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BANNING THREAD: Alex's Grandma

  
 
Jack Fear
16:37 / 28.01.08
So. For a while now, the abusive gin-sozzled ranting of Alex's Grandma (in all hir various incarnations) have been rather like the weather: Everybody complains, but nobody ever does anything about it.

Until now. It is time, I think, to finally put the issue on the table, and to let the people have their say. I, as a rank-and-file member of the community, have no extraordinary powers here. The banhammer is not mine to swing. But for too long there has been the grumbling that, Well, no one is actually calling for a ban...

Now someone is. Time to put up or shut up.

THE CHARGES: Alex's Grandma (hereinafter AG) has been gratuitously offensive at every turn, without contributing anything of actual substance to the ongoing conversation that is Barbelith.

THE REBUTTAL: AG's relentless piss-taking is terribly, terribly amusing, and besides, this whole notion of "substance" is highly overrated anyway. Besides, AG knows a lot about comics.

THE QUESTION AT HAND: Since no one is denying that AG is often kind of a shithead, the crux is this: Is AG's continued presence to the board of such value that we should forgive hir consistent forays into attention-seeking, shit-flinging asshattery?

THE COMPETING CONCEPTIONS: Barbelith as a resource for information and analysis vs. Barbelith as a vehicle for frivolity and running jokes. Barbelith as a library and athenaeum vs. Barbelith as a jolly clubhouse for good-humored blokes and blokettes.

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION BEGS TO DIFFER: Why bother, really, since Barbelith is already going down the shitter at such an alarming rate? If Barbelith is dying (tm) anyway, what's a few piss-stains more or less on the corpse?

Ladies, gentlemen, and otherwise of the community: Your opinions, please, for banning and against. Catalogs of AG's offenses and contributions are welcome; links will definitely help to make your case.

Begin.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:44 / 28.01.08
Lazy starting post.

Let's begin by finding some actual examples of the behaviour being complained of, rather than imagining the cases for the prosecution and defence, shall we. Why do you think he should be banned, if you do? What unacceptable behaviours do you, Jack, think he has exhibited? Provide supporting links.
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:47 / 28.01.08
Agreed. Unless this is a joke, which it really shouldn't be, you are going to have to do some work here JF.
 
 
Jack Fear
17:03 / 28.01.08
Oh, I freely admit that I don't have a dog in this fight. (Honestly, I just find AG kind of dull, in the same way as Boboss and Pigs! and the rest of that crew when they're in full-on self-congratulatory boy's club mode. I can take or leave it, as I can, increasingly, take or leave Barbelith as a whole.)

But it's certainly not a joke. People have been pissed off, and have said so—but there's been an apparent lack of will among the mods to confront this head-on. Instead we've had more than a handful of posts in recent weeks saying, "If someone would care to start a banning thread..." or "Well, no one is actually calling for a ban, so..." and variations thereon.

So. Not a joke. A public service, like, from which I reap no benefit and for which I expect no reward.

Now, for the sake of argument, you've got your banning thread. What are you gonna do with it?
 
 
HCE
17:03 / 28.01.08
There's no case for banning. The problem is not the asshole posts, which are notable for being useless and annoying rather than antisemitic or homophobic. There's often quite obvious trolling, but it's not sustained enough to warrant being banned.

The problem I see is that people who usually have rather better taste find them so wonderfully amusing. It's baffling and a little disheartening, but what are you going to do. I feel sorry for the moderators, who don't have the ignore button as an option.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:12 / 28.01.08
I think probably regret that this thread is basically broken from the start, since the thread starter did not actually want a ban or make a case for one, and has instead indulged in decorative but useless speculations about what people who do or don't might think.

If one were to try to put together a coherent argument for banning, one might start with the idea that AG, when he is looking for an opportunity to call himself lower than a worm, etc., often seeks out as a target people who he thinks might be inclined to get upset and insult him. You might be able to tease a case for harassment out of that. A harder but possibly more rewarding approach might be the Paranoidwriter gambit - that if he is to be shut out of Barbelith, it would be primarily to protect him from himself. I don't know if that would play, though.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
17:12 / 28.01.08
Thing is, Jack, it's usually incumbent on people who WANT a ban to start a banning thread, and tell everyone else why. If those people can't be arsed, and instead keep saying "nobody's started one", then, well, that's their prerogative.

It's also, as Haus says, usually incumbent on people who CAN be arsed to start one to start it properly.
 
