I admit I'm still mystified as to how that happened, iconoclast. From my perspective, a poster launched into a (to me) disturbing description of some violence he wishes would happen to someone he doesn't know, who, it happens, is a woman. Some posters have proposed, based presumably on a history of interaction with this poster, that he wouldn't have done this if his target were a man. These posters find themselves disturbed by the implications. One chose to challenge him in-thread, and another started this thread. The initial post was poorly formed, as Haus noted. Maybe that's where your idea that the entire thread was a joke came from, which is a little bit more understandable to me.
The problem is not, as you describe it, admitting that we "think about mean things happening to people on TV." I hope your framing of the issue this way does not seem as dismissive to Anna de Logardier and ROFLADY as it does to me.
Thinking the thread could benefit from some clarity, I posted the relevant quotes behind a cut-tag and said what bothered me about Mathlete's post, and also indicated that I wasn't calling for a ban. I've spent the rest of this thread exploring the idea that using board space for graphically wishing violence on people can be a bad thing, and that in some cases it can be a bad enough thing that it should be stopped—namely in the cases that someone is likely to feel threatened or intimidated either personally or as part of a (marginalized) group. Although I admit that plenty of this territory is problematic, as Haus, Jack, Flyboy, and others have pointed out, I don't think the idea is unreasonable to the point of being satirical.
We have a difference of opinion concerning whether it's of any use to fantasize out loud about violence happening to certain heads of state who are themselves responsible for atrocities such as none of us could come up with in our wettest dreams. My primary concern is keeping people on the board from feeling threatened, and since I don't think GWB or TB or Rummy or similar are Barbelith members, I'm happy to respect the difference of opinion. As I realized midway through my third post, what I'm suggesting is not really much more than a clarification of current board standards, my main point being that graphic descriptions of wished-for violence, particularly against groups of people, can have the effect of a personal threat, and generally when posters threaten others they are banned.
I don't know if this helps to clear things up any or just muddies the waters further. |
