I'm hereby declaring open season on anything unfamiliar that comes through the door. Newbies: behave or die.

Teresa: I recommend Purdeys.

I'm hereby declaring open season on anything unfamiliar that comes through the door.

I am somehow reminded of a scene from Sethra Lavode:

"I wonder how many of them there are."

"Let us count them as we go."

"Very well."

---

Incidentally, I've never been a MeFi reader, and a quick scan through the linked thread suggests that I never will be. I'm not sure what kind of Filter the MetaFilter is, but it needs some maintainance, because it seems to be clogged.

Teresa, it's tempting at this point to arrange for a singing telegram or something just to see what this open season involves. Then I reflect on videos of firepower in action and reconsider.'

"Troll season!"

"Crank season!"

Anil Dash phrased clearly just about what I was thinking. I assume that there's some very good reason for what's been happening to the VB-related material, and I'm guessing that there's fire-fighting going on. And from little what I know of the people involved, I'd be surprised if, once they cease to be up to their collective asses in alligators, they didn't provide at least a bit of an explanation about why it was necessary to do some swamp drainage.

The interesting phenomenon here, to me, is how not how quickly people are willing to jump to conclusions with little to no information, but instead how passionately they will defend those conclusions.

I guess if I were running BoingBoing I'd be pleased that I'd succeeded in creating such intense emotional engagement. People don't get this worked up over stuff they don't care much about.

Just the same, I think I'll hide backup copies of my favorite rants in the Curmudgeons League apocalypse-proof data bunker, if I can just find the durned key....

This is why some of us love scooting over to Metafilter - what a great community. You can even find links to posts here - what a convenience.

An ounce of data is better than nothing. Thanks, Teresa. I'm sure looking forward to the full payload, of course.

Forgive my ignorance, but where does Anil Dash fit into the MF link? Does he have a pen name I don't know but everyone else does? Firefox findeth not his name on that page...

I find myself mystified by the whole BB/VB/TNH kerfluffle. I don't know what is going on or why, but it seems many people are in a high state of outrage/excitement over it.

I will admit to rarely if ever reading the comments on BB.

Anil's handle on mefi is "anildash".

Incidentally, I've never been a MeFi reader, and a quick scan through the linked thread suggests that I never will be. I'm not sure what kind of Filter the MetaFilter is, but it needs some maintainance, because it seems to be clogged.

MetaFilter isn't for everyone, but I would recommend not dismissing it so cavalierly. The operating principle there is freedom of speech; the moderators are extremely chary of deletions and depend on speech (theirs and others') to counteract speech they dislike, which I find exemplary behavior. Yes, it can get noisy, especially in a controversial thread like that, but more interesting things tend to emerge than in a comfortable round-table discussion where everybody knows everybody else and is on the same page.

In that particular thread, John Scalzi and I got hot under the collar, snarled, came to our senses, and shook hands. That couldn't have happened had our initial snarls been deleted for lowering the tone, and that sort of thing is very common at MeFi.

I fully understand that the vigorous, often jokey, sometimes confrontational discussion style at MeFi can make people uncomfortable, but on the whole it provides the most wide-ranging and interesting debate of any internet site I'm familiar with. You might want to give it another chance -- though I'd recommend trying another thread!

Anil Dash

Teresa's link should hop right to his post. If not, search for "anildash".

#11 Josh: Wow. I saw the post here, looked at the MF link page, found no posts by Anil Dash, etc. Now, prompted by you I went back and the thread is ten times longer than it was when I went there the first time, including posts by Dash, Scalzi, etc. Weirdness.

Ah. I believe I now have context for Patrick's remarks of the other day. Sympathies all around, to thems as need it. And yes, Anil Dash has got some mighty brane on.

A statement has gone up on Boing Boing.

Had the BB people had just said that in the first place (even by private email) when asked instead of deleting all questions on the spot, this whole thing probably would never have blown up in the first place.

Yeah, probably just a burp, DaveL. It's a big pile of thread.

And I'd second much of what language hat just said. I'm one of the folks who runs the site -- "cortex", over there -- and while I will never imagine Mefi to be for everyone (any more than any other interesting community site would be), I think there's a worst-possible-light aspect to the kind of vaguely-antagonistic cross-site interactions that come up in a context like this.

It's more or less impossible to prevent a large community from having some sharp edges and some loudish mouths. Commentary is more or less laissez faire on mefi, and we only pull really out-of-line or willfully, continuously disruptive stuff getting pulled from threads on metafilter proper if we can help it. Between that and the degree of inscrutibility that comes with in-jokes and localized lingo, it's always odd having eyes coming into the site when there's a contentious topic about.

Insofar as that means that there are some obnoxious cheap shots in the thread, I'm annoyed at some mefites' behavior but accepting that that's how we can look. It's like having a very large, very weird family out to eat at a restaurant sometimes. But get past the drunken uncles and it turns out there are some fascinating folks involved, having some pretty solid discussions about everything under the sun.

Sorry about the stuttering of first places there. Note to self: must proof read more conscientiously.

Phil, to repeat what was said on Boing Boing, they were trying to avoid embarrassing people. You can't say that without causing the embarrassment you're trying to avoid. In the end, it wasn't possible to avoid it.

language hat @ 12--You're right that it isn't for everyone, though. It's a place that privileges the more aggressive commenter, and effectively silences the shy. That's also a form of speech-control, and just because it happens invisibly doesn't make it not so.

It's a place that privileges the more aggressive commenter, and effectively silences the shy. That's also a form of speech-control, and just because it happens invisibly doesn't make it not so.

Oh, come on. To allow free speech is neither to privilege the aggressive nor to silence the shy; it's simply to let people say what's on their minds. To call it "a form of speech-control" is Orwellian (in the sloppy but now accepted sense of that much-abused term). Shy people silence themselves; that's a pity, but it's not the fault of the agora.

Teresa: I appreciate that entirely, but once you'd got to the point where the BoingBoing moderators were deleting comments asking about the issue you'd already lost control. Doing stuff like that is just guaranteed to stir people up and make things worse, not better.

Personally I'm really surprised that a new media savvy organisation like BoingBoing couldn't (or wouldn't) see that.

I didn't say the control was being exercised by anyone but the shy people themselves (which is one of the reasons I carefully avoided the word "censorship"), but if it seemed I was implying that, I apologize. Still, I think it's illustrative of the lack of middle ground between the idea that fora are wholly public spaces that should have little or no control over what is said, and the idea that they are more private spaces where active moderation is desirable to create a safer space for communication.

language hat@22: I'm not sure I agree with you on that front. Much as I love the cut & thrust of metafilter, I can quite see how such a culture would be anathema to certain types of people, who will simply choose not to post at all, and metafilter is in some senses poorer as a result.

Other forums (like ML) choose a more aggressive approach to moderation partially in order to demonstrate that they value the contributions of people who don't necessarily want to engage in the kind of in your face debate that often occurs in metafiter threads. Neither option is necessarily "better" than the other.

Andrea A. Phillips #6:

I'd guess that when defending a snap judgement - especially a jumpy one - you are not defending just that particular conclusion, but your confidence in and capability to make such quick decisions.

LanguageHat, there really are people who can't speak up in an environment like that. Honest. I'm not one of them, but I know they exist. I also know they aren't rare.

Some kinds of speech exclude others. It's a matter of environment. I'm glad MetaFilter exists. I'm glad for the existence of other forums as well.

Phil (23), if we were not entirely in control of the situation, neither were the commenters who were trying to force an issue the Boingers were still debating.

Teresa, thanks for linking to that statement. It's about what I figured.

I'm still curious about why the content was removed, but... as I've said to friends who've touched on the edge of something very personal in their lives, "I'm curious about this, but I know that it's none of my business and I don't want to pry. If you'd like to talk about it, I'm willing to listen."

Other forums (like ML) choose a more aggressive approach to moderation partially in order to demonstrate that they value the contributions of people who don't necessarily want to engage in the kind of in your face debate that often occurs in metafiter threads.

Which is a totally reasonable approach.

Oddly enough, the dichotomy between unchecked-and-rough and more-closely-moderated modes of community administration exists within Mefi itself:

Ask Metafilter has a somewhat more restrictive, more actively moderated commenting culture than Metafilter proper -- the goal of that part of the site is to get folks answers to questions, not to host free-form discussions attached to interesting links, and so we're pretty attentive about removing derails or infighting in order to keep the utility of the site high.

Metafilter itself isn't utility-driven, and so the (mostly) free-for-all approach reigns there.

As you say, it's not one option being better than another in any absolute sense: there are just different trade-offs and compromises that come with any given choice.

One of the heartening things about mefi, for me, is that as often as you have someone swaggering and shouting, you may have someone else telling them to can it and let the shy guy talk. There's an aspect of community policing there that, when it shines, mitigates well the chase-out-the-bashful effect of a busy and boisterous conversation.

And Phil again (25): Making Light is fine with in-your-face debate. I believe there's an inherent respect shown by fully engaging with someone else's argument. What we don't like is careless habitual rudeness, or the use of rudeness to bolster what would otherwise be a weak argument.

Well, I for one just melted the hell down on BoingBoing. Jesus, I hate this maleficent energy that BoingBoing lightning-rods in from (apparently) the entire human race. It's a talent. One wonders why the boingers still boing. I would have packed it in years ago, faced daily with such evidence of the fundamental hopelessness of humanity.

Normally, only ruling Republicans can arouse my ire so effectively.

Ah well, too bad that statement didn't get made earlier. It is scary but not surprising just how fast general indignation and flamage can blow up.

Because it'll go far better if you completely clear the air now, rather than seeming that there's something to hide later, may I suggest an addition?

There were some general flames suggesting that Boing Boing had also deleted all posts and comments referencing Ursula Le Guin. That's manifestly false, as I found a number when I did a simple search on the site.

However, I did also find some subtle indications that one or more past posts about Le Guin might have been deleted some time back - probably in haste at the time of all the foofaraw about quoting her one-paragraph story. I humbly suggest that now would be the best time to check with the proprietors, and if that is what happened, to acknowledge it now (e.g. in a postscript to the VB post) and deflate any head of steam over that topic. Otherwise next time there's a "controversy" it'll be dragged out again with even more real or faux indignation behind it.

Last thought: next time something like this has to be done, if ever, replace the deleted posts with placeholders such as [original post removed by author] rather than vanishing it? I suspect this would somewhat reduce the fears about "rewriting history".

P.S. Teresa, email me if you need a hint on what I'm talking about re UKL, if the parties involved forgot.

Phil@25: Neither option is necessarily "better" than the other.

hmm. I disagree, and I think that in this case quality is actually measurable -- at least in theory.

It's my observation -- and not just mine -- that what you call "the cut & thrust" is especially off-putting to woman, not least because of the way guys will casually insult each other with gendered language. I think this is co-extensive with the real problems with misogyny in tech workplaces.

Now, IIRC if you have a group of people with men and women talking, when women make more than 30% of the comments people (M & F) say that the women are talking "all the time". In other words, unless you have the gut (though mistaken) feeling that the women in your group are talking "all the time", you're not hearing women's voices. And any space that's supposed to be for "free speech" but where only some people's speech is free ... isn't.

Clifton @33 -- that's an eminently reasonable suggestion.

Phil @ 23 -- I don't think you understand the nature of BoingBoing's burden. I'm not joking that they draw the negative vibes out of the very atmosphere itself. There is literally nothing they can do -- ever -- to avoid shitstorms.

Also, in general, (1) I can't even read contentious and voluble crap like mefi (tho I wish I were parent-supported so I'd have that time) and (2) it's fine if you keep the arrogance and general snot-nosedness within your own walls, but when you spill out into the world at large, there are many people who aren't liable to chuckle and say, "Kids will be kids." Civilization is a thin veneer over primate nature. There are reasons for the basic rules of politeness, and while it may appeal to the adolescent in all of us to run rampant over them (again: primate behavior), that is not the world we actually want to live in.

I guess I'm just saying, fine, you can keep your drunken uncles, but if you wheel them out in public, it's your problem if they end up in the drunk tank overnight.

@34-5, the Le Guin affair you're referring to is largely a matter of public record. Something was posted, then it was deleted, and very shortly thereafter Cory posted an exhaustive explanation.

I think it's pretty clearly different from the current kerfuffle, most obviously because the Boingers were responding to a legal threat.

Link.

Oh, sorry -- my last post turned out to be based on a hasty misreading. Apologies to Clif.

Teresa: I did not mean to imply that debate does not occur (or is not permitted to occur) here. Clearly it does. The tone differs markedly from metafilter of course, as a consequence of the moderation policy & the culture built up by those who choose to participate, which obviously interact and feed upon each other.

I was merely suggesting that the tone adopted by ML might be more conducive to certain types of people that that adopted by metafilter. I hope there's nothing controversial about that!

I think this entire situation is complicated by the fact that many people have a personal relationship with the principals involved. Or, at least, are close to people (like our hosts here) who do have such a relationship.

Anytime you have a personal connection to someone you are going to be willing to cut them more slack than you otherwise would. There isn't anything wrong with that; it's how the world manages to keep chugging along. But from an outsider's point of view, I still see that BB generally doesn't grant other entities that level of slack. There certainly aren't a lot of "this is weird and potentially troublesome but let's all settle down and wait to see what happened" posts there.

Anyway, I'm glad a statement went out and I think BB would clearly have been better off if they had listened to and followed Teresa's rules for PR management. At the least they probably should have anticipated that actions like they took coming from a site like Boing Boing would provoke widespread interest and had a statement ready for that eventuality. Lastly, I think BB should probably decide if they are a site that's partially a media outfit (boing boing TV, media watchdog activities, etc) or if they're just a personal blog for a couple people to throw out some things they think are cool, because they seem to want to be both depending on which costume advantages them in the current situation.

My sympathies to anyone involved in any embarrassment. Live your life partially online and out there for everyone to see and that sort of thing is inevitable but still, no doubt, uncomfortable.

As to moderation in general, I still believe that the completely uncensored Usenet circa 1991-1993 was the Amber that all other online communities are but pale shadows of. With the commercialization of the internet I recognize that being able to delete spam is probably necessary now, but beyond that, well, the solution to speech you don't like is, in my opinion, more speech. Yeah, there are downsides to that. Yeah, it can be obnoxious and uncomfortable. Sometimes life is like that.

Teresa @ 31... Making Light is fine with in-your-face debate

Hear, hear. And the supposedly aggressive moderation suits me just fine, but one's kilometrage may vary.

Ask Metafilter has a somewhat more restrictive, more actively moderated commenting culture than Metafilter proper...

Thank you, now I understand. Like duct tape, Metafilter has a light side, and a dark side!

(Okay, okay... With due respect to those of you who cherish the Howling Mob Experience, let's call them the "formal side" and the "wild side".)

I was wondering why this thread was totally unlike any other Metafilter link I'd ever followed...

I guess I'm just saying, fine, you can keep your drunken uncles, but if you wheel them out in public, it's your problem if they end up in the drunk tank overnight.

Er? When did I suggest otherwise? People from mefi say and do embarassing things. There's thirty-something thousand of them, all told. I don't think impromptu cross-site interactions -- between any realistic sample of community sites -- tend to go well, or to scale well, or to make either side of the interaction look particularly good.

I don't fantasize that I have any real ability to prevent someone who hangs out on mefi from being a jerk elsewhere, though I occasionally make a point of asking someone threatening a ruckus to calm the heck down and walk away.

I'm having trouble parsing the "I wish I were parent-supported so I'd have that time" thing, though. Is that a "mefites live in their parents' basements" jab, or something aimed more at site administration, or what?

The LATimes has an article on this:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/06/violet-blue-scr.html

Oh yes, and Fark has a comment thread set up on it too...

Wakboth @26: Hmm, that's an excellent point. Thank you for making it!

Separately, on MeFi: I find it a very useful community. It helps me to work out how people can arrive at very different, reasoned points of view on many, many subjects. It's worth the price of admission for that alone. The signal to noise is fairly high (though not as high as here) and even the noise is educational in its own way.

It might not be right for you, but that doesn't make it (or its participants) a festering barnacle on the face of the internet.

You know, I may have to memorize Anil Dash's comment so that I can haul it out (attributed to him) at key moments.

I think maybe I'm more naive than I want to be. However, I was surprised by the sheer rate of blog posts and comments which, in the lack of any actual data, simply assumed the absolute worst. Once that started, I wasn't surprised that it took a life of its own. But I'm always taken aback by what can grow in a vacuum.

I'm glad that BoingBoing has issued a statement. Hopefully, this will put a stop to at least some of the hysteria.

I comment here. I will continue to do so.

Descriptions of MeFi make me think it's not for me. And I am far from shy. Anil Dash's comment on MeFi was intelligent, but one doesn't have to read far in either direction to find comments to make one shudder, not if one is this one here.

The BoingBoing statement is clear and to the point and ought to lay most questions to rest. It didn't. Some of the commenters on the resulting thread ought to be spanked, or have their heads shoved in the toilet (not to drown them, just long enough to trigger a dive reflex and humiliate them a little).

I think this whole thing is stupid. If I throw away old love letters from (or to) someone I messily broke up with, am I "unpersoning" them? No, I'm decreating them in my own little universe, which is something I have a right to do and may need to do. And anyone who tells me I have no right to do that can really go fuck themselves.

John L @44 -- The LA Times Blog has an entry on this. That's slightly different than the Times running an article.

Much as I love the cut & thrust of metafilter, I can quite see how such a culture would be anathema to certain types of people, who will simply choose not to post at all, and metafilter is in some senses poorer as a result.

LanguageHat, there really are people who can't speak up in an environment like that. Honest. I'm not one of them, but I know they exist. I also know they aren't rare.

I don't disagree with either of you, but you're disagreeing with a point I didn't make. I didn't say there weren't people who can't speak up in an environment like that; I know some of them personally. I was saying that's their decision, it's not some form of oppression by "free speech," which is what #21 alsafi seemed to be saying ("It's a place that privileges the more aggressive commenter, and effectively silences the shy. That's also a form of speech-control"); I accept alsafi's word that the statement was not meant the way I took it, but I still have a hard time reading "That's also a form of speech-control" any other way.

Whether MetaFilter is poorer for it is a matter of debate. While of course more voices are better, it is impossible to have both vigorous free speech and the participation of those who are intimidated by such speech, and I value the former highly enough to be pretty sure it's worth the loss of the latter. Furthermore, people can learn over time to deal with it; I know some who started out only participating in the "safe" AskMetafilter section, but gradually got accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of the other parts and joined in.

Xopher: What you're fantasising about is torturing people. Do you really think that's healthy?

language hat@22: Shy people silence themselves; that's a pity, but it's not the fault of the agora.

It's for this reason that the standards of the agora are not the same as the standards of the coffeehouse or the salon, and also why the agora should not be the only venue for the exchange of ideas. A loud voice and a thick skin are useful in the rough-and-tumble of public debate, but the stentorian and the leather-hided among us are not necessarily the ones possessed of the keenest insight.

It's my observation -- and not just mine -- that what you call "the cut & thrust" is especially off-putting to woman, not least because of the way guys will casually insult each other with gendered language.

This is absolutely true, and the "boyzone" aspect (as it's called there) has historically been the single biggest flaw in MetaFilter. It has caused some valued contributors to leave, and I have spoken out about it as long as I've been a member. I'm happy to say that after a couple of long and painful MetaTalk threads (which I won't link to, because if people have a hard time with the BoingBoing thread those'll really upset them) a lot of people got the point and things have gotten noticeably better. They'll never be perfect, because MeFi is a human institution, but it's encouraging to see that these things can get hashed out in such a way that minds are changed. Again, I find that better than just zapping all comments that anyone might perceive as "hurtful" or "sexist" and sweeping the problem under the rug.

Knock it off, Phil. That's not what Xopher said.

Debra Doyle #51 : It's for this reason that the standards of the agora are not the same as the standards of the coffeehouse or the salon, and also why the agora should not be the only venue for the exchange of ideas.

Quite so, and neither should the coffeehouse or the salon.

A loud voice and a thick skin are useful in the rough-and-tumble of public debate, but the stentorian and the leather-hided among us are not necessarily the ones possessed of the keenest insight.

See, this is what bothers me about the discussion here (and other places where similar prejudices are expressed). You seem perfectly comfortable assuming and stating that MetaFilter belongs to "the stentorian and the leather-hided." With respect, I spend time there and you (I gather) don't; which of us is likely to have a better feel for the place? And do I seem stentorian to you? Why not take my word for it that there is subtle, well-informed, and (save the mark) polite discourse there alongside the jokes and arguments? Just because you (or people you know) don't feel comfortable there doesn't ipso facto make it the equivalent of the Colosseum (or, if you prefer, Fark).

I'll second what languagehat says about the boyzone aspect of Metafilter.

Metafilter is extremely self-aware and there were multiple 1000+ comment threads in Metatalk in a very short period of time about how to make Metafilter more accessible to women in particular without sacrificing what makes Metafilter valuable in the process. So the observation that Doctor Science makes is not only something Metafilter is aware of, it's something that Metafilter spends a hell of a lot of time grappling with, discussing, and taking action over.

I don't think the BB blowup can reasonably be set at Metafilter's feet. It was a car wreck waiting to happen given BBs very high profile and sought-out reputation in terms of being on the forefront of issues regarding online censorship.

Michael Roberts #36:
I can't even read contentious and voluble crap like mefi (tho I wish I were parent-supported so I'd have that time) and (2) it's fine if you keep the arrogance and general snot-nosedness within your own walls, but when you spill out into the world at large, there are many people who aren't liable to chuckle and say, "Kids will be kids." ... I guess I'm just saying, fine, you can keep your drunken uncles, but if you wheel them out in public, it's your problem if they end up in the drunk tank overnight.

Honest question: does this kind of childish insult represent the accepted standards around here? If so, with what right does anyone look down at MetaFilter?

Grobstein: No problem, I can see how you might have misread it at first.

And having looked at the comments on that LA Times blog, it reads very much like the other thread here.

language hat #49: I think the best solution possible for that is the one the net seems to be evolving--lots of different venues for discussions, without the notion that one kind trumps the others. The world is better for having both loud biker bars and quiet coffee shops.

Phil #50: I'd hate to hear what you'd accuse me of fantasizing about, after seeing me drive on the Beltway. (How does that Woody Allen quote go? "I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not exactly in those words.")

albatross #59: I think the best solution possible for that is the one the net seems to be evolving--lots of different venues for discussions, without the notion that one kind trumps the others. The world is better for having both loud biker bars and quiet coffee shops.

I entirely agree. Well said.

language hat@54: Me, I cut my internet teeth on GEnie's Science Fiction RoundTable, where they used to issue you a flamethrower when you logged on just so you'd start out even. But I am willing to believe that a certain percentage of people find Metafilter's rules of engagement intimidating and offputting, not least because much the same thing was often said of the old SFRT, back in the day.

(For that matter, I'm willing to believe that a certain percentage of people find Making Light to be intimidating and offputting, both because of the generally high level of play and the unwritten but generally understood rules of decorum that apply.)

But it doesn't do much good to tell somebody who's trying to run a coffeehouse that they ought to follow the market-square rules instead.

#12 Language Hat - Thank you for such a new lovely word - chary.

I like chary, esp. when it comes to commenting on fora.

;o)

Debra Doyle #61: But it doesn't do much good to tell somebody who's trying to run a coffeehouse that they ought to follow the market-square rules instead.

Very true, and I wouldn't do that. To each venue its own decorum!

Meta filter trikes me as being too much like school kids bickering at each other over their guesses about what the parents are discussing with teachers in the office.

Teresa@16: Thank you for posting the statement and starting the thread at BB.

I would also like to second Clifton's recommendation at #33: If you're going to "unpublish" something (whether temporarily or permanently), it's best to put something in its place indicating what you've done (which can be as simple as "this post has been removed by its author" or "this post is unavailable pending review by the editors") instead of having it look indistinguishable from a URL that never existed.

This isn't just a sop to the suspicious: it's a courtesy to folks who were linking to, or following links to, old posts that aren't there any more. It's compatible with the desire not to embarrass people you mention in #20 -- anyone specifically looking for the post can see that it's been removed, and can see who's responsible for that decision-- but it doesn't in itself draw attention from folks who weren't interested in the issue.

Sorry about that; it was indeed an LATimes blog that Fark had linked to.

What John Mark Ockerbloom said in #65. Silently breaking links to stuff you own is bad internet practice, however much right and power you may have to do so. I expected better because of the respect and admiration I have for Boing Boing on internet issues, and I'm disappointed that Boing Boing seems not to care about the damage to the broader internet that they created while exercising their undisputed sovereignty over their own realm.

For the benefit of people whose only exposure to MeFi is the boingboing thread, just so you know, this sort of thing is much more usual for Metafilter.

Serge 53: Thank you.

albatross 59: Thank you, too.

Phil 50: [somewhat different phrase, oddly enough also ending in '-k you'.]

LH,

I rarely read the Mefi comments, because the level of commentary is so off-putting. Fun links, yes, but I prefer a more civil discourse. You do that naturally, partially because of the subject matter of your blog, and so I read your commenters extensively. I read comments here. I skip the ones on BB and Mefi, and often when I dip my toes into those waters, I run screaming. It amazes me that even as a discriptivist, you can stand some of the language and phrasing common in the communities of both of those websites. MetaFilter is esp. bad about this and creates a problem for me as I won't wade through the crap to find the content. On the other hand, I don't believe there is any "content" to be had on the original mefi post on this subject.

Well, to clarify my earlier comment, I do not think 404 pages are breaking the Internet, oh noes!!

I simply think that a notice/placeholder would serve better to manage the general public's odd expectations about permanency, however unreasonable they may be.

I'm an old GEnie hand too, and was on the Well for ten years, which was frequently accused of being too rough-and-tumble but which had great conversations amid all the frank (and sometimes frankly nasty) talk. (And it somehow managed to have lots of active women, too.) On the open Web, I tend to prefer a lively but firmly and intelligently moderated conversational forum, because it's easy for assholes to poison an open place if they're not smacked down. But I agree with the value of having places with looser rules that are policed by little more than community mores, even if I think that's a very uneasy balance to try to maintain.

Which is a longwinded way of saying, I'm sympathetic to Language Hat and David's defenses of Metafilter, and am not making any assumptions about the community based on what I've read here. Just a few of its members.

#65 If you're going to "unpublish" something (whether temporarily or permanently), it's best to put something in its place indicating what you've done (which can be as simple as "this post has been removed by its author" or "this post is unavailable pending review by the editors") instead of having it look indistinguishable from a URL that never existed.

I don't know about the back end of Boing Boing, but I can tell you about the back end of MT as I see it here:

If I click "Unpublish" on a post or an article, it's still available to be put back in its same place, unaltered and unharmed, again with a single click. But if I replace the text with "This post has been removed by its author" the original text is gone and cannot be easily reconstituted.

I'm shocked and outraged at Jerry Pournelle's comments!

Oh, wait, that was a different fracas. ;)

I think things like this, once they achieve critical mass, are pure blogosphere spectacle. Almost none of us have all the facts, but almost all of us have /staunch/ opinions, and we'll argue and agree among ourselves until we're blue in the face.

I'm waiting for the wonk to write the inevitable article about how much money this scandal causes the country in lost wages or some silly thing. You know it's coming.

When Teresa makes a statement, instead of immediately jumping to "Cover up!" I'm inclined to take her at face value. I'm inclined to give BB the benefit of the doubt. The character demonstrated there over years counts for something.

It amazes me that even as a discriptivist, you can stand some of the language and phrasing common in the communities of both of those websites. MetaFilter is esp. bad about this and creates a problem for me as I won't wade through the crap to find the content.

Really and truly? If anything, a lot of folks at metafilter sometimes strike me as overly pedantic, too quick to worry over the niceties of language instead of just proceeding with the conversation. This is something I imagine language hat would back me up on.

But it's a diverse crowd. We also have younger folks; poor typists; folks for whom English is not a first or a primary language; even some (god help us!) linguistically lazy people who merely care more about making their point than they do about making it look pretty or feel pithy.

Which, I don't know. I can see it being off-putting at a glance, that weird mix of careful and not-so-careful writing, and if it's just that one glance and a shake of the head and going on your way, so be it. But I've loved mefi for a long time in large part because of the language of the site and the cleverness and expressiveness of its members.

That's something that, granted, rarely shines through its brightest during noisy, much-busier-than-normal internet drama threads like the one tied to this issue.

Scraps #72: Thanks, much appreciated.

T.W #64: My, another commenter who exhibits the very vice meant to be pinned on MetaFilter.

just so you know, this sort of thing is much more usual for Metafilter.

While that's true, I would also point to this sort of thing as examples of what I love about the place.

James D. Macdonald @ #73:

That's a very interesting point as to good reasons for simple removal vs. place-holder replacement. Actually, I find fascinating the simple mention that there's an "Unpublish" button. I had no idea...