 
Seth
17:31 / 28.01.08
Jack Fear: Alex is crap! The Brighton lot are crap! Barbelith is crap!

I want to be a target for The Fear. Me too! Me too!

Shame I don't have any tattoos or body piercings. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: just plain old undecorated Seth and his hairy manscape having that naked sex all up in your genitals.

As God manself intended.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
18:00 / 28.01.08
This is a fucking abortion, really. No links, no case, no nothing.

Irked as I've got with AG I've never seriously considered invoking the B-word. I don't believe that banning is justifiable, necessary or desirable. I'm still working from the assumption that since I once found Granny moderately entertaining myself (wore off about, oooh, a year or so ago, but then I'm not a patient chap), since Granny's grate frends still see him as defenceable on the grounds of being a terribly funny chap sometimes, and since we do not normally accept the It Was A JOKE!!1! defence, he must be basically a reasonable sort and amenable to persuasion. So, rather than asking for a ban, I'd like to make 1) a statement and 2) a request:

1) Other people do not enjoy being made to feel wound up and shouty as much as you appear to enjoy winding up and being shouted at.

2) If topics relating to feminism and misogyny put your knickers in as much of a twist as they appear to, maybe you should refrain from reading and responding to those topics since all you ever contribute are ill-considered pisstaking and windups. Ill-considered pisstaking and windups in relation to the above topics are easily available elsewhere, ta.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
18:22 / 28.01.08
since Granny's grate frends still see him as defenceable on the grounds of being a terribly funny chap sometimes

Your post seems eminently reasonable, as one of the aggrieved parties. But I think I'm probably included in this "grate friends" category, and I'd like to clarify that I don't think the funny posts are a justification of the nasty ones. I don't think the nasty ones are made with nasty INTENT, and I wish to fuck that maybe some apologies would be forthcoming for those, otherwise I'll look stupider than usual, but that's not the same thing at all. Just the funny ones without the nasty ones would be good.

tl;dr- Granny, quit griefing people and go back to being funny.

That felt bizarrely like talking to Woody Allen.
 
 
*
19:03 / 28.01.08
The reason no one ever does anything about it, Jack, from my perspective, is that one is left with the following options:

1) Call for a ban and a) start a precedent that people who make really quite bad jokes ever too persistently will eventually be banned for them and/or b) feel quite shitty because so many people one respects on the board seem to find the bad jokes of value and now seem inclined to think one is a humorless stickarse trying to steal all the fun by setting the precedent (a).

2) Attempt to engage constructively with Granny (which, in case I need to make this absolutely clear, only feeds hir desire to feel persecuted and shouted at and makes further antics irritatingly and boringly more frequent)

3) Start a thread entitled something like "What to do about Alex's Grandma's destructive and antisocial behavior" (translation: "GRANNY! You're getting even more attention! Keep it up and you might even get banned and wouldn't THAT be a laugh riot!")

4) Leave the board (and why, really, when it's getting so near the end and Bryant Park is so close you can just taste it? {ed note: Zippy seems to have confused Barbelith with Project Runway again.})

5) Enclose hir in a large and sturdy envelope and mail hir to a remote shack someplace where internet access happens only once every three years when the person with the solar-powered computer in a pushcart gets around to your nearest village. And cut hir hands off so ze can't use it when it gets there. (Perhaps the most humane solution, but the postage is just prohibitive.)

6) Put hir on ignore (the brokenness in my ignore function seems to have gone away, with the result that it really does expire every week, so every week I ignore the same two users--AG isn't worth the weekly half-calorie it takes to click the mouse)

None of these solutions is particularly inspiring. Did you have another one? Bearing in mind that it seems that banning really doesn't do anything after all but is the equivalent of pointing a device that makes a "bombs away" noise at your boss' closed office door when you're feeling angry, only much, much, much more tiresome?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:06 / 28.01.08
We can't ban anybody anyway. So, y'know, what's the fucking point?
 
 
Tsuga
22:21 / 28.01.08
There you go.

But speaking for myself, even if we could, I see no real need. I've been annoyed before but that's it. If someone really wants a ban to happen (which can't happen) then they can start a thread to go through the motions.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
09:43 / 29.01.08
Wow, I just looked for a few minutes and found it more difficult than I would have expected to find a post of Alex's Granny that I would characterise as 'offensive' as opposed to dull and pointless, and if we start kicking people for that then I'm going to be long gone before they come for the Communists. I wonder if the issue is the suspicion of inauthenticity that has developed around Granny? It's not like he makes that much of an effort to post in character but we never really had much success with the whole thing of people acting out their fiction suits (I remember the confusion caused when Flux started pretending to be 'Flux' and there was that whole thing about his fiction suit crashing which was largely met with bemusement) but that, combined with his habit of blaming anything that people don't like in what he said on his being drunk and then making apologies that, in the same medium, don't sound sincere ("I am lower than a pig"), perhaps leads us to where we are now. The perceived annoyance factor is higher than the actual annoyance factor.
 
