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You were here long before we were ever spidered by Google, weren't you gridley? Going stealth again wouldn't keep us off the radar altogether - we'd still be found by other online references to us. You just wouldn't get here by searching on any string found in any thread, without any context whatsoever.
A couple of things occur to me reading Kaiser John's points of view on the previous page: Firstly, if we do have an entry level concepts 101 section, we should add 'Semantics' to the list. But more importantly, it seems to me that there is a crucial quality to Barbelith that someone familiar with other message boards might not expect. That is that you're just not going to get away with stuff here that you might elsewhere.
I'm sure we all have some real life experience of advocating some ridiculous position and getting away with it. I'm not just talking about making off-colour jokes in the pub and getting a laugh; my guess is that all of us have had a pretty easy time playing devil's advocate or successfully proposed or defended some spurious position on something or other. It's been mentioned in the past - Barbelith's constituency exhibits more than its fair share of 'Smartest Kid In The Class Syndrome'. In other words, I think some of the fights here get nasty because the protagonists are used to bullshitting their way out of things in other arenas.
Earlier on in this thread rising and revolving posted to say I'm a dick. I misread Haus' writing what he meant as him having done so. Sorry about that .. and that struck me as something I don't read anything like enough on Barbelith. I don't think this is an ego thing so much as people being unused to saying that in other spheres of their lives.
And this isn't about knowing your place or accepting that other people know more about x, y or z than you do, but I think the mistake that posters who adopt the "I was joking / being playful / if you knew me you'd know I was being ironic" gambit is that the culture of Barbelith doesn't put a great deal of stock in those things, particularly outside the Conversation.
That was certainly my experience when I first came here. I thought people took themselves rather seriously and it was a bit of an epiphany when I realised that it wasn't people taking themselves seriously (later confirmed, if confirmation were needed, when I met Barbeloids in a pub environment), they just take the issues that come up here seriously, and like to use Barbelith to talk about them seriously.
To me, it's about context. You don't have to read much of Barbelith to work out what social / political / philosophical / cultural issues the community is particularly engaged with, so recognise that people take these things seriously. If you think comics are for kids, chuckle about that with your mates as you walk past Forbidden Planet; if you reckon people who think they can cast magic spells are deluded, there's nothing much to be gained by going on about that in the Temple; mocking things for being ghey might go down a storm with your buddies, but don't get pissed off if it isn't received in the same spirit here.
Sorry, a bit of a ramble, but I think some of these problems could be better addressed by being clearer about the fact that Barbelith just isn't a forum dedicated to the exchange of ideas, regardless of how un-PC or troglodytic they may be. Kaiser John must have got that from somewhere and I wonder if there is a branding issue here. Maybe the association with anarchism is causing a perception problem. Is it time to think more about changing the name? |
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