Nice statement Teresa. I'm glad it's gone up, if only because I was imagining your frustration at seeing the option of quick measured response to this brouhaha slowly slip away.

As a note, David P. at BB has a wicked sense of humor today.

As another note, can anyone believe the nerve of zota over in the other thread? Goddamn. Sockpuppetry is one thing, but using the name of a principal in the argument at hand is maybe the lowest I've seen. I still wish it hadn't been closed off, but it was getting a bit more incendiary, I guess. Still, glad to see this one opened up. Makes me sad when threads are closed off in what I think might be premature defeatism and frustration. I guess because I haven't been reading the commentary anywhere but here (and the ridiculous post at Tomorrow's Futures) I hadn't yet had my fill, whereas Patrick was steeped in the thing.

Actually, I find fascinating the simple mention that there's an "Unpublish" button.

For CMS purposes, I'm a Wordpress guy rather than MT. There (at least in the current interface), there's no "Unpublish" button, but the same functionality is handled with a drop-down menu with the options "Published", "Pending Review", and "Unpublished". Pick an option, hit the Save button.

It's useful functionality in a number of situations (though I've only ever used it once or twice in a panic when I accidentally published an unfinished draft) and so a neologistic "unpublish"-as-verb usage makes sense and does go to explain the otherwise kind of doomy-sounding term.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make it sound much less doomy to folks encountering it for the first time in an unflattering context.

It's really hard to handle a situation without embarrassing the parties involved. This fits in well with my long-term observations that it is a lot easier to generate negative karma than it is to get rid of it.

If you do nothing, you feel embarrassed, and other parties may do more of whatever it was that was embarrassing you.

If you take action and say nothing, people will wonder why, and imagine all sorts of possible motivations for your action, many of could be much more embarrassing than the reality, so you feel even more embarrassed. Meanwhile, the other parties involved feel surprised and embarrassed by the whole thing, or at least they say so.

If you take action and say something, at least you have a chance of explaining it without going into all the embarrassing details. Also, you have a chance it will blow over faster. But there's no way to completely avoid the embarrassment.

Gursky 78: Yes, re zota. Just astonishing. I mean, I'd tagged hir as a troll fairly early on, but identity theft (of a sort) really crosses the line. I'm glad Patrick banished hir.

Thanks for the kind words, Teresa. And Josh, yep, in the version of Movable Type they're using, one of the status settings for entries is "Unpublished (Draft)". I can see how that might have influenced the languaged used.

#69 Xopher: man what. Seriously. I know you're not a Buddhist, but I think this is a situation where attachment is leading to suffering.

You don't understand what the blowup is about; cool. But saying "All these intelligent people who are mad are being stupid" is not cool: these are smart reasoned people and if they have a beef your job as a polite respectful person is to sit back and try to figure out, why do so many people have a beef?

Telling people to fuck off because they're like, "Whoa, dude, suggesting torture of the people with a beef, is that maybe too much?"... It's not the kind of play I expect from you.

Madeline @ 83: Except, well, it's more than a bit of a stretch to imagine that Xopher was actually literally suggesting that commenters be tortured.

Phil's condescending response was out of line, and Xopher didn't owe him anything in return.

There's been far too much posturing and faux-outrage over this issue already; let's not add to it unnecessarily.

Phil Armstrong #17:
I doubt it myself. Some people will contrive any excuse.

Posting in haste, jumping to conclusions or assuming the worst are not uncommon actions. Done it myself, regretted it later. But I'm trying to do better.

#65:Putting up a note that a post used to be here and has now been removed preserves history. That's a good thing. However, it's also the sort of thing that could easily spark an internet firestorm, especially if the note has a formulation like "this post is unavailable pending review by the editors." That statement inspires an obvious next question, so people will ask it. Of course, the internet firestorm could happen regardless of what the note says or whether there is a note or not, as it did in this case.

Not making silent changes is good practice. But how you make changes turns out to be rather tricky. (e.g., if you need to redact to avoid embarrassment, it would be bad if your note pointing out the redaction provokes the embarrassment you sought to avoid.)

Language Hat,
Metafilter gives me a bad impression every time and I will throw what ever stones I like at it. You being a preachy elitist at me does nothing positive.

"Preachy elitist"?

Sigh. Perhaps in retrospect I should have emailed Xopher directly rather than called him out in public.

Nat: To be absolutely clear, I certainly don't believe that Xopher intends to torture people for making comments posts he dislikes.

I do believe that a) simulated drowning is torture {wasn't there a making light thread on this very issue not so long ago?} and b) publicly fantasising about doing it to people gives aid and comfort to those who want to make such behaviour acceptable.

For these reasons, I belive that Xopher's comment was out of line. Telling me to f off in response is just the icing on the cake.

Is that darn Krell Machine going to blow up again?

Madeline 83: I never said any of that. I said I think "this whole thing" is stupid. I think the fact that some intelligent (and some less intelligent) people are wasting huge amounts of time and energy arguing about this is stupid.

Last night I left most of a large container of sour cream sitting out all night, so I had to throw it away this morning. That was stupid. Does that mean I'm stupid? Arguably I am, but saying I did something stupid on one occasion is not the same as saying I, as a quality, am stupid.

I HAVE figured out why they think they have a beef. It's been explained. I don't agree, but I don't think they're stupid (or even being stupid) for thinking it was not the best thing for BoingBoing to do either. I also don't think they're stupid for thinking it's not consistent with BB's ideals (I don't agree with them there either, but I don't think they're being stupid).

I think it's stupid to go screaming and yelling and bandying about words like 'hypocrisy' and issuing scathing denunciations and so on, over something that is AT MOST a peccadillo, and more likely has a perfectly reasonable, even kind explanation. I think it's stupid to leave the blogosphere metaphorically littered with corpses, so that vultures like "zota" can come and feed.

You were speaking about attachment leading to suffering?

As for the "torture" comment, did you really think that Phil's comment at 50 was sincere criticism? (For the record, I did not.) Did you not notice that Serge and albatross both pointed out that I was not advocating torturing them? Did you notice that in my post at 47 I said "some of the commenters on the resulting thread"—that is, not "suggesting the torture of the people with a beef"? To clarify, I meant the nasty zota-like troll-vultures.

If you read what I said there, I said "just long enough to trigger a dive reflex." Maybe you don't know this: the dive reflex kicks in instantly when cool water hits your face. If throwing a bucket of cold water over someone is torture, then so is what I said. I do not think so. Or maybe it was the humiliation? Sticking someone's head in the toilet is a way of reifying calling them a shithead (in other words "they ought to have their heads stuck in the toilet" is a metaphoric way of saying "what a lot of shitheads"). Or maybe I've got the whole thing wrong, and it was the spanking? Saying "they ought to be spanked" isn't advocating torture. For $DIETY's sake.

Add to that the fact that, had I the entire spate of trollish commenters before me, and my legion of hunchback guards said to me "Mathter, shall we thpank them? Or thtick their headth in the toiletth?" I would say "Thert—that is, certainly not. Banish them from Our Presence, but do not harm one hair of their heads." I was not seriously suggesting anything of the kind, in other words.

In case that's still not entirely clear, I fantasize about torturing very few people. Osama bin Laden is one, and even that hasn't happened in a while. The other one is my ex-boyfriend, and that's only because a) the "tortures" involved do no lasting harm, even psychologically, and b) he enjoys it so very much.

Nat 84: Thank you! "More than a bit of a stretch," absolutely. One might also say "patently absurd."

Phil 89: What, you again? Honestly. I wasn't talking about simultated drowning (or even non-simulated partial drowning, which is what waterboarding is), and you know it...or...I assumed you knew that perfectly well when you posted your response at 50, and gave it the reply it deserved. If you didn't, then a) my response above to Madeline should enlighten you and b) I withdraw the "-k you." And as for "the icing on the cake"—do you prefer ganache or buttercream? I can do either, and they both taste better than telling someone to f off, or (I feel certain) being told!

Xopher: I've always been partial to buttercream as it happens.

I'm glad to hear you weren't talking about fantasies of simulated drowning of any sort.

Sometimes it's worth it to read to the end of a thread in which one has no, nada, zero, zed, zip interest -- hell, I can't even figure out what the argument/discussion/spat/disagreement is about (and no, don't tell me) -- just to get to Xopher's post.

*waves* Yeah, Xopher!

Xopher @91, I agree with you and have said so twice now over at BoingBoing (not "I agree with Xopher" but comments whose intended communication was substantially similar to your point, although significantly angrier, more insulting, and less patient).

I've been disappointed in, and lost respect for, certain blogs and bloggers and quit reading them. If that's how you feel about BoingBoing, of course that's your right. But the dramatic proclamation of censorship and Orwellian revisionism is just ridiculous.

And I know your offer wasn't to me -- but when you are done with make-up icing, I'd like to put in a request for ganache please.

T.W #87: You seem unable to disagree without insulting someone. I take it, then, you stand in solidarity with Michael Roberts #36? (I'm still waiting to hear whether ML people consider that acceptable discourse.)

Oh! Oh! I see the problem now! I said dive reflex (OK, apparently it's really called the "diving reflex," but please note the phrase "Immediately upon facial contact with cold water") and was taken by Phil and later Madeline to mean the various drowning reflexes as described here.

With such a misconstrual, they were not being unreasonable to think I was being fairly outrageous. Good gods.

However, I thought Phil knew I was talking about the DIVE reflex—the one that a cup of cold water in the face can elicit—and took offense to his calling that torture. I do apologize, Phil, if only for not realizing from your other quite reasonable posts that you weren't the sort of person who would say something like that if you understood what I actually meant.

Lizzy 93: *blushes* Thank you!

Caroline 94, if I can get my act together there will be both buttercreams and ganaches at WorldCon. Are you going?

NB. Xopher and I have had a short email exchange in which it became clear that I had conflated the dive & drowning reflexes, and read more into his post than he intended. Our subsequent exchanges were exacerbated on both sides by this initial misreading.

I therefore withdraw my comment@50 above & apologise to Xopher.

On preview: I see Xopher beat me too it!

*Phil and Xopher join hands and sing boom-de-ah-dah, boom-de-ah-dah* :-)

And Phil...if you're going to WorldCon There Will Be Chocolate (if, as I said to Caroline, I get my act together in time).

I am pleasantly surprised to hear that MeFi has been discussing the "boyspace" issue. I tend to think of it as the "Jerkosphere" problem, because it's not really about anything particularly XY-like IMHO, it's a part of the general culture that is coded masculine and tends to be amplified online. But holy cats, there are certainly some mostly-female online spaces that are full-fledged parts of the Jerkosphere.

I guess I want to break the association between "acting like a boy" and "acting like a jerk". You can have boyspaces that are not part of the Jerkosphere -- and women shouldn't get complacent, because as the Law of Proctouniversality says, "There's a little asshole in all of us."

For me, though, MeFi will have to change a lot before I stop thinking of it as on the edge of the Jerkosphere.

<breaks out hug-o-matic>

Sadly I won't be going to WorldCon. But thanks for the offer! Chocolate always appreciated, etc.

I wouldn't even begin to claim to speak for anyone here but myself, but no, I don't think being deliberately insulting is acceptable discourse or behavior, here or elsewhere.

However, and I mean this in the kindest way it is possible to mean a gentle remonstrance, I also think the "you people..." construction implicit in the challenge to all of the commenters here to repudiate someone else's insults is skating right on the edge of what's generally considered acceptable here, though I am aware that is a community standard of Making Light, and not a universal one.

The thing I had posted over at BB (and will repeat here) before reading Anil Dash's comment was that it almost certainly was a personal situation of some kind.

Which means somebody's out there hurting about this - whether furious or sad - while a zillion uninformed people chime in with how terrible it is that *links* to someone else's stuff aren't online. <sarcasm>Oh the humanity</sarcasm>.

I have the greatest sympathy for whoever it is. I'm guessing the BB'ers are standing together as friends while they try to thrash this out without publishing the details. That they're willing to take the reputation hit rather than release any of the details and hurt someone worse? I'd hope my friends would do the same.

{shrugs off shiny metalized asbestos Michelin Man suit, wipes forehead}

Whew! Finally, a thread that isn't too hot to enter without heavy protective gear! I wanted to post on the BB thread, but couldn't think of anything original enough to stand out there.

Interesting things I've learned here that I've not seen elsewhere: Moveable Type and WordPress database functionality is such that unpublishing content is less damaging than replacing the content with an explanation about why it is gone. Thanks to James D. Macdonald @#73 and Josh Millard @#79 for those factoids. It also neatly shows why the creepy-to-the-uninitiated word "unpublished" was used without any creepy intent, and without realizing at first (or second, or third) thought that it would seem creepy. I'm sure there are technical terms I use without thought that would make others go "WTF?" that I can't think of right now because, well, I'd use them without thought... Not that explaining that in the BB thread would damp the existing flames much.

As for the bit here about shy people being discouraged from posting due to the boisterous nature of a conversation - that happens to me a lot when things get too heated. 'Tis why I'm commenting in this thread rather than the BB one or MeFi or other places.

I hope the hoopla gets buried off the BB front page soon so I can read nifty stuff without being drawn to the geometrically-increasing post number, which on ML and BB usually means "something interesting here". I also hope that everyone who is involved in this mess comes out of it not too singed. Yes, even the gasoline-flingers - burns ain't fun. It is at least kind of funny to watch the post numbering on BB jump around, especially when I hit refresh and the last post I read has a few new ones *above* it in the thread...

Oh, and Greg London is posting some *good stuff* in the high 300's/low 400's over there, reminding me of the "Blog." entry mentioned a while back.

A long, long time ago one of my pages/locations/identities on the internet was metafiltered, as one of two or three excerpts from an analysis of a social networking site.

At the same time as I was flattered and amused to see a small fuss being made over something I'd done on the internet, as the people began to play the "what else has this person done" game, I began to rush to take down a lot of images I had on sites related to that online identity, simply because I knew some of them were unflattering and... well... I know what happens to unflattering images of girls on the unfiltered internet. I didn’t think that ALL of metafilter would react negatively, but I knew that SOME of it would, and I did not want. Absent the dangerous pics of imperfect female, the discussion went well and concluded not unpleasantly. A lot of discussions on metafilter are very nice, and some are very bad and stupid, like many places on the internet.

The following is not a commentary on Metafilter itself, but rather on the quality and freedom of discourse on sites that are moderated versus sites that are unmoderated.

I can name you half a dozen places I used to frequent until misogyny got too high. One thing that would often drive me away were the horrible ‘cosplay commentary’ threads on a lot of fan boards. What started out as generic threads about skilled or unskilled costuming degraded into people spending pages analyzing every inch of the bodies of girls in found cosplay pics. I remember a side by side comparison between a pic of Kiera Knightly with a Pirates cosplayer. The Pirates cosplayer was an average-sized, normal-looking woman (ladies size 6-8, if I can hazard a guess). I would have said she was pretty. However the commentary on this picture implied that she was hideous and defective for making the attempt without being a size 2. I know from experience that if a girl responds to that kind of thing the ‘return response’ is usually “I bet you’re fat too, lol, lose 50lbs and{implied sexual act that will set the woman straight}.” There’s then about a 50/50 chance it will spark a lengthy derailing of the thread with a heated argument about whether or not asking people to stop active misogyny is censorship or not. Almost never will the “I bet you’re fat too” poster be universally repudiated by his peers.

That’s not free speech. That’s abuse. There IS a difference. It’s just like how freedom of action does not include the freedom to give someone electric shocks or Indian burns or inflict any other kind of physical pain.

I’m not saying here that Metafilter is like that all the time, or that a culture of abuse is typical of metafilter. I’m saying that the less moderation you get, the more you risk that kind of ‘speech control through abuse’ situation.

language hat wrote the following at 49:
"While of course more voices are better, it is impossible to have both vigorous free speech and the participation of those who are intimidated by such speech, and I value the former highly enough to be pretty sure it's worth the loss of the latter."

I disagree very strongly with the implication that this is the difference between moderated and unmoderated sites. This makes me incredibly angry, and I'm having to be quite careful with how I phrase my next few sentences to avoid sounding histrionic.

I'll go ahead and add my own opinion on moderation versus non-moderation: "it is impossible to have both unmitigated abuse and the participation of those who are intimidated by such abuse. I'm willing to give anyone a chance to participate without resorting to abuse, several in fact, but I don't believe that abuse is conducive to free speech."

Speech that is controlled by abuse and fear is no freer than speech that is controlled by deletion. A place where people are free to abuse others is possibly more ‘unfiltered’ but it is not more ‘free’ than a place where abuse (and only abuse) is filtered out. (Just as a society that punishes randomly punching a stranger in the face isn’t any less ‘free’ than a society that allows it).

I think there's a reason why alsafi used the term "speech-control" instead of censorship. Furthermore, I think that speech control is much more insidious and dangerous than outright censorship.

Imagine that every time someone said the word “tuna” they were punched in the face. They’re still allowed to say tuna, but with the knowledge that it will result in punishment. Is this censorship? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely speech control.

Now, say that every time someone says the word “tuna” they’re not physically attacked, but instead receive death threats, slurs, stalking, public humiliation, or revelation of the contents of supposedly confidential information. Is this censorship? The line is even blurrier here, but that is definitely speech control.

Some time ago I wrote about a few problem people on an otherwise positive forum I participated in. On that forum was a woman who utterly terrified me. Any time anyone disagreed with her opinions or questioned her actions she would utterly flip out, accuse them of harassing her, and bring her army of followers down on those people. Sometimes they’d become outcasts. Sometimes they’d quit the forum. Sometimes they’d just learn to never publicly disagree with her again. No post disagreeing with her was ever actually deleted, but over time it became the case that no one ever posted any opinions that dissented with hers.

While no one ever made any rules or deleted any posts, emotional abuse IS as valid a tool as a punch in the face. Hell, for me, it’s worse. If I knew I’d be punched in the face for saying “tuna” or that any post containing the word “tuna” would be censored by the government, I’d go around shouting it all day long and writing it on the walls. I can deal with a punch in the face. But the way that woman degraded and lied about the people who disagreed with her was very effective, and I was terrified of what she might do to my reputation – much more so than I am of prison, or personal injury. She ruined friendships, because she was an extremely convincing liar. I'm currently friends with someone who was once deep in her cadre, and he is very embarrassed by some of the things he did, as well as frightened of the kind of power she had.

I remember at some point there was an attempt (on a different site) to call her out for the things she had done, to combat her deriding, negative speech with more speech. It resulted in all participants who did not make themselves anonymous before posting being labeled as ugly and jealous if they were female or bitter stalkers if they were male.

There was very little moderation on that site, and there were a lot of other bullies. People who would respond to an opinion piece with phrases like “Anyone who thinks ____ should have {insert really horrible possibly sexual thing here} done to them.” The people who wrote those horrible things thought they were entirely harmless, and often gloried in the fact that the forum fostered ‘free speech.’ Anytime someone asked them, politely, to not say things like that they exploded in a storm of derision, flying the ‘censorship’ flag high and wearing their slurs and derision as a badge of honor.

To me this is a corruption of the idea of free speech. I think a society where you’re allowed to pants or spit on anyone you see with no repercussions is a corruption of the idea of a free society. To tout such places are MORE free than places where any opinion can be stated as long as it is stated civilly is, in my eyes, a fundamentally flawed argument.

language hat, I realize that your more recent posts have agreed with some of the more balanced statements regarding the fact that different venues are better for different people, but at the same time you never recanted on the statement that an unmoderated forum is freer than a moderated one. I guess I just wanted to make it crystal clear that I disagree with that, and why.

Sorry for the rant.

#96/98 Xopher/97 Phil Armstrong: Ok, that was pretty cool. :)

#91 Xopher: Sorry, I was taking your metaphor of "it's my right to burn my old love letters" to mean that you didn't grok the situation, which I'd put more as "it's my right to have my old love letters removed from the next edition of a love letter anthology without telling my ex-lover who I never actually broke up with, I just stopped calling". And yeah, I agree, there's more attachment and suffering on all sides than is best. I like the comments of Clifton Royston and John Mark Ockerbloom and so forth.

On a separate thread, one of the best fruit salads I ever made happened after a pineapple/mandarin orange/grape/banana/shaved coconut/sour cream mix sat in the sun for a couple hours and then went into the fridge. After a week or so the mixture fermented and had this amazing and excellent zizz to it.

For the main thread, seems that there's been a maturity fail on the part of someone at Boing Boing; if they thought well enough of Violet Blue to let her post, that past shared feeling should have indicated they tell her why their opinion had changed so much. Unfair to not give her a chance to learn from her mistakes.

Violet Blue never posted to BB. These were posts ABOUT her, and links to her work.

They were unpublishing their own content, not hers.

For the main thread, seems that there's been a maturity fail on the part of someone at Boing Boing; if they thought well enough of Violet Blue to let her post, that past shared feeling should have indicated they tell her why their opinion had changed so much. Unfair to not give her a chance to learn from her mistakes.

While folks have been quick to assume that Cory, Xeni, Teresa, Patrick, and who-knows who else is lying, why doesn't anyone ask if Violet Blue may not be shading the truth? I think it's within the realm of possibility that she knows darned good and well exactly why those posts were hidden.

alsafi #101:

However, and I mean this in the kindest way it is possible to mean a gentle remonstrance, I also think the "you people..." construction implicit in the challenge to all of the commenters here to repudiate someone else's insults is skating right on the edge of what's generally considered acceptable here, though I am aware that is a community standard of Making Light, and not a universal one.

In general, I agree with you, and I would not ordinarily haul out that particular blunderbuss. But I'm pretty fed up with people sneering at MetaFilter for allegedly being impolite and crude and all that nasty stuff, while winking at equally nasty behavior on their own allegedly superior site. I'm not so much looking for a mass "we reject the evil one!" as an honest admission that all sites have their better and worse posters, and that the very nastiness hurled (by a few) at MeFi in this thread makes the silliness of the claim to a Higher Level evident.

For the main thread, seems that there's been a maturity fail on the part of someone at Boing Boing; if they thought well enough of Violet Blue to let her post, that past shared feeling should have indicated they tell her why their opinion had changed so much. Unfair to not give her a chance to learn from her mistakes.

In addition to Xopher's correction: my idea of maturity has more to do with understanding that there are many valid ways to deal with fallings-out other than the ones I would use or prefer be used toward me; that there are lines that can be crossed that preclude deserving a chance to learn from mistakes with me -- nothing stopping them from learning how to behave next time with the next person; and that when I don't know who said what to whom when, I'm a long way from being in a position to pass judgment on the affairs of strangers.

Xopher @96, sadly, I am not. I will have to eat it in spirit.

Doctor Science @99: holy cats, there are certainly some mostly-female online spaces that are full-fledged parts of the Jerkosphere Good lord yes. Sadly, some feminist online spaces are like that. I am Done with so many places because of the Jerkosphere effect. It's even driven me away from blogs where the actual bloggers are great, but I cannot deal with the commenters.

Man. Between blog politics and national politics I am really just about ready to move to Mars. They have water and dirt there. I will just have to figure out how to provide an atmosphere.

Leah Miller #104: MetaFilter is not unmoderated and I was not touting it as such. I have seen the results of lack of moderation, and they're not pretty. I was saying that the moderation is as light as possible, and that I strongly approve of that. As for free speech, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Xopher #106, that's simply not true, although Xeni did say it today, so you can hardly be blamed for believing or repeating it, as I myself would have before all this blew up. I personally saw at least one post written by Violet Blue on Boing Boing with my own eyes, at the time it was posted (by Xeni).

Here's Xeni today, and note the cool "this person" for someone she was once kissing close to:

"This person never 'posted' items to BB, they were not an author or a guest blogger."

And here's Xeni in 2006, introducing one of the now-deleted posts by (not about) Violet Blue:

"Blogger and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Violet Blue shares this roundup of memorable moments in memehood with BoingBoing readers. Full text follows after the jump."

Follow that archive.org link and you'll see an after-the-jump Violet Blue byline.

I'd like to believe that Xeni simply forgot this one counter-example to a generally true statement, but sadly her comment was in response to a question that specifically cited the 2006 post in question.

Yeah, I'm growing angry and desperately sad about this situation, because I hate to see people I had so much respect for throwing away their formerly high ideals, and then trying to pretend they never did any such thing. I'm not a Boing Boing hater, I am one of their long term fans, and right now I'm not a happy camper.

#106 Xopher: Doh! I am wrong. I am chagrined, and I apologize to the Boingers. I agree that "person you have linked to as cool" does not demand the same level of respect, and that depublishing them is not out of the bounds of respectability.

#107 James D. Macdonald: Hoom, that she caused a shitstorm by pretending she didn't know when/why the posts went down when she actually did know, or should have known if she'd thought it through? Possible, but it doesn't fully jibe with the Boing Boing statement "noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her". Worth keeping in mind though, particulary when paired with Joe McMahon's comment at 102.

A footnote to the closed thread:

Elusis took me up on my wager (basically, I staked $20 on the idea that nobody was likely to really need any off the unpublished posts anyway). She laid out a claim and backed it up in e-mail with more than enough detail to let me check and be convinced, and I've paid up.

James @ 107: Agreed; the "not knowing" could be real, or could be self-deluding ingenuousness, or a lot of other things. I didn't post that because I felt I didn't know the person in question at all.

Which is the part I have to keep reminding myself: I don't know the Boingers personally, and I don't know Violet Blue personally. Getting personally involved for me is dumb. Wishing *everyone* well and hoping this will get cleared up somehow is as much as I feel is proper.

Though I am quite happy to have been inspired to call an allergy to light in the 435 nanometer range a chromatic aberration.

Props to Bruce @114. Good man.

Seconding everything John Chu said at #86.

As far as I can tell, BB is in a no-win situation as regards public opinion. They make the silent changes to avoid embarrassment, and when the changes are noted a year later*, embarrassment ensues, along with vicious assumptions of bad faith**. They (well, Teresa) finally post(s) a reasonable statement explaining that certain behavior on the part of VB led BB to disassociate from her, and people on that thread scream that BB ought to make explicit what that reason is. Also, the assumptions of bad faith continue.

If the BB principals were then to go against their better judgment and explain exactly what VB's offense was, then everyone would be arguing with them over whether her offense merited disassociation. Which would be stupid, because it's the right of any person to choose to disassociate from another for whatever reason, no matter how many readers disapprove of the reason.

I agree, in abstract, that silent removal of content is often unwise; Teresa's rules for PR, mentioned already, observe as much. But I'm not certain anything else would have been better, given that no matter what BB do in this situation (or in any situation, as Patrick has noted in the previous thread), there always appears to be a horde ready to condemn them for it.

My personal thought is that perhaps VB's behavior should be explained, so that BB can take a public stand against it. But I wouldn't tell the BB principals to do so, because I don't want to presume about a situation I don't have all the data on.

Heck, I've just now recently been in a situation where I felt the need to disassociate from someone because I could no longer bear to tacitly condone their personal conduct; yet because that conduct was personal, I considered it inappropriate to tell everyone in our social group what my gripe was. I didn't even feel empowered to tell the person themselves why I now felt squicked out to be around them, because it's not my place to tell them to change this particular personal behavior. "If you want me to associate with you anymore, you need to be a different person." No.

That my situation involved a social group of 10 and BB's one of thousands doesn't change that such a situation could arise for BB.

*"Bottom line is that those posts (not "more than 100 posts," as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago.***" So what the fudge causes the outcry this week?

**It's extremely easy to insert 1984 references into an argument. It does not follow that every mention of "doubleplusgood" and "Winston Smith" is actually deserved.

***I see no contradiction between this statement and the statement that it takes time for a group to decide how to react to a firestorm that started a couple days ago.

Bacchus, look at the words you yourself chose:
I personally saw at least one post written by Violet Blue on Boing Boing with my own eyes, at the time it was posted (by Xeni).

Consider the last clause as you wrote it, and compare to the wording you criticize from Xeni:

"This person never 'posted' items to BB, they were not an author or a guest blogger."

Isn't that making literally the same statement as you, namely that while VB wrote it, Xeni posted the article?

When somebody's words get quoted as a whole, verbatim, by someone else, trying to call it either way (the former "posted", or they didn't) involves hair-splitting, and universal agreement on the definition of exactly what constitutes a post or who is the author seems unlikely at best.

One more factor to weigh:

All people have notoriously flawed memories. Memory is a reconstructive process; without any hypocrisy or intent to deceive, people tend to remember things day-to-day in a way that fits their current mental narrative, and the events they remember will "drift" over time while retaining the aura of exact truth. There are now a zillion psychology experiments demonstrating this in various ways. I've misremembered simple facts in some bizarre ways at times, and I now try to cut people a little slack for misremembering things before assuming malice or deceit, particularly when they are in a "hot" emotional state.

I'm assuming this was a personal problem with at least one of the Boingers and Violet Blue, for the reason that a professional problem would almost certainly demand explanation of the details.

Not specifically about this situation: Has it always been this difficult for people to untangle the personal and the professional? Or has the knottiness (heh. double heh.) simply become more visible?