 
The Natural Way
17:19 / 29.01.08
When is it, exactly, that Boboss adopts a self-congratulatory mode? Jack, the days of Brighton Lither's high-fiving are long, long gone. 2003 or before? Most of us barely post now.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
10:07 / 30.01.08
Yes, I do think that's unfair. Boboss is one of my "oh yay it's so-and-so, good ole so-and-so" posters rather than an "oh grud it's that so-and-so again" poster.
 
 
Harrison Ford, in a battle suit, wheels for feet, knives and guns
12:02 / 30.01.08
and around we go.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:32 / 30.01.08
Case in point...
 
 
Alex's Grandma
15:10 / 30.01.08
I wasn't going to say anything in this thread, because, while on some level it's everything I've ever aspired to on Barbelith, to be the true outsider, etc, it's a bit like winning an Oscar for being a dick. Not in a good way.

But here, perhaps, is an object lesson in the way negative energy can bite one in the ass.

While I was in the middle of writing Jack Fear a telling PM with regard to his recent antics, at around seven this morning, some guy threw what seems to have been a car battery through the kitchen window, and then followed it in, in attempt to rob the place, while I was sitting there

It sounds ridiculous, I know; there you are in front of your computer, setting the world to rights in an up and coming area, and suddenly there's this ... presence in the room, plus broken glass, etc, who apparently wants to beat the crap out of not just you, but your sleeping friends, too. And nick all their stuff.

Even more absurdly, I actually had a fight with the guy. Fighting is not something I'm good at, but we had a duel involving the kitchen chairs anyway. It sounds a bit 'Buster Keaton', and it was. Needless to add, I lost; there was a point when, while I was on the (stylish, parquet) floor I really thought that this could be it.

It was like something out of 'Sin City' is the best way of putting it; this monster, (this buster) exploding through the panes. You're sitting there thinking; 'is this actually happening, surely not?' and then there's blood your jeans.

All of which is by way of saying (and, honestly, I'm not making any of this up - I've spent the whole day talking to the police, the insurance co, the glaziers and so on) that I've now realised that peace is basically better than war.

I suppose I always knew it really, though.

(Sorry if this reads like something 'My Little Pony' might have come up with on a meth binge, after reading 'Mein Kampf'.)

You can't let this sort of stuff get you down, but I think for the immediate future I'll be taking a step back from enjoying the violence of modern society, quite so much.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:49 / 30.01.08
Wow. Off-topic, I hope you're OK. That sounds frightening. Look after yourself.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
16:23 / 30.01.08
Well, seeing as the point of this thread seems to be the many ways in which ... my grandson is a let-down as a member of Barbelith, I thought I might try to show you guys some of the real him. Just as a mortal, and so on.

I now see that this was a mistake.

Ms W, how can anything that pertains to the lads 'fiction suit' be off-topic in a thread that seems hell-bent on its destruction?

Surely the thing would fight to survive, like all life?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
16:29 / 30.01.08
I said my bit, I meant it; you carry on.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
16:34 / 30.01.08
I realise that you were hardly in a position to question his reasoning but, I've visited your place, unless you moved very recently. Your kitchen (unless you've rearranged the house and plumbing), is on the first floor while there are downstairs and basement windows. Was he attempting an entrance from the roof, because he'd been doing some free running or whatever it's called?
 
 
Olulabelle
16:39 / 30.01.08
Wow, I just looked for a few minutes and found it more difficult than I would have expected to find a post of Alex's Granny that I would characterise as 'offensive' as opposed to dull and pointless, and if we start kicking people for that then I'm going to be long gone before they come for the Communists. I wonder if the issue is the suspicion of inauthenticity that has developed around Granny?

This is important. Frequently the offensive posts are posted in the middle of the night, seen by an unlucky few and then Granny asks for a deletion. I do realise that asking for a deletion shows, on one level, an awareness of the probable offense, but equally it could be construed in a different way, in that it gets read by the relevant people but no-one can ever pull Granny up about it.

