Barbelith Underground > Policy & Help > Is something wrong with Barbelith?

Okay. I feel that it generally smarts to get pulled up on posts which would seem to indicate some underlying prejudice. Getting a bit shirty under the circs is perhaps forgivable, especially when pulled up hard and sharp with a rude name or two.

However, it is infinitely preferable to letting the board slide into an environment where slightly whiffy posts go unchallenged. I believe the broken window effect has been evoked elsewhere: if you let one whiffy post slide, it becomes a mite harder to challenge the next one, and before you know it you have perfectly lovely posters leaving the board never to return because they feel that it is no longer a space in which people of their ethnicity (gender, orientation ect.) are regarded as, well, people, fellow board users with emotional responses, rather than abstract notions.

Also, once the intitial sting has worn off a bit, it behooves the stung party to simmer down a bit and have a think if the stingy people might not have had a point. It's happened to me, not so much on the Barb (tho' I have had to do a lot of re-thinking over the past 5 years) but at other times in my life.

My personal yardstick for this kind of thing is an episode from my teens where I got called on my use of a particularly nasty slang term, "flid." This was used pretty much the same way as you'd use "wimp" or maybe "klutz," to indicate physical or other forms of ineptitude. What I didn't realise was that it derived from the word Thialidomide and referred to people with physical deformities caused by the drug. I suppose I vaguely noticed people looking at me funny when I used it, or discovered that right-on types I'd previously got on well with were cooler towards me, but I didn't think anything of it until someone actually upbraided me for its use (without bothering to explain why, which is a bit crap but hey, 18). And discussing the scene afterwards with a fellow user, I came out with exactly the same arguments we see every time anyone is called on anything like that on the board: I didn't mean it like that, it was just a word, I didn't think of people like that, I wasn't prejudiced, it didn't have that meaning to me, I was only joking, ect ect, until finally I had to give up and accept that yes, I'd looked like a total wanker every time I'd used the word and had better excise it from my vocab. (All over bar the occasional tendency to curl up, bite my knuckles, and whimper "But why didn't anyone tell me?!")

Point being, we all have crap in our vocabularies, in our means of communication, and in our attitudes to the rest of the world that could do with scraping up and binning. Yeah, it hurts to be called on it, but sometimes you just have to accept the criticism gracefully. There's such a thing as realising that you're in a hole and should lay aside the shovel.