John #118 -- Good question. I noticed a while back that the Internet, blogging especially, makes it very easy to lose track of the line between the personal and professional.

Clifton Royston #118, I myself have found things in my blog archives that I would have took an oath before a judge I'd never seen before, and I posted them. So I'm very sympathetic to the memory issue. However, in this case Xeni was specifically denying something that had just been cited to her. Yeah, it's possible for us to lawyer-lips her out of a falsehood by raising the distinction between authoring and posting, so I'm not arguing deliberate falsehood. But it seems odd that she'd be focusing on who hit the post button, when everybody else is talking about who, you know, wrote the deleted material.

Anyway, please recall that I was contradicting Xopher's claim that the deleted content was not Violet Blue's content. I am confident that Xopher made that claim in good faith, but it's simply not the truth, as the links demonstrate. Only he can say whether he was led astray by Xeni's comment.

At what point (assuming the person possibly embarrassed is VB or an affine thereof) does VB's continued agitation of the trolls justify embarrassing her?

language hat @ various - it's not typical, no. And to be fair, I don't actually know much about MeFi besides this particular flamefest and the fact that I've kind of bounced off threads there in the past. In fact, the only thing I really have to categorize MeFi is the fact that if they hold BoingBoing up as indicative of evil, or express that lovely sense of entitlement we all cherish so very much on the Internet, I have no time for them.

Whether or not you consider my invective childish or not -- well, if you think my post was as childish as what I've been seeing spilling over from MeFi around here and on BoingBoing, all I can say is that the many levels of analogy make my brain hurt.

I do like the occasional invective, by the way; it reminds me of my family, now mostly dead. Get a case of Pabst into them and they'd go on all night. But a little of it goes a long way, and I like BoingBoing and ML and resent it when people come in with an attitude.

Bah. You can single me out all you want, language hat. MeFi is still more than I can take. Sorry if that makes you sad.

At what point (assuming the person possibly embarrassed is VB or an affine thereof) does VB's continued agitation of the trolls justify embarrassing her?

Er, exactly what are you calling continued agitation? She posted once about this, claiming to not know what caused it. Was she being disingenuous? Possibly, but that's all she's said about it.

It's BoingBoing that has been doing the agitating; they deny things that are true -- Cory claiming never to have criticized Digg over the AACS key, Xeni claiming that none of the posts were actually Violet Blue's. In a geek fight, that's the sort of thing that is really going to ruffle feathers; denial of reality never goes down well.

They failed to be transparent about it on BoingBoing, while letting little passive aggressive comments slip out all over the place, either directly or from surrogates. They've been silently editing their own posts, also something sure to gin up a geek fight, especially when the people doing the editing have been very loud on the subject of transparency and how it is best to show a change and an explicit edit.

Sure, they have every right to do whatever they want with their archive and their site, as a private entity. But if the publisher of the New York Times had a bad breakup with an contributor and had every mention of them sterilized from the paper's archives, it's unlikely that the BoingBoingers would be so cavalier about it.

the only thing I really have to categorize MeFi is the fact that if they hold BoingBoing up as indicative of evil, or express that lovely sense of entitlement we all cherish so very much on the Internet, I have no time for them.

Would you have time for them if all they did was set up and then decry obvious strawmen?

In a geek fight, that's the sort of thing that is really going to ruffle feathers

eeeehhhh, No.

Geeks actually care about facts, and a day or two of lag is not unusual. The facts are what they are, and a few hours delay will not surprise actual geeks like me.

Leah @104: applause in the form of standing ovation lasting some 15 minutes or longer filled with increasing shouts of "Brava, Brava, Bravissima, encore!"

Also, me too.

I think I enjoyed my time on USEnet during the early 90s mainly because of the convergence of two factors: first, it was an utterly wild and new and wonderful thing to be able to talk with people from all over the world on any niche interest I could think of, and second, I was a teenager with the boundless energy of some teenagers for high-velocity, oft-incendiary discussion. It didn't hurt that I was often the recipient of compliments along the lines of "You're only 16? But you're so well spoken!" It is possible that some of the flamers pulled their punches around me because of my age. It is possible that I put up with things I wouldn't have ordinarily because there were no readily accessible alternate discussion forums (at least that I knew of).

Years later, I do not have the energy for trying to make signal heard against increasing, ill-spirited noise; I am more sensitive to online invective and thus more likely to shut up and leave when people get ugly; and there are other places to go for rewarding discussion about my old favorite USEnet topics (writing, progressive rock, Paganism/religious rights, etc). Also, since an adult is less likely than a teenager to be treated as a precious gem just for stringing sentences together into meaningful paragraphs, I no longer enjoy the natural protection and kudos I received in those years (nor should I).

I don't hang out on USEnet very often anymore.

USEnet hasn't changed, but the world around it has. Well, perhaps the world's changes have changed USEnet: with so many other venues, some moderated and some not, the concentration of ugliness in unmoderated fora increases. Where once everyone piled into the same room for lack of anywhere else to go, now rude/malicious posters can gravitate to unmoderated fora, and more soft-spoken, sensitive, or simply respectful posters can leave them.

Hey, Tavella, what if the NYT backed a disastrous war in the Middle East .. but I suppose that's not worth your time...

Geeks actually care about facts, and a day or two of lag is not unusual. The facts are what they are, and a few hours delay will not surprise actual geeks like me.

That's not what I was commenting about. My paragraph:

"It's BoingBoing that has been doing the agitating; they deny things that are true -- Cory claiming never to have criticized Digg over the AACS key, Xeni claiming that none of the posts were actually Violet Blue's. In a geek fight, that's the sort of thing that is really going to ruffle feathers; denial of reality never goes down well."

I did not comment that the *wait* ruffled feathers -- I commented that denying things that people can prove with a simple link *will* ruffle geek feathers. There's a reason why the phrase "reality based community" became a popular catchword on geek blogs.

if they hold BoingBoing up as indicative of evil

Reasonably speaking, they (we) don't. It's hard to know how best to treat the perception of an aggregate vs. individuals here when I know full well that, for example, while I recognize on the order of eighty distinct metafilter members commenting in that thread, each in their own distinctive style and with their own established history of site contributions, someone unfamiliar with the site is going to see something like an undifferentiated mob.

And that difference is neither your fault nor mine, just as it's neither my fault nor Teresa's that I'm not particularly familiar with most of the regulars over here on ML and have only been able to glean a small sense of your various personalities in the last couple days of discussion. So it goes: it's hard to get acclimated to a new group, and much harder yet under stress and when one's friends (whether BoingBoing or MeFi) are the topic of critical discussion by the unfamiliar group.

Folks on mefi have all kinds of opinions about BoingBoing, and about Cory and Xeni and so on, that they've come to by whatever means. Who shows up in a given thread is obviously self-selecting -- for all the hundreds of comments in the mefi thread at this point, it's only a very small fraction of the active userbase who has spoken up -- so it's not really surprising to see a strong showing of folks with something critical to say, but it's a pretty bad misreading of the userbase and of the site to take from that thread the notion that MeFi Thinks BoingBoing Is Evil, or anything close to it.

Cory, to folks who are not friends with him, is a Big Personality, and an Internet Personality, and there's a degree of jokey, low-grade "rivalry" that exists in mefi conversations re: BB on account of the two sites moving in somewhat overlapping circles. And while this is probably the least sympathetic place I could choose to point this out, Cory and his writing and his net persona and his pet subjects are in that context a kind of lazy running joke -- not meant with any more invective by most of the folks who invoke "him" in conversation than a tepid Leno monologue, just easy, accessible material.

All of which is to say: I think this is about the least flattering way for such stuff to be exposed to folks who are (as it seems a lot of ML regulars are) actually a bit closer than average in however loose a sense to the BB crew, but a whole lot of the BB/Cory riffing in that thread, and elsewhere on mefi, is exactly that: riffing, people on the site that they hang out on just jawing while something interesting unfolds. I'm sure there are a few folks in there who are feeling genuine anger or upset at BB, but by that token there's also a lot of us having, and expressing, substantial but far-from-angry reactions to all this.

David @ 125 - I don't know, David. Would you like to be more explicit about what you actually mean to say, or would that be too direct for you? Do you mean to imply that all I do is to set up and decry obvious strawmen? That's pleasingly circular. Or do you mean to imply that MeFi sometimes sets up and decries subtle strawmen, and that I should make more time for it?

Frankly, I'm confused. You seem to have some clear concept you're objecting to, but I'm not sure what it is. Would you like to try again?

Also with the props to Leah #104. Good one! I have also left otherwise useful discussion forums that were not moderated to remove sexist abuse.

Newish thread: "sausagefest" is the term I've heard for an overwhelmingly male space (a la "Yeah, the fishing club is a real sausagefest"), but does anyone know a term for an overwhelmingly white space? Not looking for something pejorative or suggestive that the racial balance is the result of poor intent, just looking for something descriptive.

tavella @ 124: Actually, she posted twice, but I do agree they weren't particularly incendiary posts.

Avram @ 120: That's part of what I was thinking. I was also thinking that Violet Blue is a sex worker. That's much more respectable now than it was in recent memory. It's also a profession that, like writing, blurs the boundary between personal and professional. I was also thinking about the greater openness to personal detail in public. Consider the confessional poets. Consider Oprah.

You know that Lou Reed song that goes "Growing up in public with your pants down"? I do.

And there's another thing. The internet doesn't just make communication easier, but it makes memories much, much longer. I think that might be the more operative factor.

Josh @130 - Actually, I don't know a damn thing about MeFi, and I'm sure you're right. And while I'm not friends with Cory, I also don't feel the sense of entitlement that many of the negative posters on BoingBoing do. I don't know if they're MeFi or not. I really don't have time to read any of it -- I'm stealing time from my wife and children just to type this post.

All I really want, when I boil all the rhetoric away, is for all you people to stop being wrong on the Internet -- so clearly, I'm the one who should be shutting up and going away. No, sirree, I'm not one of those who doesn't know how to shut up when told to shut up. When it's time to shut up, I shut up! I can shut up with the best of

(Yosemite Sam: Shut up shuttin' up!)

Niall McAuley@#128:
Hey, Tavella, what if the NYT backed a disastrous war in the Middle East .. but I suppose that's not worth your time...

Er, what? Care to clarify what you were trying to imply with that? Given that I just criticized exactly that sort of silent editing.

Tavella @ 129 - Cory claimed not to have criticized Digg? Heck, I remember that myself. Where did he claim it?

I'd probably only describe the current situation as really "evil" if it turned out that DECA interfered with BB's editorial content. That would be simple enough to clarify, though.

alsafi @101:
I don't think being deliberately insulting is acceptable discourse or behavior, here or elsewhere.

Whether you consider it acceptable or not, it is empirically true that "being deliberately insulting" *is* considered acceptable in many parts of the Internet and in parts of society as a whole, and if you're witty or transgressive enough it's even considered admirable, a valuable social coin. Saying "this is not acceptable" doesn't work, when the behavior clearly *is* acceptable some of the time.

Leah's story @104 is exactly why I talk about the Jerkosphere, not "boyspace". The problem isn't boys, it's *humans* -- and, as Leah's story illustrates, women have often been trained to be extremely high-level social manipulators. If the MeFi-ers (??) think of their Jerkosphere problem as a "boy" problem, that's a misdiagnosis IMHO.

language hat @111 : I frankly have no idea why you say to Leah, "as for free speech, we'll have to agree to disagree". Leah presented evidence about how "free speech" can lead to unfreedom; what evidence are you presenting to the contrary? Just FYI, in my experience "we'll have to agree to disagree" is a line used by people who are feeling overwhelmed and put upon by the weight of evidence on the other side of an argument.

I also don't feel the sense of entitlement that many of the negative posters on BoingBoing do.

I could go on at length divvying out the things I've seen in comments, both on BB and mefi, that I think fall fairly into realm of "entitlement" vs. those which fall more to the camp of "stating an ethical position" -- I think there's a pretty broad spectrum in play the last couple days, along as well with the aforementioned riffing -- but I've already gone on at length a lot today. In the spirit of shutting the hell up (something I have trouble with myself), I'll save that for another day.

I don't know if they're MeFi or not.

I recognize a few mefites over in the BB thread (some of whom are regulars at both sites), and there are probably a few more who I don't recognize due to a different handle, but my impression is that most of the mefite conversation has been kept to the mefi thread itself and a few of us over here.

To save you the trouble, I've read both the BB and the mefi thread through, and there's a lot of noise in both. It's striking to me how many folks over on BB have been making a point of pointing out how little they care that any of this happened, but that's probably just a difference in site cultural norms from what I see at mefi (where folks tend instead to tear intensely into the details of meta-commentary threads). Other than that, there's nothing really unusual going on as far as net-brouhaha threads go.

And Teresa, I just want to say that I imagine you've had a hell of a day. I appreciate you opening this and letting it keep running while the center ring over at BB has been cranking along as well.

Michael Roberts - Your initial interpretation was correct. I was implying that you set up a strawman caricature of Metafilter posters. Nobody is seriously portraying Boing Boing as evil, and I don't know how you got that idea. People are saying things that range from the claim that Boing Boing has handled an internal matter in a ham-handed manner to the claim that Boing Boing is acting in a hypocritical manner.

I'm in the latter camp; I think they're clearly engaging in special pleading by refusing to apply to themselves the same standards that they regularly apply to other entities and websites. I also, let me be clear, don't believe this is a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. It blew up on the internet because, well, that's what happens on the internet. It is not of earth-shattering importance.

But I don't think you do anyone a favor with unwarranted over-the-top attacks on Metafilter when no-one from Metafilter has come here and done anything to deserve it. You've called Metafilter full of crap, you've called it full of snot-noses, you've called it arrogant, and you've despite that) admitted you don't know much about it.

I'm suggesting that if you don't know much about something you refrain from calling people arrogant snot-noses who are full of crap.

Has Cortex been anything but polite and eloquent here? Why the bile? You do know that there is considerable overlap between readers of ML and readers of Metafilter, right?

For example, you might recognize user 18393. His username is "pnh". I leave it as an exercise to guess his name. Or perhaps user 15351, username "jscalzi". I leave that one as an exercise as well. And so on.

Metafilter is not the enemy.

Cory claimed not to have criticized Digg? Heck, I remember that myself. Where did he claim it?

Cory, if it was him*, said as much in the thread Patrick started yesterday.

*Patrick's final comment in that thread original suggested that he had it from a reliable source that Cory's comment was, like zota's "Xeni" impersonation, a forgery, though it hadn't been confirmed. That's paraphrase, I have the quote over in the mefi thread somewhere.

That later disappeared from the comment, however, implying that either Cory's identity was confirmed or the shady provenance of the comment was much less certain than Patrick originally believed. I'd kind of hoped for an update on that front either way, but I can understand if it's not high on anyone's priority list right now.

After skimming the Boing Boing thread I agree that it sounds like you've not had a very fun day, Teresa, and I hope the rest of your week is an improvement. I don't think I'll be participating in the BB trainwreck thread... just reading it makes me feel icky. I don't envy you your job... or if you volunteer, I envy it even less!

Doctor Science #138:

(To language hat):
I frankly have no idea why you say to Leah, "as for free speech, we'll have to agree to disagree". Leah presented evidence about how "free speech" can lead to unfreedom; what evidence are you presenting to the contrary?

I'm not language hat, but as I read Leah's comments, two thoughts bubbled up to the top of my consciousness, simultaneously:

a. I know what she's talking about, I've seen that, and I've chosen online fora based on avoiding the stupid nastiness.

b. There is no way, short of some kind of central control of the internet, that we will ever see an end to many of this kind of fora, because a fair number of people like them, and they will vote with their (virtual) feet.

In particular, the only way to stop adolescent males of any age from having the "look at the hooters on that one" or "damn, what a fat cow" sorts of discussions is to ban that sort of discussions from the internet. Otherwise, in a big wide world with lots of free discussions, those discussions will exist, and they will be findable on Google, and they will link to pictures put on other, better-moderated sites.

Similar comments apply to all sorts of stuff, because some people feel threatened or offended by some kinds of discussions, by some topics, by some positions held on those topics, by some styles of debate. Some people, for example, are deeply offended by skeptical or irreverent discussions of their religion. Others are very upset by open discussion of homosexuality. Still others are squicked out by the very existence of fora dedicated to discussing BDSM. Someone offended by irreverent, sarcastic discussions of religion (these folks outnumber feminists by about 20 to 1, I think) will feel as unwelcome on Respectful Insolence or Pharyngula as Leah will feel on the kinds of places she's decrying.

The only answer I can see that is workable is to accept that the net is full of places where you (and I) don't want to go. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to enforce or encourage better values on our parts of the net. But there is no good solution to the problem of people having discussions that offend you, or make you feel upset and unwelcome. There is no way to avoid having common comments in a place that deeply offend some people, without strictly regulating what is allowed to be said.

Similarly, personal insult happens in most fora, and it's hard to see how to avoid it. There are different rules, sometimes formal, mostly informal, in different places.

My best solution is to patronize nice coffee shops, and avoid biker bars.

David @ 140 - the bile's mostly from reading too damned much of that thread over at BoingBoing, I'm afraid. And as to why it got directed at MeFi -- now that you mention it, I'm not sure. Here's how it played out in my head:

- Patrick posted a cryptic note a couple of days ago. Being unaware of many Internet traditions, I was intrigued but -- correctly! -- diagnosed it as something that would suck me in if I looked too closely, once I discovered it wasn't national politics.

- A bunch of yahoos came out of nowhere on that thread. I already have a lot of bile about the haters on BoingBoing, so I naturally assumed that was where they were coming from and rolled my eyes, still successfully staying away from it.

- Somebody said, no, these aren't BoingBoing haters, they're mostly spillover from MetaFilter. (And Digg.) What? I said. I remember MetaFilter from when it first started before we coined the term "blog", but jeez, can't they shut up and not suck me in? But I still didn't get sucked in!

- Then today, Teresa posted on BoingBoing about it. I read everything on BoingBoing except the WebZen and gadget articles, so I read it. And then I was stupid enough to read the comments. Oy. And then I got all worked up and posted.

At which point, all hope was abandoned.

So -- true. It seemed I went off half-cocked. Probably I should be hating on Digg, actually. Or somebody. Mostly I'm mad at myself for being a day behind schedule on work and still allowing myself to read any of this at all, much less post, but clearly, it would be far too introspective to permit myself to acknowledge that, and only one of you MeFi people would ever suggest it such an unreasonable course of action.

Now please, everybody, stop being wrong on the Internet, so I can concentrate.

Now please, everybody, stop being wrong on the Internet

Good luck with that!

Just FYI, in my experience "we'll have to agree to disagree" is a line used by people who are feeling overwhelmed and put upon by the weight of evidence on the other side of an argument.

Without getting into the specifics of the argument, I don't think this is fair at all -- at least, it doesn't match my own experience. I've heard people say "we'll have to agree to disagree" who were obviously in the right, obviously in the wrong, and every variation you can imagine. I don't think saying it means anything other than that the person is tired of the argument.

Stephen - I agree.

Josh up there somewhere - Well, regarding Cory's having posted that or not, I can confirm that the IP that post was from was unlike any other Cory Doctorow IP in history. Unfortunately, every other Cory Doctorow IP is also unique. Damn his nomadic habits!

So yeah, there's no way for me to tell whether Cory actually claimed that or not. I'm not inclined to believe he would lie about it, but that's my own judgment and I have no reason to trust it especially.

David @ 145 - I can dream.

Another agreement with Leah Miller at #104.

Michael Roberts #144:
And then I got all worked up and posted. At which point, all hope was abandoned.

There are times when not engaging in a shit fight is the only way to avoid splatter damage*.

*Speaking as one who's posted in haste**, only to repent at length.
**Guilty of not investigating the backstory first.

Ah, thanks for the update, Michael. I'm fine with uncertainty, it's just nice to know that it's a verified uncertainty, so to speak.

All of which is to say: I think this is about the least flattering way for such stuff to be exposed to folks who are (as it seems a lot of ML regulars are) actually a bit closer than average in however loose a sense to the BB crew, but a whole lot of the BB/Cory riffing in that thread, and elsewhere on mefi, is exactly that: riffing, people on the site that they hang out on just jawing while something interesting unfolds. I'm sure there are a few folks in there who are feeling genuine anger or upset at BB, but by that token there's also a lot of us having, and expressing, substantial but far-from-angry reactions to all this.

That's an important point to remember. It also reminds me that there's sometimes this belief people have that if someone qualifies to them as a public figure, they can say anything they like about them because somehow that person is not real, and stuff said about them is somehow merely entertainment or something.

I remember that after Jim Rigney died, I was reading some condolences and remembrances that various people had written, because sometimes it feels good to have company missing somebody, if that makes any sense. I ran across one completely poisonous and apparently offhand screed of such casual meanness that I had to go sit somewhere and shake for a while, just to let my reaction go by.

One person's life is another person's free entertainment, to people like that. I don't much care to be around that, and I try to avoid doing it myself.

Not sure this is really germane to the whole BB thing, but it's what the comments raise in my mind just now, so there ya go.

Um, 151's quote was from Josh in 130. Sorry for leaving out that attribution.

Common sense triumphs!

(I just deleted the comment I'd written and was about to post.)

Golly, you guys! Would anybody like a cigarette?

I’m really glad that Boing Boing finally came out and said something. It makes me feel a lot better. Though I still think their decision wasn’t the greatest, it was the silence that really weirded me out. But frankly, I’m not taking kindly to all the people saying, “SEE? It was perfectly innocuous! You were just being ridiculous getting upset about it.” Yes, there were a lot of people out there being ridiculous and casting this as the WORST THING EVAR, but the simple act of noting the inexplicable disappearances and worrying about them wasn't foolish, or wrong, or whatever. We weren't wrong to be concerned and curious when this first came to light: wanting to know what's going on isn't a bad habit to be in, and I'm kind of upset to see so many people stomping all over it.

The sensation of being told not to worry my pretty little head about what those people over there are doing but won’t explain is pretty familiar to me these days. The weird part was hearing it from typically pretty paranoid liberals and other free thinkers—generally I get it from right-wing authoritarians trying to wave away the latest Bush monstrosity. Isn’t that exactly what they say, when we question them about illegal wiretapping or extraordinary rendition? “Don’t worry, these are good people, I know them personally, and they would never do this without a really, really good reason! No doubt there’s an excellent reason you just don’t have the security clearance to hear!”* Well, good for you that you’re a personal friend of Cory Doctorow and the other Boingers. If it was my good friend, I’d be inclined to cut them a lot more slack myself. Thing is, though, they aren’t: I don’t know them, I can’t peer into their eyes and pronounce them Good People. All I have to go by is what they’re doing, and if what they’re doing looks suspicious, I want information and facts, not personal testimonials from their friends. Everyone has friends.

*I realize there are gaping holes in this analogy. For one, disappearing a couple of posts from the archives isn’t even vaguely the same as disappearing a couple of human beings. For another, Boing Boing isn’t accountable to its readers,** whereas the United States government (theoretically) is. However, the appeals to blind trust were structured in the same way, and were (to my mind) equally unconvincing.

**Except, they kind of are. They ask people to come to Boing Boing, to comment there and form a community, to care about it, and then when something strange happens they turn around and tell them that it's a personal site and the BBoingers owe them nothing? If what you're trying to build is a community, then you have to treat people with respect.

#99 Doctor Science

My lifetime tolerance for Stupid Wife Jokes got exceeded long long long ago from a preponderance of the damned things at e.g. military technology conferences, the first few speakers at the limited access sessions all seemed to feel compelled to use them as "ice-breakers." They were ice-makers for me, however....

Happy Canada Day, all. I was just watching the fireworks over Parliament Hill, and let me tell ya, they were a lot prettier than what's been going off in blogspace...

I think I've inferred what prompted the removal of VB-related items, a year ago. Would it be inappropriate for me to speculate on that matter here?

I would love some inferred speculation, Joel.

#143 albatross

One of the most noxious things about such fora, however, is that they spread hatemongering, sometimes even lethally offensive, memes.

People's learning methods include copying words, phrases, intonations, ideas, and actions.

"You don't like this? But I see it on TV and in films and in books...."

"That's FICTION!...."

Xopher @ 96: "However, I thought Phil knew I was talking about the DIVE reflex—the one that a cup of cold water in the face can elicit—and took offense to his calling that torture."

From the Gaurdian:

Yasir Rubaii Saeed al-Qutaji describes how loud western music was played and cold water poured over his body; he said he was also threatened with sexual abuse.

"For the next 15 hours they tried to break me down by taking me frequently inside and repeating the stripping, cold water and loud music sequence," he says.

From the Defense Department Memo outlining Interrogation techniques. Warning: PDF (page 13):

Category III techniques. Techniques in this category may only be used by submitting a request through the Director, JIG....These techniques are required for a very small percentage of most uncooperative detainees (less than 3%)....

(2)Exposure to cold weather or water (with appropriate medical monitoring.

I'm trying very hard to be civil here, because do you know what this is? This is defining deviancy down, and it is happening right in front of me. You are advocating torture. I am so angry I am sick to my stomach.

Xopher @ 91:? "Did you notice that in my post at 47 I said "some of the commenters on the resulting thread"—that is, not "suggesting the torture of the people with a beef"? To clarify, I meant the nasty zota-like troll-vultures."

Oh, thank goodness. You only want to torture the really bad people! Color me reassured.

albatross @143:

In particular, the only way to stop adolescent males of any age from having the "look at the hooters on that one" or "damn, what a fat cow" sorts of discussions is to ban that sort of discussions from the internet.

Because boys will be boys? Nope, sorry, this argument is made, as they say, of FAIL -- not to mention privilege, double standards, and misogyny.

The way to stop that sort of discussion is to *not accept it* -- for other men, in particular, to say, "no, this is not funny; no, I do not think that way; no, being a jerk does not make you one of the boys, it makes you a jerk."

My best solution is to patronize nice coffee shops, and avoid biker bars.

In Real Life, this is the kind of widely-accepted attitude that leads to women being raped in biker bars -- and then blamed, because what did she expect, asking for a drink in a place like that?

The problem is not that some people say things online that make me uncomfortable or unhappy, the problem is that they make me *unsafe*.

By the way, language hat @ 95, I think "I'm still waiting to hear..." will make an absolutely dandy addition to the troll bingo card.

Stupid Michael, stupid Michael. I got out of bed to post this.

heresiarch@160: Context matters enormously here I think.

Some actions will be clearly torture in one context but not necessarily in another. From his emails to me, I don't believe that Xopher indented what he wrote to be interpreted that way: ie with all the context that would make such actions unquestionably torture rather than the relatively minor revenge fantasies that they actually were.

Given that the action is defined by the context, some readers will project a "torture" context onto Xopher's words, so there's still the potential to give aid and comfort to those wanting to normalise torture even if one didn't intend to do so.

It's a thorny area: One can think oneself completely innocent, but be read as advocating the darkest deeds. I guess that's an argument for defining the context yourself, lest others project their own on your words.

NB. The poster who spoofed the post from Xeni has apologised on the metafilter thread here, for those who care about such things.

Just as an aside, like so many other people in this thread, I'm all for moderated forums.

Unmoderated forums start, theoretically, with freedom of speech; but in practice, they tend to quickly descend into a tyranny of the loud, the lewd and the aggressive.

It's all very sad, and while I do think that the BB crew haven't acted anywhere near as well as they could in this, they certainly have my sympathy for what must have been a hellish few days. Even moreso for people like Patrick, who aren't even part of BB but have been swept up by the whirlwind along with them.

I hope that in a while, once things have (hopefully) calmed down a bit, the Boingers can take a look again at what went on, and realise that a large portion of the criticism was coming not from trolls, haters and various other varieties of internet asshole, but from some of BB's most enthusiastic fans. It wasn't all outrage and accusations of evil, it was genuine disappointment, and an attempt to hold a valued source to the standards we'd like to see it maintain.

It's the nature of internet pile-ons that, where one or two comments of honest criticism would have been taken on board, when that stretches to tens, hundreds, thousands - with a huge dollop of nasty mixed in with the honest responses - it starts to look that the whole world hates you, and all negative comments look like they're motivated by malice. The "don't let assholes rent space in your head" approach is certainly an essential mechanism for not going mad online - but it's also one that requires constant checking. It should be a shield, not a fortress - you can't completely wall yourself in with it, because you quickly lose your ability to tell who's an attacker and who's not.

If there's a plus side to this (I know, I'm reaching rather desperately for some silver lining) at least its got out in the open a whole host of issues about online publishing that are worth thinking about for lots of people, from amateurs to professional bloggers to traditional media outlets. (I took a stab at teasing out a couple of them on my blog, but it mostly just ended up over-long and blathery, and I won't try to rewrite it here.) Hopefully, this business won't become so tainted with prurience and blogdrama that everybody just wants to forget about it and nobody learns anything.

