dudders identified one specific example of me perpetuating a vendetta against him, but fell down by not actually looking back at that example to make sure his recall of the facts was correct.
At times like this, I think the site: tag in google is very useful. By adding site:http://www.barbelith.com to a phrase, one can usually find the thread in which that phrase was used. So, in this case I used that modifier with the search term 'Countdown to Infinite Crisis", and got the thread in question. That can be useful, if somebody feels it is necessary, for trying to track down and provide context to half-remembered instances.
Generally, I think intention is key here. If you see a serious problem with Barbelith, and you want something _done_ about it, you need to put in legwork, think through what you're saying and search out as many examples as you can find. Such a thread should possibly go in the Policy. If you want to make an observation about what you feel is a problem with Barbelith, but do not have evidence or the will to gather it, work out what kind of a response you are looking for. Think about the difference between "I feel sometimes that people on Barbelith are unecessarily hostile" and "there is a prevalent tendency on Barbelith for people to be snobbish pretentious assholes", for example. I think this thread is quite instructive, in some ways: King Mob wanted to tell us what was wrong with Barbelith, but also wanted to avoid having to provide examples instantiating the general trend he had identified. I think you can do one or the other of those two things but probably not both. |
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