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Okay, so this has been a thread full of high emotion and debate and argument and I think it's been weirdly successful in some ways. Obviously it's been difficult in other ways, but I want to thank people for pretty much keeping themselves under control.
My sense of where we are right now may very well be incorrect - but again, I'd just like to try and drag some things together. First off, I want to apologise to people for perceived inconsistency of my banning people from the board. I've had a long conversation with Ganesh about this and I basically agree that 95% of the time the community here should come to a conclusion about whether someone should be banned or not, and that my main role is to make it happen. If people want Shadowsax banned, then I'll make it happen. But I am also in a position to put a break on a banning process if I think people need to reconsider things a bit - with a view to the longer continuity of the board - and there will also be times where I'm going to have to ban without greater discussion, including libellous situations or where there appears to me t be acute harrassment or when not banning would seem to cause so much damage that I can't possibly wait for a longer process to go through. These latter situations - where I have to de facto ban - cause damage to the community, I think, but that doesn't mean that they don't have to be done. It's right for people to be uncomfortable about them, and it's right that they're held in suspicion and it's right that people express their problems with them when they happen, and that they object vocally if they think I've behaved incorrectly. These things stop me from stepping in too often or throwing my weight around. I reserve the right to say that sometimes the trauma to the sense of fairness in the community is the substantial lesser of two evils, however. So these things will occasionally occur.
I'm saying all of this because of the sense that it's okay to be anti-women on the board but not anti-gay or anti-Jew. I definitely hope that this is not the case, and I will re-examine my own thoughts on the subject in detail. I want people to understand that at a certain point, and in certain situations I have to make a judgement quickly and that the decision I come to may not reflect the general feeling of the board or of a portion of it. In the case of Holocaust denial on the board, I felt very very strongly that this was a direct attack on all Jewish people, intimating that they were universally liars, that they had used these lies to achieve power and that their supposedly dead relatives were a myth. My sense was that it was also a deeply personal attack, since some board members lost relatives during the Holocaust, and most could report the impact of anti-semitism on their lives. As a consequence I moved very quickly to ban the user concerned. This could have been a mistake, but I have to say I'm still not sure that it was.
Whatever ShadowSax's flaws, I do not personally think that his statements about women and feminism have represented the same level of harrassment as Holocaust denial. Hence, I feel it would be massively inappropriate of me to ban out of hand, and I'm very glad that the board is taking the time to debate this in more depth. Ignoring the substance of the complaints for a moment, I'd also like to state for the record that I think ShadowSax has attempted to engage with the discussion and that I think this is a good thing. His attempts have clearly not always been enormously successful, of course - probably for a variety of reasons. It's now up to you guys to decide whether or not you want to forcibly eject him now or not.
As usual, I want to thank Haus for his clarity of argument and also make my standard warnings to newer users about getting in conflicts with him. Haus is a terrier to debate and sometimes doesn't know when to walk away, but he is scrupulously logical. This can be very annoying for users who are not used to defending themselves against a sustained interrogation of their position, and I'm pretty sure has escalated the odd conflict in the past. Having said that, Haus is a trusted and long-standing member of the community and - unless he snaps and goes massively extreme - is unlikely to be going anywhere. Assuming that he's not going to snap, I would very much recommend new members find a way to get on with him or to avoid getting into arguments that they're not prepared to support with solid information and logical debate. If things go wrong the first time you're in an argument with him, then you have my sympathy - but the second or third time I really think it's probably your own fault.
Returning to ShadowSax, I want to take issue with a couple of his points finally, while again saying that it's up to you guys to make your decision one way or another (or to abstain, of course). Firstly, he's said up thread that:
"instead of being challenged on them, really, they are met with simple vitriol. i am willing to engage, but not with people who call me names and so grossly misread my posts."
I can only say here that while I cannot support people being rude out of hand, often on Barbelith you reap what you sow - if you make imprecise statements or make out of hand jokes then you will and should get called on them. If you say things that can be misconstrued as insulting or are blunt to the point of being rude, then it's your responsibility to apologise for how they've been misconstrued and restate them, or find a new way to restate them. Obviously there are limits, but for the most part if a bunch of people have misread your posts, that's your fault for miswriting them and your responsibility to clarify them. No one here is psychic, except for the folks in the Temple. And they're charging sigils.
To this other point: "it does seem easier to get away with sexism towards men than with sexism towards women, even if in both cases, possible offenders arent really being sexist but are rather being relatively obtuse, or at simply using the wrong terms. "
I don't know whether you were referring to Barbelith or the world in this statement, but I would just like to make it clear that I think that while you probably won't find an enormous amount of pro-male rhetoric on the board (mostly because we're traditionally a group who need it less), I think you'd find that sexist statements on the board about men for the most part get picked up on as often as sexist statements about women. And certainly there is no moratorium on discussions of sexism against men, although - as with any other contention on the board - you'll have to be able to back up your case if you're going to state things out of hand. |
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