Another plus side is that it's pretty clear that Making Light, even when it gets caught up in the worst kind of internet shitstorm, still manages to be a place for intelligent, polite and interesting conversation. So - good work, Patrick and Teresa, and thanks for providing these threads for people to talk in.

(Having said that: Michael Roberts@162 - did you really just call langaugehat a troll, or am I misreading that? Because, you know, that would be pretty off base.)

#161:

albatross @143:

In particular, the only way to stop adolescent males of any age from having the "look at the hooters on that one" or "damn, what a fat cow" sorts of discussions is to ban that sort of discussions from the internet.

Because boys will be boys? Nope, sorry, this argument is made, as they say, of FAIL -- not to mention privilege, double standards, and misogyny.

The way to stop that sort of discussion is to *not accept it* -- for other men, in particular, to say, "no, this is not funny; no, I do not think that way; no, being a jerk does not make you one of the boys, it makes you a jerk."

Even if you slap down jerkish behavior at every opportunity, it will still scuttle off somewhere and continue existing. I think (although I could be wrong) that was albatross's point.

My best solution is to patronize nice coffee shops, and avoid biker bars.

In Real Life, this is the kind of widely-accepted attitude that leads to women being raped in biker bars -- and then blamed, because what did she expect, asking for a drink in a place like that?

The problem is not that some people say things online that make me uncomfortable or unhappy, the problem is that they make me *unsafe*.

If they make you *feel* unsafe, then they're making you uncomfortable or unhappy. But a genuine risk of physical harm doesn't begin until the cyber-stalker logs off and starts stalking in the real world, which makes your rape analogy strained, at best. Making sure nobody follows you home from a biker bar is probably wise. Torching the bar is not necessarily the best way to achieve that goal.

In any case, rapes that take place in biker bars generally *are* prosecuted, AFAIK, regardless of any jerks that may engage in victim-blaming.

I'm not sure I understand the point of the analogy, anyway. Are you seriously advocating the complete destruction of biker bars, or an attempt to impose coffee-shop behavioral standards on them whether the bar owners want to or not? (The real ones, as well as the online equivalents.)

P.S. The blockquote tag apparently fails here when the quote includes multiple paragraphs. (Workaround: blockquote each paragraph separately.) That's annoying; it's a useful tag. I can understand auto-closing things like italics and bold, but blockquote is *supposed* to include substantial amounts of text.

Doctor Science #161:

Not "boys will be boys," but "a--holes will be a--holes." This isn't a winking acceptance of bad behavior, it's a recognition that nobody has the power to suppress all the bad behavior, and that giving anyone that power would be a cure many, many times worse than the disease.

I think you're mixing two bad things in your post: feeling unwelcome/offended, and being objectively threatened.

My point is that the first one isn't a matter for law or regulation, and won't in practice ever be fixed. To fix that for you, we have to fix it for lots of other people, and the end result will be literal say-this-and-go-to-jail censorship. Subtle social pressure will not work.

As an example of why, go read the posts in the next Skeptics' Circle, and imagine how welcome an evangelical Christian is likely to feel in those discussions. There is no way to make the Christian feel comfortable and welcomed in those discussions, without basically shutting up a lot of the commentary, because the whole premise of those posts is that her ideas and most deeply held beliefs are bullsh-t, and that she's a gullible fool for believing them. And this is one of a million examples[1]. Note that there are millions of loud, politically active, willing-to-flame evangelical Christians on the net. Their social pressure does not cause those sites and their discussions to either go away or to become kinder to Christians.

Threats of death or other harm look like genunine matters for the police, to me. As with all speech, there will inevitably be gray areas, but credible threats of harm are, in fact, handled now by existing law, and that ought not to change. It may or may not be possible to do anything about those (the amount of spam in my filters implies that internet law enforcement is hard), but it's not unreasonable to try.

This is broadly what we do now with speech of all kinds. I think it's the best approach we can hope for on the net.

[1] I'm using this example because it's not one that enflames most of the people on ML. But there are many others. I cannot imagine a real-world mechanism that stopped the "look at the hooters on that one" kind of discussion, but not the Skeptics' Circle kind of discussion, because any such mechanism would ultimately draw its authority from majority beliefs and politics.

Jeez, a girl goes away for a few...weeks...

One question: can anyone put into words what it is about Cory Doctorow that seems to set off so many? There are hundreds of blogs written by well-known authors and they don't seem to get such abuse; and Doctorow seems to be, pardon the expression, another garden variety excellent writer (y'all know what I mean, he doesn't have intellectual halitosis or whatever); I've been at Scalzi's blog when everyone has had a good rant fest; yet...this isn't the first time that something that seemed to me to be just another everyday statement/event gets a bunch of people just like to drop dead from heart attacks.

What is it about Doctorow that gets people foaming at the mouth?

#169: "intellectual halitosis"

That's a great phrase. I may have to borrow it sometime -- since, while Doctorow doesn't have it, there are plenty who do...

Tavella@124: [BoingBoing] deny things that are true -- Cory claiming never to have criticized Digg over the AACS key

I've seen this asserted multiple times during these discussions. Frequently, there's a link to this article. Oddly enough, I don't see Cory criticising Digg here. In fact, it seems to me to be fairly complimentary on how Digg handled a sticky legal situation, while criticising AACS-LA for generating that situation. Nor do I see criticism in any of the other top few results for 'site:boingboing.net aacs digg' on google. So if you want to insist that Cory did criticise Digg, please point out a specific criticism he made.

Emma @169 asks:

What is it about Doctorow that gets people foaming at the mouth?

Boing Boing gets a lot more hits, I would imagine, than the average author blog. My obscure blog has about five comments... and one of them is a troll. Scale that up and you get the Boing Boing comment section.

Boing Boing doesn't focus strictly on noncontroversial or obscure topics.

Doctorow is not a quiet, unassuming little mousy guy. His cartoon alter ego is a caped superhero. People tend to carelessly assume that he's immune to bullets and that they're free to use him for target practice.

Doctorow is a political activist. Inevitably, speaking out about political issues creates a body of people who will actively seek to flame you every chance they get. Cory is a big enough target that some of his critics may even be professional character assassins -- I certainly wouldn't put that past the folks who are promoting all these lousy copyright bills.

People will say rude things on the web that they would never say to your face. People will say rude things to groups that they would never say to individuals. People will say rude things to your official representative that they would never say directly to you. People enjoy being rude when they're jealous. Boing Boing is a group, on the web, with the kind of traffic and influence that inspires jealousy; a group which (because of limited bandwidth, the need for coordination, and the very important goal of keeping the bloggers' blood pressures within an acceptable range) often speaks through an official representative.

But, ultimately, I don't think there's necessarily anything special about Doctorow or Boing Boing which provoked all this bile... just as I'm not convinced that Kathy Sierra made any particular wrong move that led to her being hounded off the web in a hail of emotional abuse. Rampaging mobs are a sociological phenomenon, not a personal one. The default state of the web provides good conditions for them, so sometimes they form, no matter what you do. Perhaps the next one will be centered on you, or me -- I hope not, for our sakes.

Emma @ 169

I'm going to take a very cautious stab at this one.

I suspect, though I'm not certain it is that to a certain subset of readers his style in his non-fiction posts comes across as astonishingly arrogant. Mind you, I am not saying that he is arrogant, or that he intends to come across that way, or even that the problem is anywhere but in his readers' heads. I am one of those who simply can't read his non-fiction without raising my blood pressure, and this is despite very often agreeing with what he is saying.

Quite a number of people that I respect like him and his writing a great deal and I don't think that my reaction to his work is at all his fault. Nonetheless, even when I vehemently agree with him there is something about the way that he couches his arguments that gets my blood pressure up and makes me want to argue against whatever it is that he is saying.

(Italics qualifying the next statement) I don't believe for an instant that this is what he intends but his non-fiction stuff often reads to me as though not only does it never enter his mind that he might be wrong, but he believes that anyone who disagrees with him in so much as the slightest degree is a moron. Again, to me, it reads like his mind is utterly and completely closed.

I am not sure why it reads that way to me, possibly different cultural assumptions based on the place we were raised, possibly just basically different wiring for argumentation. I don't know. I do know, from discussions with a number of other people in RL that I am not alone in reading him this way.

I often agree with him but I avoid reading his work because it's not going to do either one of us any good. However, I absolutely don't blame him for it and don't believe it's his intent. I just know that I should not read any of the non-fiction he writes no matter how much I agree with him. As an interesting side note, a couple of the people I know who have the same problem reading him have had very different reactions to him in person which do not carry back into reading him again afterward.

That's only one perspective, and I really wish that his non-fiction writing did not read to me that way as it means I am missing some very cogent argument, but it's one possible explanation.

Leah Miller, 104,
That was very well said.
I'm with you 100%

Josh Millard, 130,
I'm not particularly familiar with most of the regulars over here on ML and have only been able to glean a small sense of your various personalities in the last couple days of discussion. So it goes: it's hard to get acclimated to a new group, and much harder yet under stress and when one's friends (whether BoingBoing or MeFi) are the topic of critical discussion by the unfamiliar group.
Quite true, that. Say, you wouldn't happen to do poetry, would you?

Bruce Arthurs, 153,
Common sense triumphs!
(I just deleted the comment I'd written and was about to post.)

milk -> keyboard

albatross, 168,
Note that there are millions of loud, politically active, willing-to-flame evangelical Christians on the net. Their social pressure does not cause those sites and their discussions to either go away or to become kinder to Christians.
I initially read this as the politically active, willing-to-flame evangelicals are not becoming kinder to other Christians. Which is really funny (and sad) because it's quite true.

@Caroline #110:

Man. Between blog politics and national politics I am really just about ready to move to Mars. They have water and dirt there. I will just have to figure out how to provide an atmosphere.

Just bring a couple of Rickover reactors to provide power for your Von Neumann self-replicating ice/ore harvester bots and atmosphere generator. If there's water, and you have power, you can make (high O2 content at first) air to inflate your temporary bubble tent. Keep plenty of patches around, and you might want to armor the lower levels of the tent against punctures. Oh, and keep the Vitamin C tablets tightly sealed in their container, with an oxygen sequestration device in with them.

Bruce Arthurs #153: Common sense triumphs!
(I just deleted the comment I'd written and was about to post.)

Oh, man, you just whacked 50 points off your Internet Curmudgeon's certification total; you'll never win Flamer Bingo that way, you know....

On the other hand, gaining 53 ML Egoboo points means you came out ahead overall. heh.

Mike @172 & Kelly @173: Thanks for the answers. you both make sense. I suppose my problem, if it is indeed such, is that whenever I find one of those "look at what that bloody Doctorow has done now" threads somewhere, it seems to deteriorate into "you should do things the way I think you should" with a dash of "how dare you behave differently than my ideal of you is!" Please note that I'm not saying that's what happening in this thread; at ML folks are much more thoughtful than that!

Of course, my usual way of dealing with someone who raises my blood pressure in such a way is to avoid them completely; life's too short to spend it in a closed-loop argument with someone you're not intimate with... and even then there's a diminishing rate of return! So my usual response would be "don't like it don't read it". So many interesting websites, so little time...

Michael Roberts #123:

language hat @ various - it's not typical, no. And to be fair, I don't actually know much about MeFi besides this particular flamefest and the fact that I've kind of bounced off threads there in the past. In fact, the only thing I really have to categorize MeFi is the fact that if they hold BoingBoing up as indicative of evil, or express that lovely sense of entitlement we all cherish so very much on the Internet, I have no time for them. ... Bah. You can single me out all you want, language hat. MeFi is still more than I can take. Sorry if that makes you sad.

I was going to pillory you for your disingenuous combination of "I don't really know much about MeFi" and "MeFi sucks anyway," but then I read your later semi-backdown where you elaborately explain how you came to somehow identify MeFi as the enemy (without, however, actually apologizing for your uncalled-for nastiness), and I was going to give you a pass.

Then I scrolled further down and got to the part where you called me a troll. You, sir, have no business commenting negatively on anyone else's behavior. I have not said a single even vaguely trollish thing either here or in the MeFi thread. If this were the eighteenth century, I'd call you out. In the civilized twenty-first, I will merely call you on it. You are neither a rational nor a civil person.

Doctor Science #138:

language hat @111 : I frankly have no idea why you say to Leah, "as for free speech, we'll have to agree to disagree". Leah presented evidence about how "free speech" can lead to unfreedom; what evidence are you presenting to the contrary? Just FYI, in my experience "we'll have to agree to disagree" is a line used by people who are feeling overwhelmed and put upon by the weight of evidence on the other side of an argument.

Others have addressed this well, but I will add that I specifically did not want to get into a discussion with Leah about it because she is clearly very touchy and was bound to resent anything I had to say on the topic. (And I'm sure she's going to resent my saying that, and probably write several impassioned paragraphs about it. Nothing wrong with that, she's entitled to her sensitivities and prose style, they're just as valid as mine, but that's why I didn't want to get into it.)

As for the "feeling overwhelmed and put upon by the weight of evidence on the other side of an argument," that's childish and unwarranted. There are very often occasions when it makes sense for civilized people to agree to disagree rather than waste time and emotional energy arguing about things they are not going to chenge their minds about; this is such an occasion. If you want to discuss some particular point, I will be happy to do so -- I have never run from an intellectual argument in my life. But I have been in many, many free-speech discussions, and I know that, like discussions of religion and cat declawing, they very easily turn into emotional time-sinks. Your experience may differ.

Tom @166 - yeah, I guess I -- well, no! I did not categorize language hat as a troll -- just the behavior as trollish. Because when somebody comes and tells the entire venue, "I'm waiting for you to respond to my challenge," I don't call that friendly. I call that argumentative for the sake of argument. And in fact I'd have to say that sentence was there purely to evoke anger or -- equivalently -- as a bludgeon.

Are you saying that if language hat does it, it's OK? Because again -- that would be really, really circular in this context. Wouldn't it?

Sigh. lh @ 178 -- I'm neither rational nor civil. You, however, are. Apparently, you're so rational and civil that you qualify to pass judgment on me. Congratulations, language hat. You have won an argument on the Internet.

The prizes are over there in the corner.

Quite true, that. Say, you wouldn't happen to do poetry, would you?

Not since open mics in high school, no. I'm terrible at the stuff. I hedge my bets and just write songs instead.

And one more thing regarding trollishness. Language hat, my physical address is 2203 Paseo del Rey, Ponce, Puerto Rico. If you want to make physical threats -- or elaborately and graciously refrain from doing so -- you can do that any time.

If that's what you call civil, well, I'm just glad I don't spend more time around you.

Michael Roberts@180 - that might be an arguable point if it was an indisputably accurate summary of what langagehat did, but it's pretty far from that. In the midst of an (understandbly, forgivably) heated discussion about the relative tone and manners of conversation here an at MeFi, languaghat made the point (certainly arguable, but also undeniably reasonable, I think) that the only truly vitriolic comments at that point had been made by a small number of people on the ML side of the debate. Then he said "I'm still waiting to hear whether ML people consider that acceptable discourse."

You can read that as a challenge to "the entire venue" if you want. I read it as doing the courtesy to Patrick, Teresa and the regulars here of not assuming that it was their number one priority right now to admonish some people for intemperate language in this thread. As in, he was literally waiting, with genuine interest, to see if this was the way people are talking around here right now, because that was in fact the subject that was being discussed at the time.

And yeah, the fact that languagehat has a long webby history of not being a troll does give him a little bit of slack. Not slack to get away with whatever he wants, but the sort of slack where you don't immediately assume the worst, most malicious interpretation of what he said.

But, as cortex said above, it's all pretty understandable when two communities of people cross over, and suddenly people don't know the history and personalities of everyone involved. It's easy to project the worst onto blank slates, especially when you're riled up.

Thanks, Tom P. I appreciate not having to say that myself. (I had expanded on the "waiting to hear" comment earlier in the thread, but my Ponce-dwelling friend evidently didn't read it or found it convenient to ignore it so he could continue to pretend with a clear conscience that I was saying something else.)

Emma@169:

What is it about Doctorow that gets people foaming at the mouth?

God knows. I used to be surprised that the BB crew continued to blog and even to allow comments in the face of the way their commenters collectively treat them. After watching people wank for over 60 comments over whether it is evil to give your kid a bucket of water to play with, I am now just surprised that they haven't taken an AK-47 to a shopping mall yet. I have to assume that Mr. Doctorow broke a cursed mirror or something during one of his caped adventures and isn't telling.

(Note: I am not fantasizing about mass murder! I am merely referring to it in a callous fashion!)

Tom/flashboy @ 183. No, language hat specifically singled my comments out as childish. Once he cut me out from the herd, he bellowed whether anybody wanted to defend me -- that's how I read it, and given his posting just above this one, I feel fairly justified in believing that's how he meant it.

He also thinks my posting is tedious, talks about giving me a pass, indirectly demands apology for my uncalled-for nastiness, passes judgment on my rationality and civility -- without, I might add, any knowledge of my own history on the Internet, to use your own apology for him -- then calls Laura touchy and long-winded for opposing him, calls other commenters on his behavior childish, and says if we weren't living in a civilized country, he'd shoot me dead.

I don't know language hat. I don't know his history. Hell, I didn't know his gender before you mentioned it. I've read his blog (I'm assuming it's unlikely there are two people called "language hat") and liked the snark. As I said above, I wasn't implying language hat is a troll per se. But his behavior here is really unconscionable, and if this is the civil discourse he holds up as superior, then I, for one, am underwhelmed.

As far as I'm concerned, this exemplifies the very snot-nosedness that I find so off-putting with BoingBoing's detractors. Feel free to defend language hat -- I really don't care, except insofar as the adrenaline is rushing in my bloodstream at the moment. I have nothing personal against him, and since he doesn't know me from Adam, he clearly can't have anything personal against me. But his claim to represent something superior -- and your incredible demand that I respect him for his demonstrated non-trollishness when I can see his behavior right here in front of my face -- I find this to be exactly what I was complaining about in the first place.

Really, it all boils down to this: Just who the hell do you think you are?

I'm waiting for the disemvoweller to appear. (I have no dog in this fight.)

lh @ 184 - you're still doing it. I acknowledge your desire to have moment-to-moment conversation on the topics you choose, but some of us have to work for a living, and otherwise have obligations that don't include servicing you.

So go ahead. You continue demonstrating your rationality and civility, and I'll just sit over here. Have fun.

Staying out of the cesspool of the Boing Boing thread, I have to say that pointing to the Boing Boing policies page (which now references "unpublishing") to support the idea that Boing Boing did nothing out of the ordinary or unusual would have been cool... if not for the fact that the bit about unpublishing was quietly and without notice slipped into the policies page after this whole fiasco blew up.

This line didn't exist a week ago: "We reserve the right to unpublish or refuse to unpublish anything for any or no reason."

Changing the policies page after the event and then linking to it in support of the event is not a way to appear less controversial.

TNH #1: I'm hereby declaring open season on anything unfamiliar that comes through the door. Newbies: behave or die.

I just got here -- I've been on vacation and mostly off-net for the past week -- and I've already had to lay down the law in the direction of a nasty little troll dropping in on my blog (which had absolutely nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of VB, because I wasn't even aware it existed, and I'm still not sure what it's all about).

As internet firestorms go, this one's halfway to Hamburg.

Me @ 188 - well, that response was full of fail. I now see what language hat is talking about. Of course, he does acknowledge in that very post that he intended that as a blunderbuss. How's that different from a bludgeon?

Beyond me.

Hi, Charlie. I give up. I can't tell whether it's me that goaded language hat into being an asshole, or he that did it to me. What's your take?

Oh many's the time
That I have seen
The world through a lining of colon,

And many a time
I have been seen
As someone most def'nit'ly not Solon!

heresiarch 160: I respect you, and I'm trying to be civil back. But "cold water poured over his body" is not the same as a cup (eight ounces!) of water splashed in the face. And I said earlier that I was mainly using "they should have their heads stuck in the toilet" as a metaphor for "they're shitheads."

I've been "ducked" in a pool by my older brothers. That wasn't torture, annoying as it was. I've also been held under water by a big guy who thought he was playing, and who was surprised and offended when I kicked him in the balls to escape (I think—it was more than 35 years ago and my memory is vague); that, I contend, WAS torture, fun as it was for him. Don't you see a difference between these cases?

Do you think it's torture when an angry person throws a drink in someone else's face? I think it's assault, certainly (especially if there are ice cubes), but I don't think it rises to the level of torture.

Didn't you read the part where I said that if I actually had them (even the really bad people) in my power, I would not harm a hair of their heads? In case that was still unclear, that includes even splashing a cup of water in their faces. Even if you think sticking someone's head in the toilet (once, briefly) is torture (and actually I can see an argument there), I was not by any reasonable standard advocating doing so.

There's certainly a danger in defining torture too narrowly, as we've seen with the Bush Administration's attitude toward waterboarding. It's also dangerous to define it too broadly, robbing it of any meaning. For example, if verbal abuse is torture (and it certainly can be), that doesn't justify accusing someone of torture when they tell someone to fuck off, or of advocating it when they recommend such an action.

But let me just state categorically: I do not really think the bad posters in the BB thread should be spanked, nor that they should have their heads shoved in the toilet. I meant they were childish shitheads. I chose a bad (that is, unclear) way of expressing that, and I apologize. I do not advocate torture of anyone,* and I apologize for the impression, unintentional as it was, that my remarks created.

Phil 163: Thank you, and your comment here is partially responsible for my bolded statement above. You're right, it was too easy to misconstrue, and I ought to have been more careful. One could say such things without worrying, back when America was the good guys and would never actually torture prisoners, but in the 24 society one must be more careful. I was not, and should have been.

*No, not even OBL. Him I really would torture if I had him in my power, but I believe it would be wrong to do so, and I rely on my friends and the justice system to restrain me from this understandable but ethically indefensible impulse. I know my own (moral) strength, and I'm grateful that I live in a community that would keep my actions sane and ethical in a circumstance where I would lose my self-control.

language hat and Michael Roberts:

You guys are spiraling into a pointless flamewar. There is nothing to be gained by that. Please stop.

There are many loud biker bars that will not have their ambiance messed up by your desire to crap on the floor. We mostly like crap-free floors here. Please don't crap on the floor. I say this as someone with neither power nor authority, just a desire for crap-free floors in this nice coffeeshop.

albatross @ 195 - Yep, I agree with your diagnosis. I'm stopping.

vito 185: (Note: I am not fantasizing about mass murder! I am merely referring to it in a callous fashion!)

LOL, yes, one must be careful! :-)

Michael 192: I think you started out with a misunderstanding, and it turned into a pissing contest. I think you and language hat need to each take a walk around your respective blocks, come back and shake hands, and never again refer to this silliness between you, except in later years to laugh about it.

If you look at the conversations between me and Phil Armstrong, you will see that it can be done. Your post here is a good start, if language hat is agreeable.

albatross @143 says: In particular, the only way to stop adolescent males of any age from having the "look at the hooters on that one" or "damn, what a fat cow" sorts of discussions is to ban that sort of discussions from the internet.

Doctor Science@161 says: Because boys will be boys? Nope, sorry, this argument is made, as they say, of FAIL -- not to mention privilege, double standards, and misogyny.

No, I think you're going too far, here. This is not about privilege, or double standards, and if it's about misogyny, then I'm sure we could, if we cared to go looking, find comparable examples that are about misandry(*).

There are things you are allowed to say when you have a reasonable expectation of being in private, among friends. "Look at the hooters on that one" is a thought that's inherently part of part of being an adolescent male. People will think things that aren't polite. People are social creatures -- they *will* say the things they think, somewhere, somehow. And if you demand that they think three times before saying anything, they will look for spaces where they can go to relax and be themselves.

In real life, we rarely have a problem with this. Generally I know when I'm among friends or not, and for every troublesome incident of "creating a hostile work environment" or whatever, I bet there are hundreds where nobody cared because the speaker actually was among friends. The times when we humans screw up our judgement of these lines can be bad, but they're very much the exceptions.

On the internet, it's more problematic. How do you know when you're among friends? Even things you imagine are transient often live on in unexpected archives, and the most obscure untrafficked teenager's blog is indexed by Google. If you're going to say that, say, frat boys can't say what they think in a place like Fark, then where can they? If the answer is "nowhere", then who's being privileged?

(*) Interestingly, I seem to have a sexist spell checker. It thinks "misogyny" is fine, but doesn't like "misandry".

Actually it was Michael's comment at 191 that was "a good start."

language hat @ 178

At the risk of setting more sparks to tinder, I'd like to point out something that's been making me twitchy about the tone in this comment. You said:

Others have addressed this well, but I will add that I specifically did not want to get into a discussion with Leah about it because she is clearly very touchy and was bound to resent anything I had to say on the topic. (And I'm sure she's going to resent my saying that, and probably write several impassioned paragraphs about it. Nothing wrong with that, she's entitled to her sensitivities and prose style, they're just as valid as mine, but that's why I didn't want to get into it.) (emphasis mine)

In response to what read to me and others as a clear, well-written and, yes, impassioned (which oddly enough feels like a criticism in your quote), argument, some of your words seem to be recalling the old trope of the hysterical female. I sincerely doubt this was your intention, but in a thread with a great deal of discussion of tone and intent, I thought it important to point out.

WHY do they have the "look at those hooters!" way of expressing themselves and viewing the universe?

As someone who's gotten verbally assaulted by yutzes in cars driving past hollering at me because the yutzes were multiple asshole males being assholes in a car egging one another on, I am opposed to ANYTHING which encourages them to verbally assault unconsenting driveby-victim third parties.

That is, their "private" behavior not only is not private, it inspires them to go and act the same way in public, and treat women like jack-off appliances for their enjoyment.

"What don't you understand about not being an offensive asshole with offensive asshole attitudes?" applies. The attitudes are offensive.... Years ago technology conferences used to be full of Stupid Wife jokes. That went by the wayside for some amount of time (I wouldn't be surprised at it coming back with the Misadministration's recidivism of "traditional values" of locking most women in a Christian equivalent of purdah; deprecation has been one of the major tools to bar gates and build barriers and make people Go Away in fear/discouragement/dejection/defeat/"I'll try for something else that is less painful and offers more of a chance for acceptance and position and appreciation and less stress."

I didn't/don't appreciate being regarded as an disposable appliance for someone to get their rocks off in, and I expect that most of the people in this forum do NOT want the TMI stories, even though some of them hit a high level of absurdity (telling one fellow flat-out direct to his face to go to hell, didn't faze him, he persisted even after that it it trying to persuade me....).

Attitudes CAN change, provided it gets made very clear, "these are NOT socially acceptable values!"

"Look at those hooters!" is obnoxious. "She's pretty" or even "She has a nice shape" isn't.

#198 colin

Experiment--see how enthused you are with a group of females staring at your crotch making valuation comments about size, size, etc.

Years ago there was a big uproar at MIT when there were ratings published of male students' sexual performance with female students.... It was regarded as going far beyond the bounds of appropriate content. Sauce on the gander didn't go over well.... turnabout got regarded as unfair play....

"Look at those hooters!" is obnoxious. "She's pretty" or even "She has a nice shape" isn't.

We're talking about adolescent males here. Do you really expect that any amount of social conditioning would result in a couple adolescent males sitting around and saying things like "she has a nice shape"? Because you're doomed to disappointment if you do believe that. It's never going to happen. Ever ever ever.

What needs to happen is a better delineation between public and private behavior. If an adolescent male (or, really, anyone) wants to think or even say (in private) "wow, nice hooters!" there really isn't anything wrong with that. The problem arises if said male is unable to restrain himself from making that opinion public.

Upon further thought regarding Tom/flashboy @ 183, "And yeah, the fact that languagehat has a long webby history of not being a troll does give him a little bit of slack. Not slack to get away with whatever he wants, but the sort of slack where you don't immediately assume the worst, most malicious interpretation of what he said."

I agree with that wholeheartedly. In fact, I sincerely wish people would apply it to BoingBoing, which was the entire point of this debate to start with.

I might even suggest that you consider applying it to me, Tom, because I am pretty much a regular here (as regular as I can be, which isn't very), and I do, in fact, have a long webby history of not being childish, irrational, or uncivil -- my fit of pique here notwithstanding.

Sorry, Xopher and albatross -- and probably everybody else at this point -- I'll shut up now. If language hat wants to stand down, I've got nothing against it. I just can't get over the irony in this entire exchange, is all.

David @ 203 - try putting this into a different set of categories and see how it sounds: "We're talking about white men. Do you really expect any amount of social conditioning to cause them to stop saying, 'Looka that damn nigger' and hanging them from trees?"

Yes. Yes, we do.

MR #205 - That analogy only holds true if you equate gaucheness with racism. They are not equivalent.

Being obnoxious is not the same as being a bigot.

David Bilek,

The adolescent girls I know don't seem to have problems not saying, even in private, "Damn, he has a big dick!" Why do you suppose there is this difference between adolescent boys and girls? (That was a rhetorical question. Let me answer it: because boys are allowed and expected treat women's bodies and appearances like meat, and girls are never expected to treat men's bodies and appearances the same way.)

