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Underground > Policy & Help >

General Headshop reflections

  
  

Page: 123(4)

 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:02 / 28.09.06
Can we not have some kind of forum-specific ban function? I feel it'd be extremely helpful right now.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:03 / 28.09.06
Probably a topic for another thread, Randy, but not necessarily a topic without merit.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
16:03 / 28.09.06
Really? Define "helpful".
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:04 / 28.09.06
"Helpful" as in the opposite of every single post you've ever contributed to it, PW.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
16:05 / 28.09.06
Thanks.

I forgive you.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
16:08 / 28.09.06
I just found the Ignore button. And I pressed it.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:49 / 28.09.06
OK. PW, you may have forgotten that you undertook not to post in the Policy for a while two days ago, here. In your early post on this topic, you made the pretence that your posting was somehow a remarkable and unlikely event, here, but this veil has now slipped completely and you are posting, in terms of number of posts, once again at about half the level of everybody else in the thread put together.

To remind you: a number of respected members of Barbelith, in the "Moderating for Taste" thread, explained why they found your posting to the Policy exhausting and consuming of energy and attention that could otherwise be productively used on the board. The fact that you have entered this thread with no apparent interest in discussing the Head Shop, rather than claiming that people should be nicer while becoming rude and abusive almost the moment after, when you don't get big love for the acuity of your insights, which rudeness you appear not to notice or feel to be worthy of attention, is saddening, but not entirely surprising.

This is not motivated only by concern for the quality of the discussion in the Policy. It is also motivated by concern for you. You do not contribute quality to this kind of discussion, for whatever reason, but it seems that you are compelled to try to do so, also for whatever reason, which then upsets you, which in turn makes you progressively ruder and more aggressive, which in turn makes people think less of you and less of the value you contribute to Barbelith.

So, although my heartfelt wish for you either to stop posting in Policy or to dedicate about ten times as long to your contributions is in part selfish, and in part a form of self-interest that extends from my ulcers to the protection of Barbelith as a whole, and a whole whose ability to have a functional Policy forum is vital to its health, it is also altruistic. The gap between the expectations of posters to the Policy and your contributions is clearly not making you happy, and it is making people who are generally kind and well-meaning increasingly angry with you. It is also starting to turn you into a troll. I have seen people become trolls before when they insisted on privileges that Barbelith simply could not give them - and, in fact, using the Policy as a means for them to pursue their personal fixations was one of the privileges demanded before. I think you're probably a perfectly nice person, and I hate to see you a) upset yourself and b) damage your standing in the eyes of others on Barbelith more widely, both of which are likely to result from continuing escalation of your sequence of vague proclamations followed by defensive rudeness in the Policy.

I'm trying to help you, here.
 
 
Persephone
17:00 / 28.09.06
Any idea how far the angel burgers jokes had gone before it was moved to Conversation, Pseph?

Here's the thread --if I recall correctly, Jack Fear's post was the last entry in Head Shop. That was only seven posts in, people weren't talking about bludgeoning angels until after it got to Conversation.

And, for that matter, how much thought had gone into the originating post? In general, a thread will stay at about the quality of its first post, so a moderator might have felt, in the absence of your contribution arriving in time, that the thread belonged in the Conversation.

I wouldn't say that a lot of thought went into the initial post. It just had a hint of something interesting, that I liked. I hear what you're saying about the quality of the first post, and I gather that's the consensus opinion. I guess I just want to express a minority opinion that a long, well-thought post maybe ought not be a *requirement* for starting a good discussion...

Having said which, how could we have addressed that? We could have moved the topic back into the Head Shop, right? Or we could have started a new thread in the Head Shop, having ascertained that the subject matter itself was not the problem. Or we could have made a concerted effort to wrench the discussion upwards, while leaving the thread in Conversation. These could all have been tried, but I fear I don't recall if any of them were...

Speaking for myself, I just let it go --I'm not that into angel meat. But also I usually don't want to get into a discussion about What is angel meat to the Head Shop, or What is angel meat to Barbelith. I just want to talk about, you know, angel meat. I'm just bringing it up now because this seems like an opportune moment.

