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...one of the board's characteristics that attracted me to join in the first place was the apparent willingness of people to nurture and sustain relatively thoughtful, empathic and intelligent debates on what exactly constitutes "bad" (racist, sexist, hateist etc) language and behaviour ... I for one am willing to tolerate and/or hit ignore a certain amount of idiocy and meanness in return for what I stand to learn from interactions with posters exhibiting said manners.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Questions:
(a) is Haus still working on a new/improved "welcome!" letter, one that perhaps uses some of this "hyper-linking" I've heard so much about to point out key threads on what is/isn't acceptable, past train wrecks, etc.? My God, being able to say "did you read that letter?" might provide a stellar shortcut for a lot of this stuff.
(b) is it necessary to establish some sort of concrete idea of Barbelith's role as educators/guides/fuzzy pals vs. scathingly sarcastic people who brook no nonsense?
Some wooly thinking:
There's an interesting thing happening right now where both Sole Eater and Scarlett have joined the board within scant hours of each other. Sole Eater has jumped in some threads with kill-happy warrior talk, sweeping generalizations about the Tofu People and nasty uninformed language; Scarlett has left her own introduction thread in a huff over a perceived (and, arguably, extremely minimal) slight, and (IMO) generalized the board through this thread and two Head Shop threads as being America-bashing ageist sexist groupthink stupidheads.
SE has received Flyboy's vow to "dog Sole Eater's movements around the board, informing/reminding people who might not wish to interact with a kill-crazy misogynist asshole that that is what he is."
Scarlett has received several exceedingly nice invitations to discuss her umbrage, and has instead moved from thread to thread to cast more disparaging generalizations about the whole board. There's a developing Barbannoy (and it, too, is so nice it is now annoying Flyboy), but no fists-raised-to-the-heavens pledges to hunt down and shame Scarlett in every thread she posts in. I still hope she takes the time to return to those threads and engage in them, because I think we could learn some interesting things about where she got these ideas.
In SE's defense, he at least seems to stick around and attempt to make his case. I don't agree with the case he's making, but there's a conversation happening. Frankly, I have more time for that than I do for the make-broad-accusations-and-run-away approach.
I don't think it's possible for Barbelith to be "fair," but I don't quite see why the person who is willing to actually discuss their viewpoint (albeit while channeling Ted Nugent) is being slagged mercilessly while the person who so far has contributed only wildly off-topic anecdotes and generalized abuse for the community is getting the kid gloves.
I'd rather everyone get the kid gloves, personally; once people have had their beliefs interrogated a bit and been forced to realize that Barbelith values self-examination above most things, don't they generally either figure it out or fuck off by themselves? See Dragon and Rural Savage, who IIRC got treated very decently by Ganesh and then wandered off when he realized this "thinking" business wasn't really his bag. SE doesn't seem to be a troll or a Trixxter God, and will probably either figure things out after some conversation, or go away.
I realize Flyboy only has a finite amount of board-spanning dogging time at his disposal, and it's not always possible to allocate board-spanning dogging time absolutely equally, but I don't know if driving Sole Eater away is a productive use of time or wrath. I also realize that there's no obligation to be nice, or to educate, or to inform.
I'd rather, though, think of Barbelith as a place where people could benefit from broader viewpoints and some education will be given an opportunity to benefit from the board, as opposed to a place where new arrivals with bad ideas are scorned, mocked, and derided until they leave Barbelith feeling smaller and worse about themselves.
I kind of like the "firefighters," idea, but I think it would be more pragmatic just to try to raise awareness of how easy it is to start new threads and/or encourage others to start new threads? If ES had wanted to be a "firefighter" without going through the rigamarole of standing up and saying "I AM A FIREFIGHTER," couldn't he just start a new thread called "Gun Control," put "spinning off from the Introduction thread: a conversation about gun control" in the summary and either use the new thread to "fire-fight" (starting it by quoting SE) or let the gun control debate move to in the new thread and focus on the conversation with SE in the old thread? Maybe saying something like "I've created a new thread to continue this conversation in general because I'd really like to focus on ____ here" ? |
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