In addition, the type of public abuse ("Nice hooters!" "Wanna fuck?" "Hey baby!") that gets heaped on many women, daily, is not heaped on men. I cannot recall a single guy, of my acquaintance, a friend of a friend, or even some random stranger on the internet, who has ever related a story to me of being catcalled in public this way.

Life is different in a woman's body.

David, to the person targeted, I don't see the difference. Seriously. And I was an adolescent male and somehow managed not to enjoy chuckling of this nature, so I know it's humanly possible. I think I've sufficiently demonstrated my susceptibility to emotional fail, right?

I'm not saying it's possible for (most) men not to look and appreciate -- that really is human nature. But this type of crudity is a way of making sure the speaker is in the in-group, and the target is in the out-group. It's bigotry.

The adolescent girls I know don't seem to have problems not saying, even in private, "Damn, he has a big dick!"

We obviously know different people; the women of my acquaintance regularly and with relish comment privately on the physical charms of passing men.

If the issue is the specific term "hooters", I'd be happy to concede people shouldn't use the word. It's obnoxious.

Nancy @ 207 - for what it's worth, I was in fact catcalled in that way by an older woman in Germany once. She liked my legs.

nancy @207: Amen, sister!

The women in my family develop early. There's nothing more threatening to a twelve year old girl than a bunch of guys making lewd comments and, in some cases, reching to touch.

Free speech my tochis.

#207 Nancy

It sometimes, not that often, but sometimes, happens to males, generally from other males.

"I never understood when women went through until I visited San Francisco." Then-Capt. George Mills, USAF, when I was in Thule.

Up at Thule there were bisexual Danish nationals. After being turned down making passes at the female US service members there, they tried hitting on the male US service members. I laughed seeing the reactions of the male US types having to fend off the passes made by other men, it wasn't nice of me, on the other hand, the Danish males didn't hit on the US males until after being turned down by the US females, including -me-....

#206 David

It IS bigotry.

I don't... let me rephrase... has anyone suggested or even hinted that it should be acceptable for guys to physically or verbally harass girls or women?

#200 Kate: Word. Kudos on coming up with a more delicate way of putting what I was going to say, which was, "You're telling a woman that you're not going to have a discussion of sexism because she's too sensitive? And for your next trick, telling a black guy that you're not going to have a discussion of racism because he's too ignorant! Were you on vacation the days metafilter had their 'let's not be priviledged jerks' discussions?" So language hat can respond to you instead of me.

#167 Chris: Yeah, you really don't understand the analogy, which is pretty wrong inandof itself (all the bikers I've met have been great people, champions of equality, and I'd feel a lot better asking for help in a biker bar than, say, on the internet). The attitude that women exist for men to judge transfers off of the internet into real life, and without people to say constantly "no that's bullshit", it's a self-reinforcing echo chamber that ends up telling people they're justified in treating women like things/dirt. And seriously, you think rapes in sketchy bars are prosecuted? Case law says clearly that a woman who goes to a bar should have known she was going to get drugged and raped (can't find the specific story I remembered from last year in Kansas, but the phenomenon is so common here's an article about a scientific paper about it). There are plenty of hellholes on the internet that don't contain anyone courageous enough to disagree with those rulings.

David @ 213 - on more exact reading, no, you didn't. You just effectively implied it was OK to categorize woman as the out-group, as long as they didn't hear it done.

What makes it bigotry is exactly that -- defining women as nothing but carriers for hooters and babies (even such definition in certain contexts) is bigotry. The overt action is when it becomes truly threatening, but it's the attitude that makes those actions feel acceptable. And yes, social conditioning will make that attitude feel less acceptable.

I take your point, sure. It's relatively harmless when people jawbone in private. But is it just as harmless when white men sit around in private, talking about how they're going to hang niggers and Jews? Don't you think that contributes to a few of them being more likely to take those actions?

Paula Lieberman@202 says: Experiment--see how enthused you are with a group of females staring at your crotch making valuation comments about size, size, etc.

Oh, sure. I was trying to be careful not to claim that it is decent to say such things. But equally, there must be some venue where it is okay to say them *anyway*. It's an important part of the process of coming to terms with one's sexuality.

I am not saying that most or even many fora should have norms that allow this kind of thing. And they should recognize that allowing it marks them as uncivilized in important ways. And personally, I can't stand Fark or its ilk and won't spend any time there myself. But I do think they're legitimate, and allowing their existence is not a question of privilege or double standards or even anything gender-related. We've already had the examples of the fanatic skeptics vs the fundamentalist religious.

It's one thing to say that there are things you can't say in public. But we can't then define the entire internet as "public". It seems sensible to me to allow each forum to define its own norms.

First, I want to clarify my stance on profanity/abuse on the internet, especially in light of albatross’s comments at 143. I’m not saying that abuse needs to be abolished from the internet. (I’m not sure if albatross was attributing this view to me or not, but I just wanted to be clear.) I’ll ‘your mom’ with the best of them. I consistently have to edit myself on ML, because I’m actually not crystal clear on the rules on swearing here, and as someone deeeeeeeep into video game net culture I can curse like a sailor on occasion. I’m not even going to argue with the intrinsic value of good sarcasm vs. vulgarity vs. parody vs. insults vs. slander vs. abuse. They all have places, they all contribute to different forms of communication. I’m not saying they have to go away. Some of them are incredibly powerful forces for free speech, in certain contexts. I’m saying that the contribution of one specific aspect of these (abuse) to free speech is, in my mind, highly questionable, and portraying it as generally positive is unwise.

Now, onto language hat @178

After Kate summed this up quite nicely at 200, I almost refrained from posting the rest of this. But well, I already spent a lot of time on it, so... what the hell.

I thought things were pretty courteously settled at 111. I didn’t think you were backing down because your argument was weak (I’ve had this argument before for DAYS. It's one of the ones that can go on forever.) Also, I was insufficiently clear in pointing out that my contrast of moderated to unmoderated was not meant to indicate that I thought MeFi was unmoderated, but just to show how the extremes of the continuum highlight the benefits of different parts of the center. (Though I thought the phrase “I’m saying that the less moderation you get, the more you risk that kind of ‘speech control through abuse’ situation.” Might have given a clue as to my intent).

But pulling out “touchy,” “bound to resent” and then saying “probably write several impassioned paragraphs about it” with the implication that that the writing of such paragraphs would illustrate my touchy-ness and sensitivity. Holy crap. That’s a catch 22 right there, innit? If I don’t agree that I’m ‘touchy’ then I should respond with more speech. But if I do, I confirm that I am, in fact, ‘touchy’ and you are right about me. I’ve seen this a hundred times before. It used to work on me. It’s not the oldest trick in the book (that’s ‘no, u’ I think), but it’s somewhere in the early chapters: It’s so pure - call someone a whiner, and then predict they’re going to respond, because they’re such a whiner. It’s dirty pool. Sophisticated rhetorical dirty pool, but come on! I wasn’t born yesterday! Do you know the parts of the internet I’m from? If you were from where I was from, you’d be ****in dead!

Sorry, sorry. I was watching the TF2 “Meet the Scout” video yesterday. (If you want a real treat, search for 'meet the demoman,' on youtube. I had to exercise substantial restraint to not use his end rant somewhere in this post.)

I remember reading somewhere that the best way to make readers not like a character was to characterize them as a whiner. Just replace a few saids with whineds, and you’re cooking with gas. Accusing your rival of being a whiner is a powerful and easy way to discredit them, and the more passionate or vocal they are the better it works.

I contemplated not posting this, but I do tend to stay in the fight longer than I should. If I stepped out of every fight where someone accused me of being touchy or a whiner or of posting walls of text… I’d be out of 90% of my fights in a few rounds. And sometimes I slip up myself. Hell, an earlier draft of this post contained a section where I listed the things I refrained from calling you, which is dirty pool itself.

I guess the question is, why use that phrasing, if not in an attempt to make me worried about seeming oversensitive or to discredit me? I’m not even specifically offended by it, but I get from your handle that you’re someone who cares about language. I can think of a half-dozen ways to convey that you don’t want to engage in a messy argument without going pejorative.

Josh Millard, 181, said,
I hedge my bets
and just write songs instead.

Ah, I see you did one on the early romantic life of the Japanese gods Izanagi and Izanami! Thats really quite cool!

Did you know that one of our hosts, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has/is in a band called Whisperado?

MR - What makes it bigotry is exactly that -- defining women as nothing but carriers for hooters

Nobody would defend defining anyone, male or female, based on one attribute. But I reject the idea that we're talking about defining women as nothing but carriers for hooters in the first place.

Noticing someone is attractive is no more defining them incompletely than noticing someone's intelligence is defining them incompletely. Everyone is the sum of their parts; physical, mental, emotional. The phyiscal is the most obvious because it is the first thing we see; noticing that fact is not defining them.

Nancy C. Mittens #207: I've been groped by women I did not know. Granted, this was in Belize.

Nancy C. Mittens@207 says: The adolescent girls I know don't seem to have problems not saying, even in private, "Damn, he has a big dick!" . . .
Life is different in a woman's body.

Um. The adolescent *girls* you know aren't learning to deal with being pumped daily full of testosterone. It's a drug. It affects mood and the brain. Life is different in a man's body, too.

Please understand that I also expect adult men to have damned well learned to deal. But adolescents have to learn somehow, sometime. The body drives the thoughts; there needs to be an outlet for them *somewhere*.

To Michael Roberts@205: That's why I think this is different. But to the extent it's not -- yes, I think Stormfront should be allowed to have their own website. I also think they should keep the hell out of any ones I frequent.

Did you know that one of our hosts, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has/is in a band called Whisperado?

I did not! Listening to clips now. Fun bar country-rock feel so far. Patrick, you should come post something over at MeFi Music some time.

Michael Roberts #191:
Me @ 188 - well, that response was full of fail. I now see what language hat is talking about. Of course, he does acknowledge in that very post that he intended that as a blunderbuss.

Very much appreciated, and as I did with Scalzi on MetaFilter, where we had a similar exchange, I extend the hand of reconciliation. We seem to be somewhat similar people, which often results in difficulties (see: me and my brothers). Thanks, and there will be no more blunderbussery from me.

Kate #200:

language hat @ 178
At the risk of setting more sparks to tinder, I'd like to point out something that's been making me twitchy about the tone in this comment...
In response to what read to me and others as a clear, well-written and, yes, impassioned (which oddly enough feels like a criticism in your quote), argument, some of your words seem to be recalling the old trope of the hysterical female. I sincerely doubt this was your intention, but in a thread with a great deal of discussion of tone and intent, I thought it important to point out.

First off, thanks for your assumption that such was not my intention; that's both generous and accurate. In fact, the worry about the kind of reading you tentatively gave it is precisely the reason I didn't want to get into it in the first place. These are thorny issues, and presumptions are easily made, especially when you don't know the other person.

I'm in something of a bind here, because I'm pretty much an unknown quantity except to a few who know me from my blog and/or MeFi. If we were on MetaFilter I'd have a reasonable expectation that my interlocutors would be aware of my six-year history of being a strong and consistent feminist voice on the site, and if they weren't it would be fair for me to say "look through my comment history if you don't believe me." But I can't do that here, and obviously just saying "but I hate sexism and have been a vocal feminist for decades and I know all the issues!" just comes across as whining. So all I can say is: some people, male and female both, are in fact touchy, sensitive, and verbose; in the sexist culture we inhabit, females are unfairly stuck with those characterizations whether they deserve them or not, whereas men are either given a pass or lumped in with women and mocked; and that makes it difficult to address the issue of a woman being touchy, which is why I didn't want to get into it. I knew that if I said anything like that I'd get the "hysterical" accusation. And I don't even blame those who make it; I understand the problem and why they would react that way, which is why I didn't want to get into it. But since I was called on it, I had to say what I thought.

Look, as soon as I read "emotional abuse IS as valid a tool as a punch in the face" I knew I was dealing with a person I could not have a meaningful dialog with. This is not an insult, I am not putting myself on a higher plane, I am just saying her ideas and mine are irreconcilable. I've known, online and off, plenty of people with that attitude, and of course it leads to conclusions like Leah's:

To me this is a corruption of the idea of free speech. I think a society where you’re allowed to pants or spit on anyone you see with no repercussions is a corruption of the idea of a free society. To tout such places are MORE free than places where any opinion can be stated as long as it is stated civilly is, in my eyes, a fundamentally flawed argument.

I understand why she thinks that way, and I respect her feelings, but there is no way we can argue meaningfully about free speech. But (those who have accused me of refusing to debate or of not answering arguments, listen up) she is not making an argument, or rather her argument is of the form "I feel X, therefore I believe Y." What am I supposed to say other than "I do not feel X, and I believe not-Y"? To me, free speech is the highest intellectual value and is worth all the hurt feelings it causes. She does not agree. How are we supposed to discuss it and come to a conclusion? It's like a religious person arguing with an atheist: there's no point.

I am, by the way, extremely impressed with the level of discussion around here. Kudos to all.

190: Hi, Charlie. I was so tempted when I saw that particular troll to floridly compliment him on how appropriate and helpful it was for him to encourage you to speak up. It's a big problem, what with you being the shy and retiring type who has trouble asserting yourself, and you being so reluctant to speak his^Wyour mind without encouragement.

David, it seemed like you were saying that bigoted behavior is unavoidable (for young men, but not for whites) and should therefore be overlooked. If you weren't, then ... never mind.

Leah Miller #217:
Hadn't seen your latest when I posted (as you can imagine, that post took a while). All I can say is, I do think you're touchy, but I don't think that's an insult. If you take it as one, I apologize for causing offense, but I say what I believe. I did not, and do not, mean to attack you.

The conversation's kind of moved on, but to wrap one part of it up:

Michael Roberts @204 - I certainly intended to give you exactly that slack. I don't think I said anything bad about you as a person, simply that I thought you'd misread languagehat and made an unwarranted accusation based on it. As I said in my last paragraph of @183, it's pretty understandable, especially when people are on edge - I wasn't demanding that you magically gain knowledge of his posting history, I was explaining why I would cut him some slack. But I was typing quickly, and so it was probably both less clear than I intended, and snippier in tone. Sorry if you thought I was ragging on you.

I guess I've got an advantage in that I read both ML and MeFi (which explains the unwieldy handle, btw - I wanted to be clear about who I was in both places, even though I only rarely comment over here). So I do have a sense of the backgrounds and characters of probably a majority of the commenters in this thread, and as such am more inclined to make free with the slack-cutting. Same goes for BoingBoing too - I'm having fresh supplies of slack shipped in just so that I can cut them some of it.

Of course, that doesn't preclude telling people that you think they're wrong. It just means making it as clear as possible that you don't think they're an asshole because you think they're wrong.

Michael Roberts@215 said: You just effectively implied it was OK to categorize woman as the out-group, as long as they didn't hear it done.

Well, that's about the most hostile possible spin, I think.

The main place I disagree I think is in the notion of a singular "the" out-group. Humans are tribal creatures. We form in-groups and out-groups as naturally as breathing. But they don't need to be fixed, and they evolve as you gain maturity. One of the ways to gain maturity is by having a place where you're allowed to express your idiot ideas.

In fact, I suspect that the more thoroughly we wall off the idiot ideas, the more they fester underground, and the longer it takes for people to grow out of them.

#221 colin

To be crass and indelicate:

Women don't get the green flaming hornies? Go look at the work published by the likes of Ellora's Cave, Red Sage, the Brave imprint of Kensington, etc., available at Borders and Barnes & Noble on shelves, go look at Laurell K. Hamilton's most recent several years of best-selling darkish fantasy novels, go look at the Kushiel books by Jacqueline Carey, etc.

The range of human sexuality is QUITE wide, and is NOT what I consider all that dependent on whether one has a penis and/or testicles, a clitoris and/or vagina and/or ovaries.... contrary to the play and film _Becket_, Thomas a Becket apparently was a lifelong virgin, and when associated of his in the English army sent a prostitute to his tent, she came out of it being extremely annoyed about the situation. The reason I mention that, is that Becket is hardly unique in human history as regards being a male lifelong virgin.... and at the other extreme, perhaps, was the reputation of one of Emperor Cladius' wives....

However, historically it remains generally socially unacceptable for females to sexually promiscous unless part of the "demimonde" while the old double standard sometimes even has extolled extreme sexual promiscuity in males.

That is, there is negative impartiality and an enormous amount of bias when discussing human sexuality, due to all the mass of cultural baggage and judgmentalism involved. I've seen people lying to themselves about their drives and motivations.... the extreme cases including the fellow who said, "I'm not making a pass at you" when his hand was trying to get inside of my shirt, and yes, he really was genuinely dissociating to that degree of the concious and unconscious neural processing!

("Then what is your hand doing trying to get inside my shirt?" I asked him, and he seemed genuinely surprised that that's where his hand was trying to go...)

The assumptions involved tend to be based on cultural values and belief rather than the product of research without a bunch of cultural taboos and baggage as the starting points and analyses futher skewed with the cultural biases and historical blind spots and avoidance areas....

language hat @ 223

Your response makes a lot of sense, and I too have been known to use "let's agree to disagree" (often when I've seen that a discussion is likely to take me into a non-productive, spitting rage).

I think one point where I'd disagree is when you say,

But...she is not making an argument, or rather her argument is of the form "I feel X, therefore I believe Y." What am I supposed to say other than "I do not feel X, and I believe not-Y"? To me, free speech is the highest intellectual value and is worth all the hurt feelings it causes. She does not agree.

I don't think that's at all the point she's making. Rather, she's pointing out that your definition of "free speech" isn't any more "free" than moderated forums. You seem to be arguing that completely unmoderated, unfettered speech (which of necessity would include abuse, intimidation, outing, and anything short of direct personal threat or even including that) is the freest speech around. And you're right - that is absolutely free speech. But some people won't feel free to speak in that environment. They will silence themselves or be silenced by the ridicule or abuse enforced upon them by others in the community. To say that they have a choice not to speak and no one is taking their freedom away from them is to ignore that there are systems of privilege and disenfranchisement within which we are all socialized and learn to interact. Which is why totally free speech should absolutely be protected, but is not always (or even often) the most useful way of getting as many voices as possible into a productive conversation.

To Paula@229: If you believe that the only reason that boys and girls act differently is cultural conditioning, well, okay then. Fine. I don't agree, but I was not actually trying to start a debate about gender.

If girls want to have a forum where they can say things without worrying what the hell boys will think, that's fine with me. In fact, I presume they already do.

Jules@#171:
I've seen this asserted multiple times during these discussions. Frequently, there's a link to this article. Oddly enough, I don't see Cory criticising Digg here. In fact, it seems to me to be fairly complimentary on how Digg handled a sticky legal situation, while criticising AACS-LA for generating that situation. Nor do I see criticism in any of the other top few results for 'site:boingboing.net aacs digg' on google. So if you want to insist that Cory did criticise Digg, please point out a specific criticism he made.

If you see no criticism of Digg in all the relevant links, we are working in sufficiently different universes of discourse that I doubt that we will find much of use in continuing discussion. I regard articles that portray Digg as censors foiled by the brave and creative revolt of their users as criticism. You, apparently, do not.

Kate #230: Thanks again for your kind and civil response. We don't actually disagree at all, as far as I can see.

But some people won't feel free to speak in that environment. They will silence themselves or be silenced by the ridicule or abuse enforced upon them by others in the community. To say that they have a choice not to speak and no one is taking their freedom away from them is to ignore that there are systems of privilege and disenfranchisement within which we are all socialized and learn to interact. Which is why totally free speech should absolutely be protected, but is not always (or even often) the most useful way of getting as many voices as possible into a productive conversation.

I agree, and in fact I think I said something like this above (though damned if I'm going to go search for it). But, possibly because I grew up mainly abroad, I've never shared the common American delusion that we can Have It All. Everything in life comes with a tradeoff; one tradeoff for free speech is that some will feel silenced because they perceive the environment as too harsh for them. That's a damned shame. (Another tradeoff is that people with very bad speech indeed, like Nazis and other racists, get to be heard publicly. That's more than a shame, but like the ACLU, I grit my teeth and accept it, because that's what free speech means. If speech isn't free for my enemies, it's not free.)

Fortunately, those who feel uncomfortable in unprotected enviroments can create protected ones, and I'm all for that. (Which is why, though I've gone back and forth on this difficult issue, I'm in favor of the existence of women's colleges, not that anyone asked.) But the public space must be free.

I obviously agree with tavella; choosing what to cover and how to cover it is an important editorial decision regardless of whether you blatantly append your own opinion on to the end of your article. Boing Boing regularly and enthusiastically highlighted things like the Digg user revolt and pilloried other sites from silently editing archives.

I'm not sure the fact that they didn't come out and say "GO DIGG USERS!" is all that relevant except from a "plausible deniability" standpoint. And I don't find the deniability all that plausible.

"pilloried other sites from silently editing" should obviously be "pilloried other sites FOR silently editing".

lh @ 223, I accept your proffered reconciliatory gesture and return it, with only the minimum of grumbling required to save face. I draw the line at hug-o-matics.

In further reconciliatory gesticulation, I will refrain from commenting on your ongoing conversation with Leah. Or alleged lack thereof.

*gives chocolate to Michael Roberts, language hat, and Leah Miller*

Mmm, chocolate!

I've got the hug-o-matic right here you know. Hold on while I get it plugged in...

#231 colin

There are people who have had a difficult time believing that from my on-line postings, that I am female....

There are all sorts of axes, and the -variation- among individuals on the average, my experience is, is greater than any systematic statistical differences arising from XY, XX, XXY, XYY, and the sexual organs one was born with....

Differences in math scores worldwide show rather large differences from country to country... there is a lot higher percentage of female scientists and engineers in a number of Islamic countries, than in most of the countries of the western world... see e.g. _Scherezade Goes West_ which rather explodes a lot of myths about seraglios and odalisques and views of women generally.... Scheherzade triumphs by being an intellectual skilled not only in storytelling but in art and science--as opposed to the western ideal of bimbo dumb blonde with big boobs, or though the book didn't refer to it, Richardson's character Pamela who elicited a reponse in the form of the book Shamela from the author of Tom Jones (I attempted to read Pamela when I was a teenager. I found it utterly revolting and repellant....)

"We're male, we have TESTOSTERONE to use as an excuse!" What about all the teenage males who never act like assholes, and the female ones who do? The relative numbers of BadGirls versus BadBoys has gone up dramatically from the 1940s and 1950s, and I don't think that "biology" is the reason for it, I think it's cultural changes, just as the difference between the murder rates in the USA versus Great Britain tend to be cultural values (and apparently the rates for the latter have been increasing over the years, and there have been cultural changes....)

Me @ 236 - bah. Thanks to this whole thing (not this thread, but the aforementioned BoingBoing meltdown) I'm operating on three hours of sleep. So that response was likewise more grumbling than it had to be.

Language hat @ 233, though:
I don't agree with you on your characterization of free speech -- like Leah, I see verbal intimidation as beyond the pale. I don't like the rhetorical tricks you use, even though fundamentally you look as though you pretty much share my philosophy and outlook on life. You enjoy the game and don't see why you should have to worry about others' feelings when all you did was use words.

To an extent, of course, you're right. Snark is fun. Words aren't actual weapons, and they don't actually hurt anybody. Physically. All they do is cause people to shut up who often shouldn't have been shut up. You don't even notice. So why should you care?

In many cases, you will be absolutely correct to think this. But in many others, you will be absolutely wrong. And this goes to David Bilek's address, too -- because a lot of this "verbal cut and thrust" is gender-correlated. Men usually don't react with as much ... what? Self-repression?

So really, language hat, the question is -- there are a lot of people out there who dislike rhetorical byplay. Do you feel it's at all important for them to participate in discussion? Or is that part of the trade-off you, personally, don't mind making in return for your being permitted to conduct yourself as you will?

There's really no non-antagonistic way to make that point, and if I'm out of step with our reconciliatory overtures above, then I really and truly apologize. Maybe I would break out the hug-o-matic if it's needed.

Paula: Thanks for pointing me to Mernissi's Scheherazade Goes West; it sounds great, and I just added it to my wish list.

Damn, I wish I could eat chocolate. I'll just eat it symbolically.

Michael Roberts #241: Don't worry, I don't feel you're being antagonistic in the slightest. (But then, chocolate makes me all mellow.) But I disagree strongly with your implication that everyone must censor themselves to protect those whose feelings might be hurt. (Yes, I realize you wouldn't put it that way, but that's how I perceive it.) As I said above, there should be protected spaces for those who feel they need them, but I absolutely feel it is both my right and my obligation to speak my mind in whatever way seems fit to me at the moment and, if necessary, apologize later if someone was offended -- something I do whenever it seems called for. (As a matter of fact, I got mildly taken to task for this over at MetaFilter: Man, why'd you apologize (http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Century-Trotsky#2167175) to jscalzi? You were in the right, he was (whatever his reasons, loyalty or what-not) a complete dick. I responded that I'd been a dick too, and in any event I'd rather apologize and stay on friendly terms with someone than have an Internet Enemy, which gets exhausting.)

Don't worry, I don't expect you to agree, but them's my views and I'm holding to them.

All they do is cause people to shut up who often shouldn't have been shut up. You don't even notice. So why should you care?

While I don't want to dig into this too much, I'd like to say here that I don't think that the emphasized bit there is at all fair, actually.

What I've gotten from what lhat has said is in part that he believes strongly in the importance of unconstrained free speech in the public square, despite the costs that come with it. It's not that you don't notice, or further don't care about the loss of some more-timid voices in that context. Anybody who is paying attention will notice; anyone who is empathetic will care.

It is a compromise; and the cost of that compromise is an argument for the importance of having alternatives to the public square. And those alternatives abound, both in public and in private life, and much of the internet at this point can be described as a series of parallel experiments in refining different models for these alternatives.

While you may not have intended it as such, Michael, the quoted line comes off as a very low blow.

*gives Michael chocolate-free goodies*

colin roald @231 -- we try to have such spaces. But the fact is that because of The Way It Works, people nearly always end up playing out the dynamic of man-as-default-person. Women's space is something that has to be constantly fought for. I quote briefly from a friend of mine: I want us to create a space to spread our wings: a space to remember how to take up space, to unlearn self-doubt and internalized oppression, to take joy in things about ourselves that otherwise we’d feel shame about, and to recharge our batteries for resisting sexism, in particular internalized misogyny....

In general, yes, I agree that you can't and shouldn't try to make every space safe space by universally policing speech. (I don't mean policing to be a pejorative -- a moderated community is a good thing precisely because it declares some things to be unacceptable.) The world is unmoderated; that's just a fact. But you can, and should, stand up for decency and let others know when their "free speech" is hurtful and unacceptable.

And a completely unmoderated conversation is not necessarily better, more honest, or more "free" than a moderated one. Even though it's impossible for every conversation to be moderated, and it would be intrusive if every conversation was. Even though you have to trust the moderator to be right about what should and shouldn't be allowed, and if they're wrong, that's not a good space for free discussion.

I think the point really is that usually, "moderation" is accomplished by communities enforcing their own social norms and standards -- and unmoderated discussion on the internet often turns into a place where there are no norms or standards, a Hobbesian state of nature. And a Hobbesian state of nature may be totally free in some sense, but it can't guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone -- in fact, it ensures that many people will be run over. Kind of a social contract thing.

Thanks for the chocolate Xopher.

Thanks for everything you've said, Kate.

language hat:

I know you wanted to avoid an argument, but I hope you also understand that analyzing someone’s writing in front of them while not directly responding to them is, in fact, continuing the argument?

Right now I mostly want to know about this line
“Look, as soon as I read "emotional abuse IS as valid a tool as a punch in the face" I knew I was dealing with a person I could not have a meaningful dialog with.”

I’m very curious about why that particular sentence embodies a concept you can’t even remotely begin to discuss, so I’m going to try to clarify the statement and add context. I’ve talked with kids who got beat up at school, but chose to stick with it, only to quit when the verbal abuse got really bad. Having people mutter slurs at you whenever you walk by, or even spread nasty rumors about you can have a greater long-term-effect on your well-being than swirlies or Indian burns or getting punched.

I would very much like to know this: what about my statement, given that context, is so disagreeable? Do you feel that verbal and physical bullying do not have similar effects? If so, what brought you to this conclusion?

You also wrote this, about me:

“To me, free speech is the highest intellectual value and is worth all the hurt feelings it causes. She does not agree. How are we supposed to discuss it and come to a conclusion? It's like a religious person arguing with an atheist: there's no point.”

Kate has it right. That’s nowhere near my argument, and I’d be interested in seeing how you came to that conclusion, and I would like to clarify any possibly confusing statements. I believe free speech is of the utmost importance. I will defend to the death the idea that any person should be able to make a website, print a comic, or hold a meeting where they can say anything they like.