I think perhaps we need to communicate that their are options - you can post without being a subject specialist, you can discuss things that aren't immediately related to philosophpy, cultural or gender studies, and you can do things with threads beyond move, abandon or lock.

Yes, I'd definitely like this to be incorporated into Head Shop culture. I will try to do my part.

In other news, if you'd like to talk about veganism, I heartily recommend Ex's excellent thread on food and body image, which is touching on how veganism functons in different cultures and societies.

Believe me, I have been thinking it over... will probably have something to say in a week, tortoise that I am. And maybe all this is just me speaking for the tortoises, making the Head Shop safe for tortoises...
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
17:03 / 28.09.06
Yes Paranoid Writer, if you could try to stop yet another Policy thread becoming derailed into a discussion of you that would be appreciated.

Susan Weaving is wise, I've followed hir advice and tried starting a thread in the HS. The unfortunate follow on to bring up Flyboy appealing for new posters in Music is that to a certain extent after a week or two things slipped more or less back to where they were.
 
 
paranoidwriter waves hello
17:11 / 28.09.06
I'm trying to help you, here.

Define "help".

No worries, Hausey baby: I'm off, again. For how long? Up to me, eh? I shan't ask your permission.

"Home is where the hatred is..."
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:24 / 28.09.06
"Help" here means "try to keep you from eventually getting either spurned by a wide range of members or bannned from Barbelith, which is what will ultimately happen if you carry on reacting violently when you are called on behaviour as rude, disrespectful and ill-mannered as you have shown in this thread".

Right. As a moderator, I am making a moderator decision here. Further posts not relevant to the Head Shop in this thread are going to be moved for deletion by me, and I would recommend by other moderators. Of course, another moderator can veto that proposal, and is free to do so, but I fear that yet another thread is in danger of bindweeding, and I trust PW's claim that he is leaving as far as I could comfortably piss Liddell and Scott's Greek lexicon, so I feel this to be justified.
 
 
HCE
18:21 / 28.09.06
I'm putting you on ignore, paranoidwriter, so that we can get back to talking about the Head Shop. I hope you find your time away from the board revitalizing.

Flowers, I will go take a look at your thread and see if I can add anything. Even a week of renewal is better than none.
 
 
Quantum
18:51 / 28.09.06
Yeah, a short spurt of action is better than none, although I lean toward the low churn model mentioned a couple of pages back. I think a broader range of thread topics might attract more posting as well, I'll try and think of some to start as I've been lurking the headshop for a while insteads of weighing in.
 
 
redtara
19:45 / 28.09.06
I am more than a little confused by what consititutes philosophy under the headshops defenition. It seems to fall exclusively within the western philosophical tradition and personally I think that is very narrow.

I contributed to a HS thread on fair trade and the ethics of consumption. I thought that an examination of the neoconservative political/economic model would fit snuggly into the HS. Instead I was told that I was rotting the thread. Confused much?

My understanding of the the HS/Switchboard devide was that the HS dealt with theory while the Switchboard dealt with event lead discussion. A debate about Marx would work in the HS, a debate about the communist party would belong in the Switchboard.

Please help me understand what I am aloud to discuss where.
 
 
HCE
20:54 / 28.09.06
I just went back and read the Fair Trade thread. You weren't told you were rotting the thread because it is not allowed (who you think is doing the allowing and how that is effected is unclear to me). Topher was asked to discuss the relative morality of capitalism in a thread about capitalism. Capitalism is not wholly irrelevant to a discussion about the ethics of shopping and the application of terms like fair, moral, and ethical to shopping, but it's very easy to wander from idea to idea and wind up losing the original focus. A rather polite request was made and I'm not clear why it got the response it did.

