Barbelith Underground > Policy & Help

we were talking about the harm discussing guns could cause, not the harm caused by guns themselves, though, yeah? because if we are talking about banning handguns on barbelith, i think i may need to read someone's notes.

I think the relevant section is here:

Well... most obviously, because people may have been victims of and traumatised by gun crime (or indeed by violence against animals), but are unlikely to have been victims of joycore.

You asked why joycore might be more acceptable on Barbelith than discussions of guns (or, by extension, of fighting dogs). This was my response. Essentially, that such discussions might refer people back to their own traumatic experiences.

Personally, I don't hve that response to either. My reaction to many of the comments in both threads was embarrassment at how depressingly Grand Theft: Auto many Barbeloids are.

I did not realise that you were likening your experience of hearing discussion of Morcheeba as traumatic in the way that the experience of somebody who has been the victim of gun violence or sexual abuse might experience discussion of those as traumatic. This does actually raise the question of what you do when people's sensibilities are substantially heterodox - for example, Shadowsax's position that broad-beam misogyny was ascceptable (because true), but "name-calling" was unacceptable, or for that matter Shortfatdyke's anger that a particular word describing a lady's happy place was being used indiscriminately as an insult - with which anger I could certainly sympathise, but which I felt it was not within the purview of a moderator to interfere with posts in support of.

If we look at the actual mechanisms of the board, responses to something we find tasteless or indecent basically fall into three possible approaches:

1) Refer upwards to Tom if it is so severe as to require some supernormal action
2) Moderate out, with varying degrees of severity
3) Exert social pressure, possibly in combination with the above methods.

1) is very rare. 2), I think, should be and is used pretty sparingly - with reference to the pictures of foetuses and Nick berg, one reason they were removed was that their presence on a computer screen might have endangered the reader's job - same reason we have NSFW warnings in threads. This is partly because, IIRC, it takes more votes to change a thread title than to change an img src tag to an a href tag, so the two requests are often bundled in simultaneously. When it is used, it is often accompnaied with discussion in Policy.

So, a lot falls on (3) - use of social pressure to make people aware that something is either not generally "Barbelith", or just to make someone aware that a particular topic is a difficult one for somebody else on the board, with a concomitant request for sensitivity. How one responds to that is also very much a personal matter, and I think there are different ways to handle it. Taking for example something like Vladmir's cock-rotting Indians, once it is clear that a number of people think you have said soemthing which they think is offensive even if you don't, you can either negotiate or you can defecate in your hand and throw it. As long as that defecation does not start damaging the successful function of the board, it is usually dealt with by social pressure - mockery, primarily.

Which also feeds into my idea of the duties of a moderator. But this is growing long - more on that later.

Taste & Decency