However I feel equally strongly that a person having specific rules of discourse for their own site in no way limits free speech, and in no way devalues the text written there, and in many cases produces more valuable discourse with greater contribution from a wider range of voices.

Let me make this crystal clear and state this explicitly: I care about free speech extremely strongly and feel it is one of the most fundamental human rights. I support the CBLDF and am strongly against the corporate-sponsored-censorship of the MPAA.

My argument isn’t whether or not free speech is valuable. It isn’t about how important it is. I’d appreciate it a great deal if you wouldn’t couch it in those terms. The argument between us is, quite simply, whether or not having stronger moderation on a site makes the speech on that particular site less valuable, or less free.

Here’s an example: you can’t make someone go home for sanding on the sidewalk on a soapbox spouting nazi propaganda. It is legal for the owner of a restaurant to ask someone to be quiet or leave if they start spouting nazi propaganda. I believe that a conversation taking place on the street where you can’t be sent home no matter what you say is no less valuable than one taking place in a restaurant where you know they will ask you to leave if you start spouting nazi propaganda.

I also believe that, while the internet itself is a public space, every single site on the internet is someone’s restaurant, or home, or some form of property that belongs to the people who create or maintain it.

I would object to any law that would tell you what you can and cannot say on your own site, or throttle bandwidth to it, or prevent people from linking to or accessing it. That would be censorship. The ‘net itself is a public place. However I don’t believe having private places that limit abuse devalues the speech that takes place in those spaces, and I don’t believe that speech generated in places that don’t have such rules is in any way inherently superior.

Of course, after I spend an hour typing this up, Caroline sums it all up perfectly in her post at 247. That is the way of the internet, I suppose.

Paula Lieberman, 229,
...go look at Laurell K. Hamilton's most recent several years of best-selling darkish fantasy novels,...

Did someone say Laurell K. Hamilton? I believe that penny-arcade had something to say about that :)

Leah Miller #248:

Thanks very much for your elaboration (which was certainly not preempted by Caroline, because nobody can speak for you but you). I obviously misread you, and I apologize. When I wrote:

as soon as I read "emotional abuse IS as valid a tool as a punch in the face" I knew I was dealing with a person I could not have a meaningful dialog with

...I was thinking of a million exchanges I've had with people who say that and concomitantly believe that free speech should be restricted to avoid people having to deal with emotional abuse. I shouldn't have assumed you were one of those people, and this is one of those occasions when I'm glad to be proven wrong, because it forces me to keep my mind open a little wider, always a good thing.

It seems to be true that "The argument between us is, quite simply, whether or not having stronger moderation on a site makes the speech on that particular site less valuable, or less free," and I'm not even sure we disagree, or disagree all that much. As I said above, I'm in favor of the kind of moderation that keeps trolls and nasties from dominating and destroying the conversation, and that's the kind of moderation I practice on my site. (Happily, language is not a topic that attracts many nasties--kooks, yes--so I don't have to do much deleting/banning.) Moderation is inherently a slippery slope, but it seems that although we might place the STOP sign at different places, we agree in principle.

Here's the Hand of Reconciliation, if you don't mind I've just been using it upthread...

caroline@247 said: Women's space is something that has to be constantly fought for.

I completely respect that. Ironically, somehow I find myself fighting here for the idea of also allowing boys' space, which also seems to need defending.

For the record, in case I haven't been completely clear: I think default public space should be moderated to be comfortable for most civilized adults, as many as possible, like 90%+. I think the rules of public space should make sure women are as comfortable as men. And I think there should be private spaces available for people who are too shy to be comfortable with the public space, as well as spaces for people who are too aggressive to be comfortable.

However I don’t believe having private places that limit abuse devalues the speech that takes place in those spaces, and I don’t believe that speech generated in places that don’t have such rules is in any way inherently superior.

I'm not languagehat, but I agree with this in theory. In practice I don't believe that's what happens in most places. Because the problem with significant moderation is that it requires a moderator, and moderators have their own biases and agendas.

What generally happens is that discours improves... at first. But you also start seeing an echo chamber effect where people who disagree start being more heavily moderated than people who disagree. You can see that at work in this thread; There are a few posts that I believe would have been disemvoweled if they had been targetted at Making Light or Making Light people, but as the target was elsewhere, they were left to stand.

It also fosters an atmosphere of insiders and outsiders. People who are buddies with the moderators are given more leeway than people who aren't. This is human nature. But it tends to drive away the outsiders and reinforce the cliquish nature of the moderated space.

So while, in theory, I agree that moderated spaces aren't inherently stifling I think in practice you usually end up with exactly that result. But the insiders don't feel it because it isn't their viewpoints and attitudes that are deprecated.

Man, there are so many typos and mistakes in that post it's not worth fixing. Sorry, I will proof-read more effectively from now on. That's just embarrassing.

Ah, public speech....
"feminazis" and the speech pattern taking the word "whores" and minimizing the r sound in it and referring generally to women by that term, the "can't take a joke can you" nastiness stuff, and the accusations that women are intent on taking away the rights of males and particularly boys to act "naturally"--the whole "boys are discriminated against and being feminized screed-spreaders and media reporting, the we=want-Title-IX-repealed-because-the-football-team-eats-up-all-the-sports-money-for-males-we-don't want-to-spend-money-on-sports-for-females-because- we-aren't-willing-to-redistribute-funds-off-the--men's-football-and-basketball-programs-for- other-sports-programs-for-male-students"...

And, of course, all the agenda from McCain and the current malfeasants in the Executive Branch squelching religious freedom and pluralism and removing emancipation and self-determination for women and those without Personal Finance Managers, replacing peer-reviewed research results with official appartchik policy sanitized revisions compliant to official ukases, and replacement of the scientific method with religious dogma....

colin roald, 251, you wrote:

I think default public space should be moderated to be comfortable for most civilized adults, as many as possible, like 90%+.

Out of curiosity, what part of the world do you live in, and what scope does your government have to enforce polite speech?

I don't mean this as a criticism; it's just on Making Light it does not pay to assume what country someone is in (which isn't necessarily the one they 'belong' to.) As a for instance, Language Hat above mentioned living outside of the U.S., and consequently, I have a hunch that "requiring polite speech in public spaces" might mean something quite different in LH's milieu. In this discussion I have read the idea of "requiring polite speech" in the frame of American libel laws, the CDA, and 1st Amendment rights. In other words, advocating less-free speech is pretty darn innocuous, since it's really hard to get government endorsement of speech regulation. This would read much differently to me in the frame of, say, Great Britain's libel laws.*

*which I only know about thanks to Charlie Stross' moderation policy. Thanks Charlie!

language hat 250: Here's the Hand of Reconciliation, if you don't mind I've just been using it upthread...

The Hand of Reconciliation is always clean.

The "you're not me!" stuff applies massively--what Person A regards as mortal insult, Person B may regard as high praise... and sometimes the exact same words, from two different people, to the same person, can have spectacularly different results on as regards the same person reacting....

There are all sorts of disequalling factors--hearing idiosyncracies, visual processing artifacts, sensitivity to touch/impact, different arousal stimuli, differen squick stimuli, different odor responses, different cultural background, different literally point of view (the view is quite different if one is 5' versus 6'10" and what one's instantaneous default field of view is!), different learned experiences, different social interactions assumptions....

Every time I use a credit card in the local supermarket I get pissed off because the chain installed card readers that the customers are supposed to sign at the level of my CHIN... so I request "paper printout" to sign, which most of the clerks have learned out to do. I get pissed off because of the complete and utter disregard of the existence of people who are -short- and can't SEE the damned things and don't appreciate being expected to sign something at chin level.

Someone 6'10 isn't going to have any issue with the reader being too high for usability, however, and my opinion is the the persons responsible were at least 5'10" tall males who put things where it's comfortable for -them-....

As a for instance, Language Hat above mentioned living outside of the U.S., and consequently, I have a hunch that "requiring polite speech in public spaces" might mean something quite different in LH's milieu.

I should clarify: although I grew up abroad (Foreign Service brat: Tokyo, Bangkok, Tokyo again, Buenos Aires), I have mostly lived in the U.S. since college (Los Angeles, New Haven, New York, currently western Massachusetts). And while I object to many things about life in the U.S. these days, and to its government pretty much in its entirety, I take tremendous pride in the First Amendment.

Also: Leah, don't miss the chocolates Xopher is handing out!

re: language hat, 258,
See? What did I tell you about making assumptions about people on Making Light :) [this is intended to be a humorous statement]

language hat,
I did not mean to suggest in any way that you didn't like the First Amendment, but I think you know that. Also, sorry for capitalizing your name - usually I try to follow the example given. Chocolate?

LH: But I disagree strongly with your implication that everyone must censor themselves to protect those whose feelings might be hurt. (Yes, I realize you wouldn't put it that way, but that's how I perceive it.)

You know, I think this difference in perception is really, really, important, and deserves more than a parenthetical "Yes, I know" aside.

You are inaccurately rephrasing Michael Roberts, Leah, et al. here. They said that unfettered free speech ought not to be used to intimidate; you rephrased them as arguing for people to censor themselves out of fear of hurting others' feelings, to which you then objected. I call straw-man. Your concern is valid, but what you object to is not synonymous with what they argue for, and either you are misunderstanding them or being disingenuous when you paraphrase them this way and then make fly-shooing hand-wavey motions at any objections they might have to the way you misrepresent them.

There's a line between the two concerns: shouldn't have to self-censor, and shouldn't have to put up with verbal intimidation. I fear I'd disagree with you as to where to draw that line. From what you've been saying so far, I think you truly believe that the Mature Rational Adult can disassociate himself from his feelings 100% and thus it is always his 100% free choice to speak up or to leave the discussion no matter how hot, threatening, or hurtful the invective.

Remember elise's self-description of having to go away until she stopped shaking after seeing some vicious rhetoric about Rigney upon his passing? Do you think elise is abnormally "touchy"?

Remember Teresa's oft-repeated assertion that words on a screen can and do cause PTSD in some readers, and those readers are just as worthwhile as the ones with leather-thick skins? Do you think Teresa is abnormally "touchy"?

You're dealing in this audience with people who think very differently from you about how words on a screen can affect the reader. To call us "touchy" is insulting, no matter how much you say "I mean no offense by it." There are ways and ways to say things such that you can speak your mind and avoid dealing unnecessary hurt. "Touchy" is not a neutral word, and I think you know that.

I think the reasonable compromise between self-censorship and intimidation/harrassment/insult is simply to choose words both accurate to the subject matter and your intent. If you want to neutrally describe something, use a neutral word. It is very rare that an insulting, patronizing, demeaning word is necessary to accurately speak your mind when you truly don't intend to be patronizing, insulting, demeaning.

Example: A discussion about obesity oughtn't to be silenced just because overweight people might be offended by it. However, there's no damn reason under the sun that such a discussion should be involve insults like "fat broads" and "cows" and "thunder thighs". Anyone complaining that they shouldn't be expected to "self-censor" such insults out of their speech belongs in the same category as the people who lament how Political Correctness (TM) has taken away their God-given right to refer to black people as niggers.

--

As for adolescent boys: what, y'all think that respectful speech and action towards women magically happens with the passing of puberty? What the young boy learns is accepted, the young boy will continue to do. If we can expect testosterone-raging adolescents not to rape women, we can damn well expect them to speak respectfully to and of them. Socialization begins early. We need men to speak up to other men, and women to speak up to other women too: "You know what? That's not cool." There's no good reason not to say that to an adolescent boy. He may go off and be crude in private, but he learns that in public that ain't OK. If we expect him to learn that by adulthood, we can't just sit around going, "Oh, boys will be boys - I mean, he's so full of testosterone he can't help it" and looking the other way.

Paula Lieberman@240 wrote: There are all sorts of axes, and the -variation- among individuals on the average.

Yeah, of course. I don't think that has anything to do with the point I was trying to make, though -- perhaps I didn't make it very well.

I say that variation between sexes is not *only* cultural; that is, at least some of it is genetic. If you think there isn't a meaningful difference in distribution of aggressiveness between the sexes, then I would ask why the large majority of the prison population is male. If you think that difference is just culturally driven, I'd ask how you can be confident of that, given that as far as I know it's true in every society in the world and at every time in history. (So far as I know! If I'm wrong, I'd be fascinated to learn the counterexample.)

don delny #260: Don't worry about it -- my blog is Languagehat, I'm either languagehat or language hat depending on where I am, it's all too confusing to bother with. Just don't call me late for dinner.

Speaking of which: goody, more chocolate!

Appears the conversation moved on around me, and Leah and language hat have reconciled their differing modes of speech.

I just want to add this:

language hat: ...I was thinking of a million exchanges I've had with people who say that and concomitantly believe that free speech should be restricted to avoid people having to deal with emotional abuse.

I have no idea whether I am one of those people, because at this point I can't confidently assume I know what you mean here. After the way you've been rephrasing people throughout this discussion, for all I know, you might include in the set of "people who... believe that free speech should be restricted to avoid people having to deal with emotional abuse" people who object to misogynist jokes in the work place, drivers yelling sexually charged slurs at random women walking by, and comments left at blogs expressing the wish that the [female] blogger would get raped.

(I know I'm focusing on feminist issues here, which is only one slice of the spectrum of hurtful, threatening, hostile speech-control speech. It's the slice I am personally familiar with and have had to put up with since the first time I entered the public sphere without a parent holding my hand.)

So, I don't know. Am I "one of those people"? I certainly think that causing emotional abuse is worth avoiding, and the desire to avoid causing emotional abuse is something that marks a mature, respectful adult. And I think, if I may assume from some of the things you've said here thus far, that the amount of situations in which one must risk causing emotional abuse in order to freely speak one's mind are vastly fewer than you would argue.

Leah @ 248, I sincerely doubt I summed it up perfectly or even close to perfectly (I was thinking aloud), but thanks.

Nicole @ 261 - This is fantastically well-said!

Josh @ 245 - actually, I consider the possibility that language hat doesn't notice his silencing effect to be the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that he crushes the weak for the sheer enjoyment of it, in full knowledge of what he is doing. In the spirit of reconciliation, I thought that might have been a little harsh.

actually, I consider the possibility that language hat doesn't notice his silencing effect to be the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that he crushes the weak for the sheer enjoyment of it, in full knowledge of what he is doing. In the spirit of reconciliation, I thought that might have been a little harsh.

Really? Those are the only two possibilities that occurred to you? What I said in my comment didn't even occur to you as a likely or plausible interpretation?

#262 colin

Assumptions do lots of biting--if women are locked in purdah, they're already imprisoned!

There are people who don't get locked up as a general rule in prison, due to special considerations such as being locked up in the house (all those madwomen in the attic in gothic romances of days gone by) or otherwise (Lady Caroline Lamb, or "the Blood Countess" Elizabath Bathory (spelling/remembering name correctly...).... or Laura Bush who was never charged with vehicular homicide but hit the car in front of her killing its driver while a teenager.

Prison is a public incarceration by government for social crimes, as opposed to labelling unwanted women "witches" and putting them to death, or getting rid of unwanted excess female babies by infanticide... however, another factor was that in the past women tends to have high death rates from pregnancy and childbirth....

Another factor, opportunity--locked in purdah, how much opportunity is there to commit a crime of theft or public nuisance!? Prevented access from trades, how much opportunity is there to steal from an employer?

Another factor--protection and not being charged--in cultures which treated women as chattel, father/husband/brother/son/nephew/uncle/etc. get charged as responsible for the crime committed by the -property-. The propery might get put to death, however... Pater Familias in ancient Greece and ancient Rome held the power of life and death over the members of the family. Adulterous wives or wives accused of adultery didn't get imprisoned, they got beheaded if they were married to Henry Bolingboke; Henry Bolingbroke however had a variety of bastards, nobody beheaded him for adultery!

Renaissance Florence did some sanctioning of "notorious sodomites" who were homosexual or bisexual males, however, it didn't seem to charge women with the crime of lesbianism.

"Crime" involves social issues--different societies have different things regarded as criminal, and different responses to people convicted of criminal activity, and often different rules for different classes of society, and different access to activities where someone can commit the various crimes.... if a locality doesn't allow women employ as locality workers, the women can't commit crimes such as embezzling from the locality treasury....

Access and training and treatment and expectations are not equal. However, there have been notable rises in the USA over the past generation, apparently, in the level of violent crimes committed by girls--the changes, again, are social ones, the 'training" is different--Buffy going around bashing up monsters etc. is not something that would have been a common cultural icon much less on TV a generation ago.

Life does imitate art, and art has changed over the past couple generations in the US to showing girls and women being more violent over time--and the rate of violent crime committed by females has gone up, I thnk that it's rather higher in the USA, than the violent crime rate of males in most other western countries....

and the rate of violent crime committed by females has gone up, I thnk that it's rather higher in the USA, than the violent crime rate of males in most other western countries....

You might want to check your numbers. The United States does not have a significantly higher violent crime rate that most other western countries so it is impossible, given that women are responsible for only a fraction of all violent crime, for the female violent crime rate to approach much less surpass the violent crime rate of males in most other countries.

It's true that the USA has a much higher homicide rate than many western countries, but we often have a much lower rate of other crimes so the overall violent crime rates are similar.

My position: moderated online discussion forums are usually better than open unmoderated forums. Bad speech in an online forum can easily drive out good; it's too easy for someone whose goal is something other than conversation where participants learn from each other and refine their views to disrupt that conversation, it's too easy for "debate" to be elevated to an end in itself, and it's too hard for respectful conversation and unrestrained attacks to exist in the same place. I stopped reading unmoderated Usenet groups long ago because the quality of the discussion got too low; the people I liked to read and talk to got driven away. Telling me that I would like Usenet better if I and everyone else had thicker skins isn't a useful suggestion, and doesn't make Usenet more readable.

I also don't think that using the phrase "free speech" without qualification is a useful contribution to a discussion about online conversation groups, in part because I don't think it's being used consistently. Sometimes it's used in the sense of government censorship, and sometimes it's used in some other sense that appears to apply to online discussion forums' moderation policies. This ambiguity makes it a poor phase to use in this discussion: it's too easy to slide from one sense to the other without noticing, or to silently appropriate moral weight that belongs to one sense and shift it to the other.

Josh -- seriously, no. I don't believe that anyone can logically believe that you have to be allowed to be an asshole to everybody in order to protect freedom. So your interpretation did not, in fact, occur to me. To me, the only question here is whether one uses intimidating rhetorical tactics in one's arguments. (Others' mileage may differ.)

I believe to the fullest that language hat supports freedom of speech, and I defy you to find anyone here -- at Making Light -- who disputes the value of freedom of speech. But there is a vast difference between freedom to say what needs to be said, and the freedom to say it in any way one chooses. LH clearly relishes a good verbal sparring match, and practices a lot, and I enjoy snark to an extent which is less than seemly.

What I've been trying to say is that his insistence that the entire Internet is fair game for that sport is not really beneficial to the freedom of all to speak. Just to his freedom to speak. So to speak.

Josh, I am really trying to be charitable. I am honestly attempting to engage language hat on a less rhetorical, and more real, level. He himself does not appear to take that amiss. I think you can let him defend his own position -- he seems to be a grownup.

Plus there's chocolate. You can't argue with chocolate.

For anyone interested in insightful book-length analysis verbal argument and gender, I highly recommend books by blogger Suzette Haden Elgin, including The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and Genderspeak.

Nicole@261 said: There's no good reason not to say that to an adolescent boy. He may go off and be crude in private, but he learns that in public that ain't OK.

Is all of the internet public, or is one allowed to be crude on, say, Fark?

Are you allowed to advocate hanging blacks on Fark? Or just boning chicks? How comfortable are you with that distinction?

If I were distracted by all of the navel-gazing going on in the latter part of this thread, I'd no doubt ask "what the heck was this thread originally about, anyway?!" heh.

What I've been trying to say is that his insistence that the entire Internet is fair game for that sport is not really beneficial to the freedom of all to speak. Just to his freedom to speak. So to speak.

Which is a perfectly reasonable objection to make, but I don't believe that has anything to do with what he actually said, and so your last couple jabs seemed about on par with an inquiry into his wife-beating status.

The entire internet need not be fair game for the rawest of free speech. No one in this thread, lhat included, has suggested otherwise. It seems like there's been a lot of discussion of the value of different kinds of place -- from the biker bar to the coffee klatch, and everything between and beyond.

I don't personally think there's much question that there exists a usefulness for even those places that allow the most raw and unmoderated of speech. They may be ugly, unfriendly places where most people don't want to spend their time. I don't want to spend my time in those places, generally.

But advocating the importance that such places exist is not the same thing as claiming that such places are ideal, or that it's to someone's fundamental detriment not to want to spend time there. And it feels more like you're trying to suggest just that than actually treating his position as he stated it. That seems less than charitable.

Dom @ 272 - how incredibly a propos! Although it's kind of a giggle to me to think of Suzette Hayden Elgin as a blogger first, author second.

And in fact on June 24, she posted something which expresses far better the haphazard point I've been trying to make: here.

The attacker's intentions are irrelevant to the question of whether an utterance is verbal abuse or not. The only meaning an utterance has in real-world spoken language is the meaning the listener understands it to have .... When the target's understanding of the utterance is that it was intended to do harm and is hostile, that's the relevant real-world meaning. In both cases, the target may have misunderstood, but it's the target's perception that matters.

If language hat doesn't intend to have an intimidating effect, then all I can say is "ur doin it rong."

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little #264:
I have no idea whether I am one of those people, because at this point I can't confidently assume I know what you mean here. After the way you've been rephrasing people throughout this discussion, for all I know, you might include in the set of "people who... believe that free speech should be restricted to avoid people having to deal with emotional abuse" people who object to misogynist jokes in the work place, drivers yelling sexually charged slurs at random women walking by, and comments left at blogs expressing the wish that the [female] blogger would get raped.

(I know I'm focusing on feminist issues here, which is only one slice of the spectrum of hurtful, threatening, hostile speech-control speech. It's the slice I am personally familiar with and have had to put up with since the first time I entered the public sphere without a parent holding my hand.)

So, I don't know. Am I "one of those people"?

No, as far as I can tell, you're not, and I repeat that I've found ML to be full of thoughtful and interesting commenters. But surely you're familiar with the attitude I'm talking about, the "you mustn't say such things because somebody's feelings might be hurt"? I certainly don't mean "people who object to misogynist jokes in the work place, drivers yelling sexually charged slurs at random women walking by, and comments left at blogs expressing the wish that the [female] blogger would get raped" -- as I've said, feminist issues are important to me, and I've objected to such things myself when I've had the chance (and was one of the people loudly calling for a "sexism" flag at MetaFilter to call the mods' attention to such comments).

But as someone whose heroes include such humorists as Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, and who used to enjoy Howard Stern back when he was funny, I am very sensitive to any hint of the kind of attitude that led to attempts to suppress such humor. To me, the difference between vulgar, offensive humor and vulgar, offensive behavior to women on the street is clear. I appreciate that lots of people don't agree and think the former contributes to the latter, and obviously the debate on that will go on for a long time, but I will always come down on the anti-censorship side. I'm happy to debate, as long as the person I'm debating with is willing to grant me the benefit of the doubt and accept that I can be a decent person, even a feminist, and hold the views I hold. Alas, it is all to common for Defenders of the Good and Decent to make the lazy assumption that anyone who differs supports the oppression of women (and probably longs for the return of patriarchy and slavery), so I can be a little touchy and reluctant to engage, as has been apparent here.

Michael Roberts #277:

Returning to the attack? What happened to the Hand of Reconciliation? At any rate, I entirely disagree with this:

The attacker's intentions are irrelevant to the question of whether an utterance is verbal abuse or not. The only meaning an utterance has in real-world spoken language is the meaning the listener understands it to have .... When the target's understanding of the utterance is that it was intended to do harm and is hostile, that's the relevant real-world meaning. In both cases, the target may have misunderstood, but it's the target's perception that matters.

It's precisely that kind of attitude that leads directly to censorship. "I felt attacked by what you said, and I don't care how you meant it, you must be silenced!" No. People's feelings are not the court of final appeal, and if you're going to live in this world, you take the risk of having your feelings hurt.

If language hat doesn't intend to have an intimidating effect, then all I can say is "ur doin it rong."

Really? You think my contributions to this discussion are intimidating? Really?

Josh, what he said was this:

I absolutely feel it is both my right and my obligation to speak my mind in whatever way seems fit to me at the moment and, if necessary, apologize later if someone was offended.

That's what I responded to. I'm saying he's wrong; that it is not, in fact, his obligation to couch his rhetoric in whatever inflammatory style suits him at the moment, that in fact it might be a better idea to tone it the h-e-double-toothpicks down, especially when in places where he's neglected to establish the reputation as the straight shooter he undoubtedly enjoys where you have seen him most. Because in failing to establish his identity as a well-meaning person, the actual content of his communication has a chilling effect on discourse, whether he likes it or not.

In assuming that he is well-meaning and that he simply doesn't realize that that chilling effect is a real thing, I am being charitable, but that charity is the basic right of every human being, and I do apologize for having failed to be so charitable earlier.

Am I expressing myself clearly enough at this point? Because this is something I find really important. I apologize for the syntax. This always happens when I'm translating from German.

Yeah, lh, I do. I certainly find myself responding in ways I'd rather not. Was it your intent? I don't believe it was -- you took exception to my description of your peeps, said so in the style you chose to use, and voila! Here we are!

As to attack -- no. If you take the Hand of Reconciliation to mean that I have to like your style of argument, well, I don't. But if you take it to mean that I accept that you're an OK person -- well, I accepted that from the start. I took the reconciliation to mean that I explicitly stated that, because it's by no means obvious from what I've actually posted.

And really: What is the final court of appeal, then? If not the emotions of your interlocutor, then what? Seriously -- I think that's exactly where our misunderstanding lies, so don't take this as an attack, because it isn't.

Michael@274, I think you have to go to Stormfront to be allowed to advocate hanging blacks. (Though I'm not sure, because Fark tends to repulse me, so I don't know the fine detail of whatever social contract they have over there. Conceivably it's "you can advocate hanging blacks as long as no one thinks you're serious.")

In any case, I don't care. I think people on Fark can do or say whatever they want, and it's only the business of other people on Fark. Fark is not the Old Boys Club. It is not a place that anyone who doesn't want to visit, has to go to. It is not associated with any "real world" organization. It's not the gateway to any positions of power in society. It's a place that exists purely and solely for the juvenile to get the thrill of being crude.

It seems to me they are people too, and have just as much right as the extremely shy to have a discourse that they enjoy.

Stormfront I think is quite a bit more hateful, but I think *they* have a right to exist, too. That's where the rubber of Freedom of Speech really meets the road.

I mean, do people believe in freedom of speech or not? It would be bizarre if we're willing to cut more slack for real neo-Nazis than for random frat boys who like boobies.

lh, #244: But I disagree strongly with your implication that everyone must censor themselves to protect those whose feelings might be hurt.

Did you really mean to imply that common courtesy is a BAD thing? Because that's what courtesy is all about -- thinking of how what you say or do may affect other people, and expecting them to do as much for you. It's what makes human society possible. And yes, that does indeed involve some level of "self-censoring", which is why I'm asking you politely rather than flaming you as a free-speech troll.

Also, your statement upthread that "the public space must be free" disturbs me for much the same reasons. The public space must be accessible to all if it is to be truly public. When people are being forced out of it by fear of harassment, it's not "free" at all.

Ah - I'm reading too poorly, and quoting too sparsely. I think it might be better to put it this way. If you intend to be hostile, and your target takes it as such, then you've succeeded. If you did not intend to be hostile, but your target takes it as hostile, your communication has failed and you should try again. Except that on the Internet, it's too damned late. Hence the Hand of Reconciliation.

It's the intent which is difficult to divine from the actual utterance. And it's the intent which is really important here.

Let's take your response to my rant as an example. It could well be that for some unfathomable reason, your intent in calling me childish was to piss some guy in Puerto Rico off royally. If so, you were quite successful. But that intent doesn't really make a lot of sense. If instead, as you say, your intent to ask whether my rant above was permissible on Making Light, then your rhetoric was ill-chosen. You may really have enjoyed it, but unless you wanted to inflame debate, your intended effect failed. (Yes, clearly I also failed -- but the issue in question here is the next paragraph.)

The question in rhetoric, then, is what is your intent? And the effect on your interlocutor is the gauge of success. It is the "court of final opinion". Modifying your rhetoric to have the effect you intend is not censorship, not even self-censorship. It's just rational.

I'm trying to be as logical as I can about this. It's damned important, it really is, because I'm well-meaning, I have to assume you are well-meaning, and if we let a mutual love for snarky rhetoric get in the way, then the outcome is less perfect than I would like.

So that's the real hand of reconciliation. Truly.