Your post here suggests that you think you were told that you can't talk about capitalism in the Head Shop, and I don't see how you got that impression.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:13 / 28.09.06
Well, the Switchboard is often used for current events generally, so the Communist party as purveyor of ideology rather than political agent acting in the world might fit into the Head Shop neatly, on the grounds that it would encompass political philosophy. Personal choice, really, depending on where you want the discussion to go...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:14 / 28.09.06
Fred: Ah. Right. That's another issue, yes. That has nothing to do with talking about Communism or Capitalism in the Head Shop, on rereading. It has to do with the thread being killed. That, I think, we are right to try to discourage.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
01:02 / 04.11.06
Bumping this, as the Head Shop has quietened down yet again, to to give a plug for Jackie's suggestion upthread about HS reading groups. I'd be interested. Anyone else?
 
 
nighthawk
10:00 / 04.11.06
I think reading groups are a great idea if we can stir up interest. The problem is finding a text that enough people are enthusiastic about and maintaining interest. I was digging through some old headshop threads recently, and I came across this discussion of reading groups, and the connected attempt to read Volume one of Capital. It doesn't seem to have progressed very far, which is a shame - but then I think that chosing Capital was perhaps a bit ambitious and daunting.

Another forum I read has had some success by chosing a text, then devoting a thread to each chapter. This kept discussion focused, made contributing fairly easy, and also left space for continuity and development over a longer stretch of time. People read at different speeds and have to arrange their reading around various other commitments - this method meant that even if some people had ripped through the text and were enthusiastically discussing Chapter 5, people could still discuss earlier material without causing confusion or feeling that they were holding others back.

Anyway, put me down as an enthusiastic 'yes'.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
10:50 / 04.11.06
Excellent. Obviously the question of what to read is pretty big: I wa going to suggest that committing to a single chapter or article would make more sense, and feel less of a burden, than something big and time-consuming. Especially Capital. But it depends how much time everyone else has, and what people want to read, I guess.
 
 
Saturn's nod
19:36 / 03.01.07
The problem is finding a text that enough people are enthusiastic about and maintaining interest.

Well, the Latour book looked promising from the number of expressions of interest in the Reading Group thread, but the thread on Ch1 is dead in the water. Is there anyone who wants to pitch in but been held up for some reason? Or like to begin post mortem dissection? I'm not sure what needs doing to maintain interest. Does this work?
 
 
semioticrobotic
02:33 / 04.01.07
I'm guilty of expressing unbridled enthusiasm and then tapering off. Sorry. I am excited about the prospect of the reading group and I hope it does continue. A confluence of factors just cut my reading time in half, but that should change very shortly and I do hope to contribute before the thread gets totally buried. I'm plucking my way through Ch. 1 at present.

But I suppose you're looking for more than just a confessional.

I do like the direction the thread has gone as a result of the guiding questions. I believe that mechanism functions well (as a guide and not necessarily as a hard-and-fast structure). We've broken the text down into manageable bites and provided a potential structure for dialogue. We've also had folks volunteer photocopies and scans of the text. I feel like many barriers to participation have been removed, but my feelings may differ from others.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
11:27 / 10.02.07
Bump.

I've been taking a break for the last couple of months, and while I've been away I though quite a lot about what has happened since the mass of discussions following the stats thread, and particularly how the Head Shop has been working since then. After an initial burst of effort by various posters to construct interesting threads and start the reading 'group', it seems that the Head Shop became even slower over Christmas and New Year. Things have been hotting up a little because of a general shift towards questions on a) disability and b) the politics of reproduction, which I'm enjoying reading (even if I don't currently have time to contribute.) But things are pretty slow. How are other people feeling? Have any of the access problems been resolved? Does it feel more open now?

Back in September, Tom posted the following in the stats thread:

From my perspective it seems that at the moment the Head Shop is not anywhere near as intellectually challenging or diverse as it was a few years ago. Actual philosophical / cultural studies questions have been rather overwhelmed by identity politics, BDSM and gender politics. If people are finding it oppressively difficult to contribute to this space and wish it to become more populist and less ivory towerish, I'd argue strongly that this should be resisted.