Then there's the totally random personal attack PM's. I've had a few of these and I am sure others have. I had one once which criticised me for upsetting someone (amongst others) whom I have a fragile board relationship with anyway. So I spent a whole day doing damage limitation, apologising to people for the offence I had apparently caused only to find that I hadn't caused any at all, that the post in question had been taken in the way it was intended and that the upset was all made-up by Granny just to abuse me with. That was really traumatic for me and felt like being picked on for absolutely no reason.

So there are two examples of why it might be a bit had to find offensive posts. Because Granny's pretty good at covering over the tracks. Hit and run nastiness.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
17:43 / 30.01.08
Then there's the totally random personal attack PM's. I've had a few of these and I am sure others have.

Well, perhaps if they could all stand up and be counted? This litany of good people I must have upset.

If you insist on getting into this (and I'd rather not) I've found the PM's you've sent me, on a number of occasions, frankly terrifying. But I don't go on about them, do I?

Can't we live in the world together?
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
18:34 / 30.01.08
I've generally found my PM exchanges with AG perfectly reasonable, but I can totally imagine some windup material ending up in the outbox one night and hitting a raw nerve at the other end. I can confirm the posting at 2am and then deleting before people get into the office and log on thing, although I've only seen the odd one or two. (Also, AG, I don't believe for a minute that you've found anything Lula might have written to you "terrifying." Come on.)
 
 
miss wonderstarr
19:26 / 30.01.08
Also, if you weren't being honest about the experience ~

some guy threw what seems to have been a car battery through the kitchen window,

~ on reflection, how could you not know, in the aftermath, whether it was a car battery or not? It must have been sitting there on the kitchen floor for a while, while the police came round ~

then that's a shame and I don't think you should lie about such things.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:04 / 30.01.08
This is exactly why we can't have nice things.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:16 / 30.01.08
Am I the only person who believes AG did actually get burgled?
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
23:22 / 30.01.08
Maybe some nice moderator should move this thread for locking or deletion, since it is total bullshit.
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
23:23 / 30.01.08
No, you're not, Stoatie.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
05:05 / 31.01.08
While there's some interest to be had in seeing just how far this diseased mutant will lurch, locking it is probably a good idea. If people want to take things further, since it doesn't seem to involve banning, perhaps "Conflict and Complaint"?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
05:12 / 31.01.08
And no, Stoatie, you're not alone.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:04 / 31.01.08
Meanwhile, a note on harassment, which I've been doing a fair amount of work on lately.

An important thing to note about harassment is that it is not the intent that matters but the effect. So, if you are feeling harassed, it doesn't actually matter whether the intent is to harass. One proviso on that is the nebulous qualification of "a resonable person" - a reasonable person would have to understand why the behaviour was interpretable as harassing. That means that in most contexts, for example, offering a hand for a handshake could not be harassment, whether or not the recipient of the offer felt harassed - unless, say, that person belonged to a religious or cultural group that cannot touch other people or similar. Even then, the offer could not be seen as harassing unless the other party had been made aware of the situation, as no reasonable person (in US or UK business culture) would see the offer of a handshake to somebody not identified as not willing to shake hands as harassing in any way.

So. How does this affect us here? If the PMs, from Olulabelle to AG or vice versa, are to be seen as harassing, then first they have to be interpreted as having had a harassing effect. That's fair. The next step ought to be, if we follow best practice, that the person who feels harassed makes it clear to the other party that their behaviour is making them feel harassed, and that they would like it to stop. The other party can deny that any reasonable person would interpret this as harassing, and that would have to go to wider arbitration. They can accept the impact of their behaviour, regardless of its intent, and cease. Or they can carry on, in which case the injured party can make the behaviour public, making it clear that the person was privately asked to desist and did not.

How I deal with what I feel to be harassing behaviour by PM is to tell the other party that I feel that harassing behaviour is taking place. I ask therefore that PM correspondence ceases, and stipulate that if the other party continues PM correspondence they will by doing so agree that the content of the entire PM exchange can be placed on the open board as part of a discussion of whether it is reasonable to feel harassed. That usually works quite well, since one of the problems of the PM system is that the expectation of privacy allows for bad behaviour. Obviously, if the other person is simply mental, it doesn't work, but at least it clears one's conscience on publishing their private messages.
 
 
Papess
10:23 / 31.01.08
Well I am glad that things have changed. I can remember being harrassed by PM and very flatly being told, "Well, just don't open them." Absolutely nothing had been done about it.
 
  
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