Michael Roberts #281: I did not say it is "obligation to couch [my] rhetoric in whatever inflammatory style suits [me] at the moment," and for you to phrase it that way shows (as far as I am concerned) ill will on your part that belies your claims to the contrary. I said, and meant, "I absolutely feel it is both my right and my obligation to speak my mind in whatever way seems fit to me at the moment." Do you really think that translates to "I want to be inflammatory"? Really? Surely "I speak as I please" is the basic statement of free speech. I would have thought it was apparent from everything I've said here that I try to be civil to people (and expect them to give me the same courtesy); if I feel I've been attacked, I will respond in kind, but since you are exactly the same, I don't think you have much standing to complain about it. In any event, it should be obvious that it is impossible to foretell the effects one's words will have on everyone who might hear them, and that if one worries too much about that, one will say nothing but platitudes, so one might as well speak freely -- which does not mean "deliberately offensively" -- and apologize to anyone who has been offended afterwards.

I mean, shit, you've offended me with some of the things you've said; why aren't you turning your blunderbuss on yourself? Could it be because you're sublimely convinced that you're on the side of All That Is Right and Good, and therefore anything you say is ipso facto good? You want to watch that kind of thinking.

Josh #276: I think that summed things up nicely. I'd add one more thing: The discussion at the quiet coffee shop is not more valuable or better or more inherently likely to get to the truth than the discussion in the loud bar (biker or otherwise) or the locker room or even the unregulated town square where wackos can put up a stand and hold forth on their particular bit of nutjobbery as desired. All those places are valuable.

Woops, didn't see your latest before I posted that! Please deduct 50% of the snark and 90% of the hostility. I take your concerns seriously, really I do. But I don't like being misinterpreted.

colin @ 283 -- hmm. I agree, actually. The question has to be where the fine line between crudity and harassment lies, and to what extent crudity should just start feeling gauche, you know? I'm not advocating forcing Websites to be less crude (my God am I ever not) -- but I am saying that crudity is symptomatic of an underlying set of attitudes about acceptable roles, and in general, if we're making progress as a species towards equality, a lot of crudity will logically start to feel pretty gauche to the person being crude. Or his kids or grandkids, anyway.

Har! LH, I'll spot you the whole snark and another 20% of the hostility, you've earned it.

I think my misunderstanding was what the meaning of the word "as" as .. I mean, is.

Heh. Thanks, amigo.

Herein lies the kernel of the disagreement. You intend "I speak as I please" to mean "I state the propositions I want to state". Yes! I agree! That is, in fact, precisely what free speech is, and it is unquestionably vital.

But "as" can also mean "like" -- and so an alternative (and, it appears, less charitable) interpretation of your statement is that you believe it is your obligation to speak "in whatever manner you choose". That's a hell of a difference, and frankly, I think I chose it because "as I please" has more of that meaning in Indiana (I'm in Puerto Rico, not of it) than you probably intended. That sounds, if interpreted uncharitably, as though you mean to say that freedom of speech requires you to be as ... as ... barbed as you want, when stating the propositions you want stated.

Sigh. Reading over that, it probably sounds as though I'm on some kind of medication. (If only.) But it's still important.

Nicole, #261: I don't think there is a neutral synonym for "touchy", because part of the meaning of the word is pejorative, and hence any other term which can be substituted for it (such as "oversensitive") is going to carry the same meaning.

Matt, #270: Hear, hear!

Dom, #272: Having read Genderspeak, I'd like to make one caveat about it: times have changed since it was published. I kept tripping over examples in which it seemed clear that the problem ran much deeper than communication gaps -- for example, one in which a woman's husband feels free to relate things she's confided in him about a sensitive workplace situation to one of her co-workers, who is also his golf partner. If she can't trust her husband to keep his mouth shut about something like that, she's got much bigger problems than anything specific he could have said! All in all, I consider that book more instructive as an illustration of how our social attitudes have changed in just one generation than anything else.

Oh, and GAVSD is in the process of being revised. I'm not sure when the publication date on the new edition is, but it might be worth waiting for -- because I know one of the things she does intend to address is verbal abuse in online fora.

Lee #284:

Courtesy is important, and it's often possible to avoid giving offense by being careful about wording, not being insulting, etc. But sometimes, the offense comes from the ideas being conveyed. Those ideas can be good (gays ought to have the same legal rights as straights) or bad (gays ought to be locked up as deviants and forcibly "cured"), but the thing that's going to give offense there is the ideas. There's not really any way to prevent this kind of offense being given, without suppressing some ideas.

In practice, we do that a lot in the name of both politeness, and private policing of private spaces. Everyone knows you need to tread carefully when discussing politics and religion and sex in the office, because some folks will indeed be offended by your ideas. Just not discussing those things is a way to avoid the conflict.

Another issue is that discussions spill over across different places. Leah talked about taking down some images, because they'd been linked to in a different place, with different moderation rules, and about fairly nasty discussions about images posted someplace else for costumes. I have no idea how to address that. To paraphrase Trotsky, You may not be interested in Fark, but Fark is interested in you....

Now I'm sure this kerfuffle is hurting Boing Boing. My daughter is stomping on her Mickey Mouse floaty boards saying, "I hate Disney!" Or, wait--does that mean it's helping Boing Boing? Damn. This is hard!

Bruce@114: so, the loss of a single $20 bet? Is that the extent of takers on the deleted content?

albatross@294 said: To paraphrase Trotsky, You may not be interested in Fark, but Fark is interested in you....

Yes! That's the question. Is Fark a private space? Can they say whatever they want?

Reflexively I want to say yes, but the line is so weird and new. At what point does harmless snarking about random strangers become harassment? Does it matter if to them, it's just a funny picture and they truly neither know nor care who you are? Does it matter if your name isn't attached, and you don't even know it happened? What if no one person says anything that could possibly be legally actionable, but the cumulative gestalt of the dogpile is horrifying -- can you hold anyone at fault?

Colin @ 273: Where I see people treating people inexcusably, I speak up; to not do so is to tacitly condone it, which I cannot in good conscience do. Where I feel like speaking up is a losing battle, I simply don't go.

Fark is one of those places I don't go.

That said, there are many other public places online and off where I would not accept being made to feel unwelcome by crude, misogynistic conduct, and you can bet I'll make a fuss. Have done and will do again.

language hat @ 274: But surely you're familiar with the attitude I'm talking about, the "you mustn't say such things because somebody's feelings might be hurt"?

I am quite familiar with it. But in my experience, that very line is usually used as a strawman by people who use "Don't expect me to be politically correct!" as an overture to abusive, hateful, insulting language. A friend of a friend uses "Oh, that's so gay" as a synonym for ugly, tactless, stupid, whatever, one too many times; I speak up; he says, "I know it's politically incorrect. That's why I say it. Because I refuse to be silenced just because someone might get their feelings hurt!"

I'm glad to hear that you are not that sort of person. You are, however, using language tropes that that sort of person uses. That's why I have been seeing you as that sort of person in this thread.

More later - not caught up yet - laptop battery gooooiiiinnnnng....

Greg London: Well, I only promised to pay to the first taker, after all. But I want to give full faith and credit to Elusis' claim - she actually does have a solid, academic purpose that would have been served by Boing Boing commentary on Violet Blue posts. Which is a lesson to me to be a little careful in some of my own generalizations.

Nicole 298: A friend of a friend uses "Oh, that's so gay" as a synonym for ugly, tactless, stupid, whatever, one too many times; I speak up; he says, "I know it's politically incorrect. That's why I say it. Because I refuse to be silenced just because someone might get their feelings hurt!"

OK, your FOAF is an asshole. But I have sometimes been able to get the point across by picking some characteristic they have, and using it as a word that means ugly and stupid. I had a Hispanic friend who had that habit. I kept saying "that's so Hispanic." Unfortunately he then started using 'Hispanic' to mean 'gay'—in the homosexual sense. It was weird. But he did stop saying 'gay' as a generic pejorative.

Sometimes it doesn't work. But it at least annoys them, and that's worth it by itself.

*staggers in, panting* I made it to the end of the comments posted since the last time I commented! So now I get to do it again! But it'll be the Reader's Digest Condensed Comments.

My opinion, which is mine:

Whoever said above that "free speech" is a poor term to use is IMHO right. My experience is that lightly-moderated, adult fora like ML or Obsidian Wings or Slacktivist or parts of livejournal (esp. many of those likely to be linked from the metafandom community) have the truly freest speech on the Tubes, much free-er than Central Jerkotopia, even though "free speech! free speech!" is much more of a rallying cry in the latter fora.

Part of what I am doing in using the term Jerkosphere is to emphasize that flagrant assholery is part of a whole flowing culture or pattern of behavior, found on many sites and cropping up sporadically all over.

Do the rest of you-all feel that you instinctively recognize what I mean by The Jerkosphere? Does it convey a meaning?

When I eat made chocolates, I get them freshly-made from Munson's if possible. If I'm buy choc for cooking or life-sustaining munching, it's Ghirardelli. hmm. The Guy is heading thataway for the Fencing Nationals -- what should he bring back as loot? Any suggestions?

Doctor Science, I'm not touching a response to your question with a ten-foot pole. There's nothing I can say that wouldn't exude snark.

There are bacteria in my cells!

language hat @280:
Really? You think my contributions to this discussion are intimidating? Really?

Really. Or possibly just annoying (in the sense that they have annoyed a lot of people, not in the more juvenile sense in which the term is often used.)

That's one reason, along with massive house painting tasks, that I have not been involved in this discussion. I have one meta-comment to make, and then I need to go buy pink paint.

I think Nicole puts her finger on the problem in comment 264 when she says:
After the way you've been rephrasing people throughout this discussion...

You—and other parties in this conversation—have tended to rephrase people's points rather than using direct quotation. Unfortunately, many of these points are nuanced, ambiguously phrased, or both. The restatement, although valuable when it shows what you understood the point to be, is prone to include a certain amount of misinterpretation and simplification.

This has two effects. First, it makes people feel like you're not listening to them. That's frustrating in an online discussion, and some of that frustration boils over. And second, it leads to a lot of strawman accusations, many of them arguably correct despite their innocent origins.

I must emphasize that you are not the only one doing it in this thread. However, I found your manner indefinably grating until I read Nicole's comment and realized that that tendency is what was getting under my skin.

Could I request, for the increased pleasure and productiveness of further discourse, that everyone tend toward quotation and re-use each other's words rather than restatement?

(To anyone who has recently arrived at, or returned to, Making Light, it is possibly useful to know that I am a moderator here.)

Doctor Science, your comments in #301 very much match my experience. Back in the day, I was part of a cabal that set up a moderated companion newsgroup to one in the rec hierarchy, which was popular but infested by a few very determined resident disruptors and, for no very good reason, increasingly targeted by the sorts of trolls that would crosspost disruptive flamewar kindling. Old folks were dropping off faster than the general rate of decline in Usenet usage by that point, and new voices were scarce.

What we found with the moderated group - which killed excessive crossposting and very little else besides really flagrant attacks - was that overall traffic was about the same as in the unmoderated one, but that the number of participants was larger, and got larger over time. Essentially, we trade about three to five shouters for ten or twenty regulars posting at more temperate rates, plus a lot of occasional posters. That was a good deal. We had some very good years, before the structural weaknesses of the Big 8 hierarchies and the rise of web forums made the whole thing increasingly moot.

So...yeah, if the goal is to maximize the opportunities for self-expression on the part of those least susceptible to being put off by others' shouts and abuse and all, then no moderation is the way to go. But if the goal is to maximize actual diversity of voices and scope of participation, then a light dose of moderation is necessary. I prefer beneficial outcomes to rules purity in cases like this - it matters more to me that a lot of people feel able to contribute safely and productively than that the hardiest feel altogether uninfringed.

# 40, (David Bilek) "I think BB would clearly have been better off if they had listened to and followed Teresa's rules for PR management."

To make this more explicit, I suspect that Teresa gave them some good, very specific advice, which was ignored. Now she's in a situation where she must follow her employers wishes about a very public matter and keep her mouth shut about how clueless her employers have been.

# 107, (James D. MacDonald) While folks have been quick to assume that Cory, Xeni, Teresa, Patrick, and who-knows who else is lying, why doesn't anyone ask if Violet Blue may not be shading the truth? I think it's within the realm of possibility that she knows darned good and well exactly why those posts were hidden.

I've been thinking the same thing. Carefully following the links around the story confronts one with the possibility that Violet is something of a loose cannon. Obviously I can't prove that one way or another, but I'm familiar with a particular type which she seems to fit.

# 117 (Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little) Heck, I've just now recently been in a situation where I felt the need to disassociate from someone because I could no longer bear to tacitly condone their personal conduct; yet because that conduct was personal, I considered it inappropriate to tell everyone in our social group what my gripe was.

I've been in a similar situation. Sometimes the best thing to do is be quiet - this is the only thing the Boing-Boingers have done right.

IMHO, the best thing to do would have been to leave the Violet Blue stories there, but remove the links, possibly substituting the phrase, "Link removed by the author."

Alex

Xopher @ 194: First of all, thanks for your civility. I really do appreciate it--this can't be an easy accusation to hear. However:

"But "cold water poured over his body" is not the same as a cup (eight ounces!) of water splashed in the face."

That isn't what you said. You said (@ 47): "Some of the commenters on the resulting thread ought to be spanked, or have their heads shoved in the toilet (not to drown them, just long enough to trigger a dive reflex and humiliate them a little)." [bold mine]

Giving someone a swirlie may be all in good fun when done by an older brother (or maybe not), but it certainly isn't when done to humiliate. When it's used like that, then I think it is torture.

"But let me just state categorically: I do not really think the bad posters in the BB thread should be spanked, nor that they should have their heads shoved in the toilet. I meant they were childish shitheads. I chose a bad (that is, unclear) way of expressing that, and I apologize. I do not advocate torture of anyone,* and I apologize for the impression, unintentional as it was, that my remarks created."

When you use violent, evocative language, saying "but I don't really mean it" afterwards is not, in my mind, any sort of defense. Violent language is violent in and of itself, even when separated from the possibility of real-world follow-through. If you heard someone say, "She deserves to be raped to death with a rusty knife," how comforting would a subsequent "Well, not really" be? The language itself is hurtful.

When you use this sort of violent language (and you use it quite regularly) it freaks me out. Even as mere rhetoric it crosses lines that should not be crossed. People (me included) will think up all sorts of terrible things to do to people they don't like, granted. But it's not a part of human nature that should be indulged, either physically or conversationally.

heresiarch, #306: I think your final two paragraphs make a very good point. We've been talking upthread about the effects of language on social customs -- how what is perceived as safe to discuss publicly can become perceived as safe to do as well. (Hate radio, anyone?) That's a sword which cuts both ways.

IMO, that sort of venting is something preferably done in private. Xopher, you've listened to me a time or two when I needed to rant and didn't want to do it here. My inbox is always open to you for the same purpose.

language hat @ 223: "If we were on MetaFilter I'd have a reasonable expectation that my interlocutors would be aware of my six-year history of being a strong and consistent feminist voice on the site,"

Speaking only for myself, whether we'd had that history or not, I still would have raised an eyebrow at your comment. Being feminist doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed never to act in a sexist way, nor does it exempt you from criticism from other feminists when they think you might be doing so.

"So all I can say is: some people, male and female both, are in fact touchy, sensitive, and verbose; in the sexist culture we inhabit, females are unfairly stuck with those characterizations whether they deserve them or not, whereas men are either given a pass or lumped in with women and mocked;"

While I’m very glad you recognize that being touchy isn't a trait limited to or defined by females, I’d be even gladder if you recognized that being "touchy" is a universal human trait, one that includes to some degree everyone who isn't a sociopath, even you. Really—I’ve seen your emotions get the better of you time and time again on this thread alone. Given the evidence of your own posting history, how can you accuse other people of being too "touchy"?

The idea that some people (men) are capable of complete rationality, and can argue unencumbered by emotion is just as sexist as the idea that women are all touchy and emotional.

Lee @ 307: Thanks. =)

colin roald @ 198: “"Look at the hooters on that one" is a thought that's inherently part of part of being an adolescent male.”

No, it isn’t. (Especially not for the gay ones!) It’s inherently part of being socialized as an adolescent male. Feeling a deep and profound appreciation for the physical beauty of one’s preferred gender(s), now that’s an inherent part of life—equally so for women. How you express it, though, is entirely social. “Look at the hooters on that one” is a back-handed compliment that simultaneously reduces the woman to meat and reinforces the macho heterosexuality of the speaker.

228: "One of the ways to gain maturity is by having a place where you're allowed to express your idiot ideas. In fact, I suspect that the more thoroughly we wall off the idiot ideas, the more they fester underground, and the longer it takes for people to grow out of them."

I’m deeply confused. Let me get this straight: being a sexist asshole is something that every boy’s got a certain amount of, and he’s just got to get it out of his system some way or another? That having places where he can treat women like dirt to the LOLZ of his peers will teach him how to reign in his worst instincts and respect women as equals?

This strikes me as landing somewhere between foolish and downright insane: being sexist and objectifying women is a learned behavior, and engaging in sexist cat-calling (as opposed to the wider category of appreciating human beauty, which can be done respectfully) only teaches them to do it more, better, and be less apologetic about it. The only way humans, boys included, learn to act in an acceptable manner is by being praised when they do and criticized when they don’t.

@ 262: "If you think there isn't a meaningful difference in distribution of aggressiveness between the sexes, then I would ask why the large majority of the prison population is male."

They're mostly black, too. Do you think that that's due to genetic factors?

I'm glad to hear that you are not that sort of person. You are, however, using language tropes that that sort of person uses. That's why I have been seeing you as that sort of person in this thread.

Nicole ... brilliant! That is an absolutely crucial point...

Languagehat, even you alluded to this before, when speaking about people not knowing your history here. That showed us you were aware that all we had to go on were your immediate comments, but then you still seemed surprised and offended when we did just that.

You didn't really adjust your manner of wording to account for our lack of knowledge, and so didn't really have the right to be put out by our "failure" to see what you "really" meant. When some of your statements were paraphrased in a decidedly negative direction, it seemed justified by what the implications of your words seemed to be. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been following along this entire thread thinking the same way as Nicole. She is by no means a PC-nazi, but she does typify the level of sensitivity this board tries to uphold.

So the lesson of this whole thread, all 300+ pieces of it is: While meaning may be defined by the listener, it is controlled by the speaker, and both are bloody damned useless if they don't try to understand the other...

/soapbox

Giving someone a swirlie may be all in good fun when done by an older brother (or maybe not), but it certainly isn't when done to humiliate. When it's used like that, then I think it is torture.

heresiarch, I thought your first post to Xopher was way over the top, and I'm glad this one is more in keeping with his (more generous than I would have been) reply.

However, it is just as incorrect as the first. How can humiliation automatically be torture? Humiliation is the basis for nearly every system of judicial punishment ever created. It is certainly fitting that those commenters suffer a little tweaking for their obnoxiousness. Xopher's particular choice of punishments was clearly meant as much for its humour value as for any actual merit. At least you had the good graces not to continue to suggest that a swirlie ranked as water torture.

I've been reading Xopher's posts, as well as his LJ entries for years now, and fail to see how anyone could be freaked out by them. I know we've just been discussing how meaning is defined by the reciever, but some definitions could use with a dictionary; Xopher is controlling his meaning just fine...

Edward Oleander @ 312: "Humiliation is the basis for nearly every system of judicial punishment ever created."

What makes you think that judicial punishment can't also be torture?

"At least you had the good graces not to continue to suggest that a swirlie ranked as water torture."

Although I'm reluctant to point it out, that actually was what I was saying. Or rather, that it can be. It's hard for me to imagine how being forcibly seized (since I doubt anyone would voluntarily submit), dragged to the nearest toilet, and having one's head shoved in would fail to qualify as severe mental suffering. There isn't an exculpatory "*Things typically associated with grade-school shenanigans are automatically disqualified" footnote after the UN Convention Against Torture; this stuff still counts.

"I've been reading Xopher's posts, as well as his LJ entries for years now, and fail to see how anyone could be freaked out by them."

Part of why I was so shocked and appalled when Xopher denied that what he was advocating was torture is that it came from him, who is sensible and eloquent in almost every case but this, and that it happened on Making Light, which is so often a voice of sanity and reason. This was the last place I expected to encounter this sort of thing, and my defenses were down.

Bruce@299: I only promised to pay to the first taker

Ah. Sorry. Missed that part.

Dr. Science@301: Do the rest of you-all feel that you instinctively recognize what I mean by The Jerkosphere? Does it convey a meaning?

Oh, gawd, yes. Some might suggest that my ability to recognize the term is because I'm a member of said group, but that's a different conversation.

I think the Jerkosphere is simple vandalism, extended into the realm of reputation and self-esteem.

Consider customer-vandals who steal towels, urinate on bathroom floors, or take hundreds of ketchup packets which they never use. Their thinking seems to be roughly: the hotel/restaurant owner is rich, in part due to my spending, so if it is possible for me to make her poorer, I will take the opportunity to do that.

It doesn't make economic sense, but as a behavioral-economic model it predicts the behavior of a tiny fraction of the population quite well.

Analogously, if someone has a good reputation (like Boing Boing) or high self-esteem (like the cosplayer in #104), then online reputation vandals will take every opportunity to reduce that person's or company's reputation or self-esteem, even if there is no direct benefit to them, just because it's possible.

heresiarch@306: When you use violent, evocative language, saying "but I don't really mean it" afterwards is not, in my mind, any sort of defense.

Hm, that's weird. Using violent evocative language usually triggers my "Must destroy arch enemy" response. I don't think xopher's comments ever triggered me. I think part of it is probably because I'm somewhat familiar with xopher and know he's not serious. A quick look at those examples you posted seem obviously meant to be over-the-top language to the point I don't take it as an actual threat, but more an expression of frustration taken to an absurd (and somewhat funny) conclusion.

That said, I could see how it might land the wrong way for other people or send them into a different interpretation that might not even come to a conscious level between that person and Xopher.

The thing going on over at BB lately that got my goat was folks taking the deletion of some old blog posts and comparing it to Stalin. That was done specifically to overinflate the damge done by the actual act. And to me, that's little different than someone talking down the damage of a war in order to make it sound like it'll be a cakewalk (we'll be welcomed as liberators. Out in six weeks. that sort of thing.)

As long as some folks were bringing up stalin's revolution, 1984 totalitarian states, and other absurdities, it seemed clear to me that nothing was going to get resolved because no one was having a conversation about anything real. It was all metaphors getting thrown around, which can be OK if the metaphors match. But they didn't in this case.

But I never read any of xopher's comments as doing anything like these BB folks invoking Stalin were doing.

Both the Xopher/heresiarch comment thread and some comments by language hat raise an interesting problem here. Statements have a context, based partly on what's previously been said both within the thread and by this person over the years. In private conversation, we all do this all the time. It's one reason why friends can talk to each other in ways that would cause a fight among strangers ("Hey, nigga!"), and have it work out. This context is the only thing that keeps every post on every issue from having to include twenty pages of legalese type disclaimers.

One interesting sideline of this is that different participants know different amounts of history, and different participants also weigh previous posts differently. I recall someone inferring from one post of Lee's that she was a fundamentalist Christian, which was hilarious. More to the point, when I'm reading a post by a regular poster, some part of the process of decoding the meaning of that post involves the context of other things they've written, what I know of their beliefs and background. The same short post by, say, Xopher, abi, Fragano, and Patrick might be read rather differently, because I know their styles, and infer some stuff.

My default here is to try to understand what's said, but to "receive liberally"--that is, to try to parse what's said in the least offensive or attacking way possible. Just as my comments to other drivers on the beltway don't really indicate a desire to send them home to fornicate with their mothers and pleasure men orally, I figure that Xopher's comments imply frustration and anger, not any kind of actual advocacy for violence. Similarly with people who express the wish to improve someone's understanding with a clue-by-four. And I do this largely based on past comments and assumptions common to ML posts.

This makes cross-site quoting very subject to misinterpretation, in much the same way that it's easy to take a quote from a book or speech out of context and smear someone with it. It also means that different readers with different weights for history vs current post will interpret things differently.

albatross, I think that's spot on. And of course, the context isn't just about shared backstories between people, or the personal history of the speaker, it's also about how the listener wraps contextual elements from their own history around what they've heard.

So often on internet arguments, the more you read, the stronger you get the sense that people aren't attacking each other's arguments, they're attacking something else that those arguments happen to remind them of.

You can see hints of that in this thread: languaghat thinking of the "million exchanges" he's had with people who want to priviledge their right to never have their feeling hurt over all else; Nicole pointing out that languagehat's tropes sound too much like those used by people with an unpleasant agenda; Greg getting strong whiffs of the Bush administration from people casually slinging Stalin references over at BB.

It's a perfectly natural way to behave and we all do it - we have to interpret things through the filter of our previous experiences, because that's pretty much how our brains work - but it can also be a catlyst for grumpiness and non-hugging.

colin roald @ 198: “"Look at the hooters on that one" is a thought that's inherently part of part of being an adolescent male.”

heresiarch@310: No, it isn’t. (Especially not for the gay ones!) It’s inherently part of being socialized as an adolescent male. Feeling a deep and profound appreciation for the physical beauty of one’s preferred gender(s), now that’s an inherent part of life—equally so for women. How you express it, though, is entirely social.

Okay, I'm not talking about how you express it. I'm talking about the *thoughts*, the *urge*. If you're focusing on the precise wording, I'm failing to communicate.

The thought that goes repeatedly through the head of an average teenage boy is an intense and irrational: "oh my god i want to copulate with that person. oh oh look at her." If you water that down to describing it as merely "deep and profound admiration", I think you've pretty much missed the point.

Personally speaking, *I* grew up in an environment very close to the feminist ideal. I learned that this was a bad thought that "reduces the woman to meat". I internalized very very early that women were delicate flowers and they never wanted anyone to make them uncomfortable. In short, I learned that *my feelings* were *wrong*.

Please note very very clearly: this is *before* I ever expressed any of it. I have never catcalled a woman in my life. *Expression* doesn't enter into it -- I learned that my *feelings* were wrong.

Over the subsequent 20-25 years of my life, I have become convinced this damaged me rather significantly at a deep level. I think it's not unlikely that it's an important contributing factor to why I am 37 years old, unmarried and childless. And I'm just going to have to say I'm accustomed to be attacked at this point in the conversation by feminists who accuse me of variants of Nice Guy Syndrome, or whatever. That's a whole nother 3-day flamewar, and I think I'm going to refuse to go there. Please allow me to stipulate (a) sexism is bad and (b) I am not blaming anyone for my personal problems.

All of the above I'm saying just to provide context for this: (c) there are real potential costs of telling adolescents that their emotions are wrong; (d) that boys have emotions, too; and (e) be careful what you wish for.

heresiarch: That having places where he can treat women like dirt to the LOLZ of his peers will teach him how to reign in his worst instincts and respect women as equals?

Um, no. I don't think that's what I'm saying at all. Apparently you can't see a difference between boys being allowed to actually talk about lust, and "treating women like dirt".

me@ 262: "If you think there isn't a meaningful difference in distribution of aggressiveness between the sexes, then I would ask why the large majority of the prison population is male."

heresiarch: hey're mostly black, too. Do you think that that's due to genetic factors?

Again, no. But I still think there's a meaningful genetic difference in aggressiveness between the sexes. Is it necessary for you to accuse me of racism, to respond to my question?

Heresiarch, re: Xopher's comments and torture, perhaps it's worth noting that the thread began with Teresa's "I'm hereby declaring open season on anything unfamiliar that comes through the door. Newbies: behave or die.". I don't think anyone thought for a moment that she was really intending to go and shoot anybody, nor advocating same.

heresiarch: That having places where he can treat women like dirt to the LOLZ of his peers will teach him how to reign in his worst instincts and respect women as equals?

What I think I've been *trying* to say, is boys need to come to terms with their urges sometime, somewhere. Suppressing them entirely is not healthy. And so it seem to me better that there exist someplace private, that doesn't have to be made safe for girls, so that actual girls don't have to be in the crossfire while it's happening. Ideally, there *will* be more mature men present to exert guidance.

320, colin roald &
320, heresiarch

If you think there isn't a meaningful difference in distribution of aggressiveness between the sexes, then I would ask why the large majority of the prison population is male.

That's not the most elegant way to put it, but...basically colin is right-ish.

Males* have more testosterone (T) in circulation than females, have more T receptors than females, and during adolescence have surges of T that are unusually large compared to both adult males and females of the same age. T is correlated with aggressive behavior, something that can be demonstrated through observation, animal models, and direct experiment.

It's not unreasonable to take this information plus the subjective, introspective accounts of post-adolescent males and come to the conclusion than most (51%+) males have very intense experiences of lust as teens, that may very well be substantially more, er, animalistic than most (51%+) females experience.

In other words, men are dogs. No, not all the time, not universally, not every last one. But most men, in most times and places, have at least gone through a period where they really wanted to do it with anything that moves. What actions (including speech) a male takes separates the men from the boys.

p.s. I did hedge the discussion of T above in regards to women: women have T and T receptors, and more importantly, the sensitivity of those T receptors counts for a lot. You can have fewer receptors that activate quite easily and get the same magnitude effect.