I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it, but I noticed that almost immediately after that comment was made, most of the trans threads died. Perhaps the board had just reached its capacity on questions around gender identity. I didn't say anything at the time, but made an effort to start some threads that weren't about gender or 'identity' issues -- the travel thread, for example -- and stopped posting to the trans and gender identity threads. (There were five -- four in the HS, that were all growing simultaneously, and the Trans 101 thread in the Convo.) Later I started to feel weird about that. I found myself feeling slightly resentful that the Head Shop had been told it needed to stop being so 'minority' and get into some more 'serious' philosophy and politics. And when it appeared to take that advice, whether people were doing it consciously or not, the Head Shop became a space where, frankly, I have felt less comfortable and less willing to contribute.

I would dearly love someone to give me a reality check on this. I'm not sure whether my perceptions about this situation are reliable. Perhaps I'm projecting, and actually what I'm writing about here is a) how I personally responded to Tom's assessment, as if it was a request to shut up about my own personal political interests and be more populist/generalist; and b) how that was inevitably going to make me feel a bit crappy. In which case, I should go off and workshop that shit myself. But if it's a feeling that anyone else has, let's talk about that.

And I'm not sure if Tom is reading this, but if you are, Tom, I'd be interested in your response.

Thoughts?
 
 
Saturn's nod
07:34 / 12.02.07
Yeah, I hear that Disco. My reaction was a bit the same. I got the message from that paragraph of Tom's that my input into stuff on gender/feminism and anti-racist work were not 'proper Headshop' material in your opinion Tom, and felt discouraged by it since that was at the time where a lot of my energy was. I knew I felt less inclined to put the effort in because those things were being named as not valued, but I didn't wake up enough to name or challenge it at the time.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
23:33 / 12.02.07
I somehow missed this at the time - possibly because I tend to see Tom these days as one of those people who pops back in to Barbelith every six months and contributes thoughts on a subject without following or really being interested in following what else has been said on Barbelith recently or in the past on said topic. There's arguably a place for those kind of contributors to the board, since after all different people have different time commitments and levels of internet access. But it means I certainly don't see Tom as any kind of authoritative figure in terms of the direction a particular forum should take, so the idea that one would be discouraged by his personal preferences for what he'd like to see in the Head Shop didn't really occur to me. Quite aside from the fact that I think the idea that identity politics, BDSM and gender politics are less populist and more "ivory towerish" than "actual" philosophical / cultural studies questions (what's an "actual" cultural studies question when it's at home?) is frankly bafflingly topsy-turvy. Look at the recent Celebrity Big Brother controversy in the UK and tell me that identity politics is less populist than pure philosophy!
 
 
Disco is My Class War
09:46 / 14.02.07
Thanks for that apt and Fly. Seems like everything's dead now except the jokes thread, and that's killed off what wasn't dead. Never mind.
 
 
Blake Head
17:29 / 06.06.07
So… hopefully this will be a cheerier environment to host a query about the Head Shop than the “‘lith is dying” thread. I was pondering starting a thread about books and essays that had changed the way we thought about pre-existing theories or texts – interpretations that radically reconfigured our individual, established understanding of something we’re invested in. So for example, ‘how Alastair Fowler overturned my understanding of Paradise Lost’ or “how reading Paul De Man showed me deconstruction doesn’t necessarily mean writing “elliptically”’. Mainly because I’m fascinated not just by the works that people are attracted to, but by the secondary theories which sometimes explain that attraction better than we’re able to ourselves, or productively wrongfoot our ongoing understanding of something.

I’m not sure though. Obvious problem with discussing these works outwith their broader contexts but on the other hand… possibly… a chance to look at some theorists that might not otherwise get a lot of coverage on the board. Also, not sure how much this would escape being a theory’s greatest hits thread or generate significant discussion between contributors. What do people think? Interested in contributing? Any pointers on how to frame the subject to get the most out of it? Is it just a shortcut to starting threads on all the relevant theorists? Does it smell of toilet? Discuss.
 
 
Blake Head
18:17 / 13.06.07
Ok, so on reflection not such a great idea and obviously there's no interest in discussing it. Though philosophically speaking does something still smell of toilet if no-one’s paying any attention? Well…
 
  

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