*I'm thinking of most, if not all mammals. Primates, at least.
**almost all, caveat, etc.

Dom, 316,
hey, that was really insightful! Very cool!
No, I really can't think of a way to elaborate on that, I just thought it encapsulated the motivations of many in the Jerkosphere perfectly.

colin @ 322 -- Very good points. I actually started getting fed up with some aspects of Quakerism when I started taking karate for exercise. Given that violence is in our nature, it doesn't seem reasonable to me to simply pray that it isn't -- better to get to know our violence, understand it and love it, and thereby channel it. If God made us violent, who are we to deny it? If we fail to channel our rage, we're liable to do all sorts of things -- bomb Iran, say, or tear random stranger's heads off on online fora. (I should probably look into a karate class again, actually...)

The same could be said of sexual urges. They're real, clearly. They don't go away if you're told the feelings are bad; they can't. All you can achieve is neurosis.

#320, colin, wrote

"The thought that goes repeatedly through the head of an average teenage boy is an intense and irrational: "oh my god i want to copulate with that person. oh oh look at her." ...

Personally speaking, *I* grew up in an environment very close to the feminist ideal. I learned that this was a bad thought that "reduces the woman to meat"... In short, I learned that *my feelings* were *wrong*." "

That makes a lot of sense, and makes you come off much better than your earlier posts.

The way I think of this is that people should almost* never be taught that desires are wrong. But they almost always need to be taught how to channel desires appropriately, so that they are not harmful or threatening to others; the first step is to teach kids to ask for others' toys, not grab.

Creating a space where people post "look at those hooters!" isn't making progress on this front; it's indulging the grabby approach. Now, in a lot of cases, I think there is a place for environments where we can temporarily enjoy our sloppy selves. I don't have a problem with sites like foodporn.com. (Link is not erotic, but may set off badly written internet filters.) But what I've read a lot of women saying is that it is threatening for us to express our desires in this sort of blunt way, and that environments where this is encouraged only hinder boys' process of maturing.

I should say that I am still a young guy (27) and haven't raised any kids yet; I'm sure these opinions will change when I do.

* If you tell me that your desire is to cause pain and humiliation to innocent, genuinely unwilling victims, I guess I am going to tell you that that desire is wrong, and perhaps you should seek professional help.

colin @322: Feelings are neither objectively good nor bad, they just are. It's the expression of feelings that can be labelled as right or wrong.

I think much of this thread has been focused on expression, specifically through language, and its effects on others. How young men (or any of us, really) feel is not at issue; how they feel, whether lustful, angry, happy or whatever, is just how they feel, no more and no less. How they express their feelings can be judged right or wrong.

Also? Women are not "delicate flowers". They're people, in the same way you are people. If you interact with them on any other basis, you may have some extra difficulty communicating.

David@269 said The United States does not have a significantly higher violent crime rate that most other western countries...

I know statistics on this sort of thing are difficult to compare, so I just concentrated on assaults, and found this:
United States 38%
United Kingdom 12.3%
South Africa 9.3%
Mexico 4.3%
India 4%
(US numbers were even more disproportionate on rape, but I decided to be charitable, and hope that the % of US women who report rape was also higher than other countries, thus skewing the data.)

We're also inching closer every year to reaching the 1% of our population in prison -- what an amazing achievement that will be.

It's true that the USA has a much higher homicide rate than many western countries, but we often have a much lower rate of other crimes so the overall violent crime rates are similar.

The stats I found were also higher for burglaries, homicides (even non-firearm homicides), car theft, you name it. Not sure I've got a point to make -- maybe just a "someone on the Internet may be wrong" moment.

Don, Michael, and DavidS -- thank-you.

pericat@327: Also? Women are not "delicate flowers". They're people, in the same way you are people. If you interact with them on any other basis, you may have some extra difficulty communicating.

I know that *now*. I didn't when I was 15. It took me a long time to figure out that I had internalized a false belief, and I'm *still* working on rooting it out.

I think you will find, though, that if you imprint an impressionable 15-year-old with too much theory about the chilling effect of gendered communication, he will acquire the idea that women are extremely delicate. Particularly if the blunter counterbalance gets completely chased out of polite company.

Whatever. The horse is dead now. I'll stop.

Meanwhile, you are correct that I have been confused and entangled about when I was talking about expressions and when I was talking about feelings. I tend to find one of the main benefits of arguing on the internet is that teaches me where I don't have my thoughts straight.

[skimming over the past 12 hours' comments....]

From off a mailing list I'm on... the "contributor" of the material below is British, and persists in posting his variety of "humor" to that list which he regards as humorous, and most of which I regard as verminous and vile and promoting vile attitudes/memes...
=========

A Mexican maid asked for a pay increase.

The wife was very upset about this and asked:

'Now Maria, why do you want a pay increase?'

Maria: 'Well Seniora, there are three reasons
why I want an increase.
The first is that I iron better than you.'
Wife: 'Who said you iron better than me?'
Maria: 'Your husband said so.'
Wife: 'Oh.'

Maria: 'The second reason is that I am a
better cook than you.'
Wife: 'Nonsense, who said you were a better
cook than me?'
Maria: 'Your husband did.'
Wife: 'Oh.'

Maria: 'My third reason is that I am a better
lover than you.'
Wife (really furious now): 'Did my husband
say that as well?'

Maria: 'No Seniora, the gardener did.'

SHE GOT THE RAISE!!!

========================
Getting back directly to the discussion on-going here, different people organically has different sensorsory systems, reactions, processing, reactions, etc., for a whole range of different varieties. There are people I've known with varying degrees of sociopathy--none so extreme as various David Drake characters, who glom onto someone else who they give in effect the complete keeping of what would be a conscience if they had one in the first place, to, to tell them absolutely what to do--who have gone to the lengths of using other people as their moral compass.... "what would Jesus do?" as a guide is a sort of analogy, since their internal moral compass is at best unreliable for them, they use external instructions/directions.

What that has to do with the discussion at hand:
1) There are people with internal judgment systems which not only they rely upon, but which other people navigate by, willingly (or sometimes unwillingly, consider Mr Mugabe... most of the Zimbabwe's population probably wants him gone, but they have to dance to or carefully around his strings if they value their continued existence).
2) There are people who -lack- usable internal judgment systems or don't trust their own, and who therefore base all their decisions, on what other people say/do/have taught then, and are effectivly complete and utter followers.
3) Most people are somewhere between 1) & 3)

Having said all that, there are other situations which are analogous. Different people have reactions etc., and just because A is male and aroused fast, doesn't mean that B who is male ALSO arouses quickly, or that C who is female doesn't around as quickly as A does.... one's PERSONAL perceptions and responses and reaction time and hotspots are NOT necessarily congruent to anyone else's.

I keep hearing what I consider sociobiology horseshit... I went to MIT. It would have been interesting if sociological studies had been longitudinally done there.... there were a higher percentage of men living in the women's dorm, than there were women living in some of the officially co-ed dorms I think! The ratio in my class was 125 women in an entering class of 1000, and it was the early 1970s. There was a lot of pressure in all sorts of ways. There was at least one woman who was a virgin in my class at graduation, she might have been the sole one, however--I expect that there were a lot more men who were. There were male Air Force officers = college graduates I was acquainted, with, who were virgins past college graduation and more than two years' service in the military...

The phoney baloney of "every male thinks about sex sex sex all the time as an adolescent," or at least, "all boys think about it more than all girls" is a bunch of bullshit.... mentally stripping people is -rude-, actually, and I have to wonder if it never occurred to those who do so, what the feelings of the people they're doing it to might be, and that the people they're doing it to, might not be AWARE of it and annoyed about it?! And that if it were done back to the people doing it by someone they did NOT find appealing, they would be ticked off? .... or, they might get caught at it and the person catching them at it, take it as a signal to hit on them?

That last can put quite a -clamp- on roving thoughts about such things....

"Mentally stripping someone is rude..."

...which is why you never let on that you're doing it. We're completely allowed to think rude things. I do it ALL the time. I cannot and will not censor my own thoughts for fear of hurting someone's feelings if they found out what I'm thinking. They won't, and to censor myself as if they could would lead to madness, possibly quite literally.

I think the "mental stripping is rude" thing is like the people who claim that hypermilers are rude. Because we only notice it happening when people are being rude, we think that doing it at all is rude, but that's not true. It happens all the time and we never notice, because those people are being polite about it.

I actually wrote this comment to someone at work today, in seriousness, and expect a serious answer:

Sigh. What is the cleartext of the smiley?

Somehow, it seems appropriate to this thread at this point in its drifty life.

sherrold: The stats I found were also higher for burglaries, homicides (even non-firearm homicides), car theft, you name it.

You were looking at PER CAPITA rates right? Because the USA has many more people that most countries so the absolute numbers will, of course, be higher. Some examples of burglaries per capita (per 1000): Australia 21.75, Denmark 18.33, Finland 16.77, UK 13.83, Canada 8.94, USA 7.1. Note I left out a lot of countries, just giving examples. But you can see the per capita burglary rate for the USA is a third of Australia, half of much of Europe, and 20% less than Canada.

I checked assault and the numbers for the USA are higher than I remembered, so I'll be happy to retract the "much lower", but I wanted to provide one example of crime rates to show I wasn't completely off base.

sherrold@328: 38% of what?

#332, John A Arkansawyer -

That's an interesting question! (I wonder if there are any linguists studying that yet.)

I suspect it's not a simple question, either, because it's going to be fairly context-specific. "I'm only teasing you," "I'm very happy," and "I'm mocking myself," are three the spring to mind right away.

As an aside, I gave up smileys almost entirely about a year into my internet career. Someone who didn't know what they were got offended by something I said on a mailing list, and it took a lot of talking back and forth and groveling on my part to make peace. I adopted instead the style of putting my purported actions inside a pair of asterisks and found it to be more useful and fun than smileys. I've only just recently started using smileys again with people I know are familiar with them, out of laziness.

*exits right, doing the cha-cha*

albatross @ 318: "Just as my comments to other drivers on the beltway don't really indicate a desire to send them home to fornicate with their mothers and pleasure men orally, I figure that Xopher's comments imply frustration and anger, not any kind of actual advocacy for violence."

I don't feel that calling people cock-suckers is blameless either. Cock-suckers are, by and large, quite generous and loving people. Which is to say: the fact that there are, in our language, kinds of shorthand used to designate things as good or bad that are exceptionally sexist/racist/whatever, and that those shorthands are often used by people who aren't in fact sexist/racist/whatever doesn't make those shorthands less offensive. I think Xopher would agree, based on his comments about trying to get non-homophobic friends of his to stop using "gay" to mean "lame" or "stupid."

When someone without a hint of homophobic intent calls something gay to show their distaste, I don't like it. When someone calls for violence to show their hatred for their opponents, I don't like it. Either way, what they are doing is reinforcing ideas that being gay is bad, or that violence is an acceptable response to disagreement.

Tom P / flashboy @ 319: "So often on internet arguments, the more you read, the stronger you get the sense that people aren't attacking each other's arguments, they're attacking something else that those arguments happen to remind them of."

This is such a perfect summary of this thread that I don't have anything at all to add to it.

colin roald @ 320: "I internalized very very early that women were delicate flowers and they never wanted anyone to make them uncomfortable. In short, I learned that *my feelings* were *wrong*. Please note very very clearly: this is *before* I ever expressed any of it. I have never catcalled a woman in my life. *Expression* doesn't enter into it -- I learned that my *feelings* were wrong."

Two things: first, you're right, that is absolutely fucked up. To me, that borders on child abuse. No one should ever be taught that feelings are wrong, and that they are bad people for having them. Feelings aren't wrong--they're simply there, like the weather. Trying to repress the bad ones only gives them more power to destroy you.

(Note that in my post to Xopher, I mention that everyone, even me, gets violent urges. It was the expression of them, not the having of them that I was objecting to.)

Second thing: Like pericat said, no one was criticizing adolescent males for being horny and wanting to have sex. They were objecting to expressing those urges in a particular, misogynistic way. The reason I was focusing narrowly on "Look at the hooters on that one" was because that was precisely what I was discussing, what Leah was discussing way up there.

There's a chunk of feminist theory that discusses what is called "homosociality." It tries to describe the ways in which a man interacting with a women has nothing to do with the woman, and everything to do with his buds who're watching. The kind of insulting objectification permeating the discussion Leah mentioned is a textbook case of homosociality.

Can we agree that powerful sexual urges among young men is healthy and normal, and discussing those urges is fine, but that using that as an excuse to behave badly is wrong?

R.M. Koske @ 331: Seconded.

colin @ 329: "I tend to find one of the main benefits of arguing on the internet is that teaches me where I don't have my thoughts straight."

Saying exactly what I mean, and only that, is a rare event for me, and usually follows much tummy-clenching. I suspect this has something to do with not having ordered thoughts.

sherrold @ 328 -

Make sure you're comparing like with like - crime statistic numbers, without the accompanying dates, and statistical sources (per capita, absolute percentage, conviction vs. reported) isn't, unfortunately, very useful.

(I once saw a comparison of UK vs. US crime rates that suggested that the UK was utter paradise, crime wise - unfortunately, it turns out the report was counting UK convictions vs. US reported events - this was nowhere evident in the data or the comparison. Charitably, I presumed that the reporter was not, in fact, trying to skew opinions with near-falsified data.)

R.M. Koske, #331: Yes, exactly. What you think or feel is your own business; what you do becomes the business of others. And David's analogy between teaching young children not to grab for someone else's toy and teaching young men not to say rude things about women (@326) is spot-on.

Tangentially, this is also why I have no patience with the Christian teaching that having lustful thoughts about someone is "committing adultery in your heart". If the thought is the same as the deed, why should I resist the deed once I've had the thought?

#336 heresiarch

There's a chunk of feminist theory that discusses what is called "homosociality." It tries to describe the ways in which a man interacting with a women has nothing to do with the woman, and everything to do with his buds who're watching. The kind of insulting objectification permeating the discussion Leah mentioned is a textbook case of homosociality.

I'm not particularly versed in such feminist theory, but I have a number of TMI stories... and for that matter, I remember some stuff from college in which people got boxed into doing things they might not have wanted to do, but felt expected to do/pressured by others to do.

Thinking further along that, that sort of group-thing prove-to-group stuff is what's involved with frat initiations that get out of hand into lethality, what's sometimes involved in drinking contests, etc... it's peer pressure, both actual, and perceived.

OK, I have to admit there are some people whose deaths I really do desire. I really, truly think the world would be a better place if they dropped dead this very instant. That doesn't necessarily mean I think any method of getting rid of them is OK, or that they should be eliminated "at any cost." Here is my list:

DEFINITELY SHOULD DIE:
Al Qaeda
The Islamic Court in Iran that sentenced those 16-year-olds to death for being gay
Any other Islamic Court that has handed down a similar sentence
Robert Mugabe
The Janjaweed militia in Darfur
The Saudi "Religious Police"
Men who have done "honor killings"
My "Plastic" tormentor (see below)

MAYBE SHOULD DIE:
The Taliban
Hezbollah

I'm sorry if this upsets you, heresiarch, but I really think that those people's deaths would benefit the world, in some cases instantly (I'm speaking of the first group). Would I advocate executing them if they were captured? Difficult. I don't think so, because if they were in custody they couldn't do any more harm, provided they were doing LWOP in a secure facility.

I'm a gentle and kindhearted person by nature, and that's exactly why the sort of thing the people on my first list do has to be stopped, and stopped at once. Any time a member of Al Qaeda dies, I rejoice. I know there are people who regard that as unseemly, but I disagree.

heresiarch, I wonder how long you spent hunting examples of my violent rhetoric to try to make me look so wicked? Never mind. To address your examples in turn,

• "I want every member of that reprehensible body to die a sticky death" (July 1, 2007)—since my "this" link goes nowhere now, I conclude that you don't think it matters what reprehensible body I was discussing. That astonishes me. I didn't remember, but later comments suggest it was the Saudi Religious Police (whom I'd forgotten about but have now added to my "Definitely" list). They are responsible for so much death, so much pain, and so much social repression.
• "I did think that one particularly reprehensible Plastic (the real kind, not the movie kind) deserved to be horribly disfigured in a car accident" (more graphic details follow) (June 8, 2007)—here I'm discussing someone who systematically tormented, libeled, and incited others to torment and libel me (and anyone else who crossed him or looked like a vulnerable target) over a period of many months. He organized a group of people to come into a group where I and some others could get support to talk about difficult matters such as personal relationships; they came in and ridiculed anyone to spoke about feelings, and published more libel about me and others, basically driving everyone but themselves out of the group. His own webpage advocates cruelty toward any less fortunate person (he really said "being cruel to people who are poorer or less attractive than you is the right thing to do"). He has systematically, deliberately, and by his own admission attempted to drive a troubled teenager to suicide. Since I have some distance now I no longer want him to live in torment for 80 years. I do, however, still think the world would be a better place AT ONCE if he suffered instant death from a cocaine-induced brain aneurism.
• I assume the issue here is "I want everyone who has ever sat on an Islamic Court in Iran to die horribly, too."—if you read the entirety of that post you will see that I don't necessarily stand by those sentiments, but explain that they were an expression of my rage. I'm talking about feelings, not advocacy. I do still think that about the court that sentenced those teenage boys to death by hanging though.

Specifically to heresiarch, I note that you not only dismiss my explanation of what I meant (on the grounds that the rhetoric itself is hurtful), but also, apparently, my apology for the impression I created. I apologize now for the hurt my rhetoric created. If you want more than that, you're out of luck.

This is the second time in this thread that I've been called out publicly for something that would have been better addressed in a private email. I would not have had to write the above had heresiarch done so; it probably wouldn't have gone in the email either. You think I sound angry? Well, yes, I damn well am angry.

I grew up in a violent home and I have violent feelings, and a core of rage that three decades of therapy have failed to drain. I have focused on controlling my actions and have struck another human being in anger only twice in the past 20 years. I will attempt to remember to avoid violent rhetoric in the future, to avoid offending heresiarch (and any others who felt the same way but did not speak up). Unfortunately that means I can't necessarily express my feelings here. Lee will be hearing from me; thank you, Lee. But it still makes me sad.

Lee 339: The wrong-headed Christian idea you cite is a special case of the general principle of "trying to suppress feelings leads to worse, not better, behavior." But you know that.

There's a huge difference between wanting to mental strip someone naked, and actually doing it.... here's a challenge to R. M. Koske--stand in front of me while I look at you and mentally remove your clothing, etc., and smile at you knowingly, and let's see how you feel about the situation....

That is, since you think that it is something lacking in offensiveness and rudeness etc., let's see how you feel if aware of it happening, and a couple additional conditions--you're not allowed to object, not allowed to react, etc.

Catching up (and with the sure and certain expectation that the comments posted between the loading of this page, yesterday, and the posting of these comments now, will make me look less than clueful in some regards).

language hat: I am not what one might term a, "shy commenter", nor am I, "intimidated by such speech", but metafilter isn't a place I enjoy enough to make the effort to become a more than occaisional reader; much less commenter.

The rough and tumble I see there is more hard edged than I want to engage in on topics which don't stir me to passion.

It's certainly not true that heated debate doesn't happen here, nor that I've not taken part in some, but the dynamics at metafilter just don't work for me.

Xopher: re torture... if I thought you were serious about it... it borders on torture. It's certainly degrading. I don't think Phil was being fair in his response (and now I see why I thought that). Taken in light of knowing you, and accepting you were being hyperbolic for effect, it passed me by. Had someone else said it...

Doctor Science: I won't say being deliberately insulting isn't allowed here. I won't even say it's not acceptable (I know, because I have done it, and not been sanctioned... on occasion even been told it was perfectly reasonable).

That's because there are times when insult needs to be given. Needs is a tricky word, and social norms will determine when a groups accepts that it was needed.

What I see in Boing-boing, and Mefi is a much looser standard of acceptable. I don't know that either of them (much for lack of steady observation) has a sense of, "need" when it's allowed, vs. "It wasn't so pointless/rude that we condemn it.

Leah @ 104 Hear! Hear!

Paula,

I think that when R.M. said, "...which is why you never let on that you're doing it, " she meant that if you are doing it, your behavior should not indicate in any way that you are. Smiling knowingly would indicate that you know that you are doing it. So if I am standing in front of her, and stripping her naked in my mind, none of that should be reflected on my face, my words, or any other part of the interactions between us.

I think you and R.M. are in violent agreement.

I could, however, be wrong in my interpretation of R.M.'s words.

Paula, you didn't read RM's comment carefully enough. She said "don't let on you're doing it." You're describing a situation in which the object of lust knows EXACTLY what's going on, and where the luster is "smiling knowingly."

If you can describe a way that mentally stripping someone can be offensive to them when they remain completely unaware that anything is happening at all, then you will have a challenge to RM. Right now you don't have a challenge, but just a misreading.

Whoops, that was a cross-post. No pileon intended.

There's a huge difference between wanting to mental strip someone naked, and actually doing it....

I think there's an awful lot of wiggle room in how different folks might interpret that. While (see below) there's a reasonable distinction between thinking lewd thoughts and signifying or displaying the results of lewd thoughts to external observers, there's a much less clear difference between merely thinking lewd thoughts vs. thinking about thinking lewd thoughts. Both of the latter can be wholly internal processes, and I don't think they're even that cleanly seperable.

here's a challenge to R. M. Koske--stand in front of me while I look at you and mentally remove your clothing, etc., and smile at you knowingly, and let's see how you feel about the situation....

But "smiling knowingly" or giving someone perceptible Elevator Eyes is not thinking, it is acting, regardless of whether you verbalize. There may be a degree of miscommunication here, is what I'm saying, over what it means to e.g. "mentally strip someone naked".

Um, Paula -- I could stand in front of someone and smile at them "knowingly"..... and be thinking about rutabagas. Professional actors do it all the time. I would posit that we all, in our personal lives, push others' buttons through our body language*. Sometimes we may even do it fairly consciously.

But the body language and the thoughts/intentions*** behind it, and the recipient's interpretations, have to be kept separate. If I tell someone I'm thinking about stripping them, AND looking at them maddeningly, AND not letting them respond, well, that's not at all comparable to what R.M. Koske was describing.

And come to think of it, the converse is actually pretty conducive to civil society -- how often have you smiled pleasantly, projected positive attitude by your behavior, and all the while been thinking (about a boss, say), "what an idiotic so-and-so"?

*or choice of wording online
**hate? teasing? contempt? all possible

Or what they said.

*kicks rocks*

#342, Paula Lieberman -

But then you're doing it rudely, because you let me know you're doing it.

If we ever meet, at a con, at a ML party, you're more than welcome to do it as many times as you like. But if you let me know you're doing it, THEN you're being rude, and not until then. If you felt the need to do it to prove a point, then I'd decide that you were definitely too rude to talk to and never associate with you again. (I'd cut you less slack than I'd cut a man doing it, actually, because I know you have firsthand experience with exactly how hurtful you're being. You would be trying to hurt me on purpose. I've got no use for that.)

I never said that the people who did it to you weren't being rude. You know they did it, of course they were rude. I said that merely doing it isn't intrinsically rude. It's the letting people know that's the rude part.

And "actually removing someone's clothes" isn't the "do" in this case. It is letting it show in your face that is the "do" that shouldn't happen. I can think anything I want. I can think someone is an idiot, I can think that they should shut the hell up, I can think that they're a waste of skin, I can think they're a jerk, I can think they'd look fabulous naked. As long as they never know I think any of those things, then I'm not being rude.

I don't think that imagining someone naked is rude, and you can't convince me that it is. I think that LETTING SOMEONE KNOW that you're imagining them naked is rude.

You have no idea how many people have imagined you naked. You only know about the rude ones.

[regarding violence by girls in the USA...]

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=254029

What's changed, some say, is girls' attitudes.

"It's being flipped around. Girls are getting sick of being treated badly," said 14-year-old Cierra Cunningham of Racine, who remembers her aunt giving her a talk about the importance of being tough after a male relative hit her in the jaw.

girls interviewed...said they viewed the rise of female violence as a sign of women's equality with men. [article then cites that film, video games, and TV having an increased propensity for having female leads who commit violence]

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=254040

[chart showing arrests of girls for assault in Wiscons from 1986 - 2002, with the the number going from 813 in 1986 to 1906 in 1994, dropping off to level out around 1650 in 2000]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0915/p16s02-usju.html
Behind the Surge in Girl Crime

"girls' violence...was always there but largely ignored...."

Well, it looks like I didn't need to elaborate - I saw Paula's post and didn't read what came after when I was previewing mine. We must have all jumped to answer in the same moment. (Nancy, you've got my position exactly right, as did pretty much everyone else.)

I'm sorry for jumping on your comments after everyone else did, Paula, it was careless of me to not read what came after your post before I posted.

#351 RM

There is a definite chasm in our perceptions of the world. I regard it as rude to mentally persist in imaging someone naked without their permission to do.... I had WAY too much experience with people who had probably mentally stripped me naked taking THEIR fantasy as substantiation for hitting on me, repeatedly, and not caring what MY opinion in the matters were.

I specified I wanted your permission, because I wanted you to KNOW I was doing that as an experiment, with your permission -- the reasons, again, include that I consider it RUDE to mentally remove someone's clothing etc., without permission (involvement with the person tends to imply there is that permission) from the person, and I have my OWN self-respect to consider, and there is that legacy of having been RESTRAINING myself from going around regarding everyone as an applicance for mentally stripping as a privileged sport for decades.... that is, there is that control involved. I resent being expected and having had to restrain myself from all sorts of things, that were considered "boys will be boys" stuff....

language hat @ 233 on speech

Fortunately, those who feel uncomfortable in unprotected enviroments can create protected ones, and I'm all for that. (Which is why, though I've gone back and forth on this difficult issue, I'm in favor of the existence of women's colleges, not that anyone asked.) But the public space must be free.

I'm not at all clear how you define "public space," but you clearly can't mean MetaFilter, a site you have to register - and pay - to comment on, and which has a code of conduct enforced by summary removal of offenders.

This is what the code of conduct has to say about the behavior that's expected of commenters

One of the guiding principles here is trust in each other. The index page of metafilter.com can be added to by almost everybody that has signed up, as there is very little editing or deleting going on. Anyone can post a comment in a thread, and say whatever they feel.

I give you the ability to do this because I trust you. I trust that you'll act in a civilized manner, that you'll treat others with opposing viewpoints with absolute respect, that you'll contribute in a positive way to the intelligent discussions that take place here everyday.

I give you the benefit of the doubt, because I trust you, so all that I ask is for you to honor that trust and promise to become a good contributor.

From that, I would glean that

a) MetaFilter is not, in either sense, a free space
b) MetaFilter does in fact control content

and

c) if MetaFilter does not control Certain Kinds of content, it's not freedom at play. It's community standards, and it's a choice.

and the thing about that choice is that you, who are apparently of an absolutist tendency on this issue, say yourself in 278 that you find yourself reluctant to engage in civil debate on this subject because people might read what you have to say in a way that causes them to view you in a negative light.

So, self-censorship in the face of being portrayed offensively is, apparently, a real problem after all.

I'm really uncomfortable myself with these sorts of debate, specifically because this is private speech, and protected, _in the same way that boingboing is_, and whether or not I approve of it is really beside the point.

But, WADR, ain't nobody here but us oranges, and it's a little disingenuous to claim to speak for the apples here.

#351, Paula

I have read in several places that some people* were annoyed/upset about the uproar over sexuality in film and entertainment, when there is almost no uproar about violence. I wonder if the increasing amount of violence by girls and women will make violence in the media more of a big deal?**

Increased violence by women sounds like a case where we're moving in the wrong direction to get equality - wouldn't it be better if male violence decreased toward equality?

*I can't be more specific because I can't remember who, or where.
**I do think violence in the media is demonized more than it should be, but when a bigger fuss is made over a wardrobe malfunction than over the torture depected on 24, something is wrong.

Paula 353: As Miss Manners says, "In manners, unlike morals, if you don't get caught, it doesn't count." You can take the (to me bizarre) point of view that mentally undressing someone is immoral, or that it will lead to unethical and rude behavior, but to claim that something going on inside someone's head is RUDE to someone who doesn't even know it's happening...is absurd. Patently absurd.

By asserting it, you put yourself in the "you have to control your thoughts and feelings" camp. Boy, are we never going to see eye-to-eye. If it's rude to mentally undress someone, what on Earth are you going to think of my fantasies about doing various other things (which I won't describe to avoid offending heresiarch) to people who anger me?

Rudeness, like courtesy, is a social action. There are no rude thoughts or rude feelings. Period. Paragraph. End of story.

#353, Paula -

I think you're right, we do have a vastly different way of looking at things. *grins*

You absolutely have my permission to imagine me naked. (There's a photo on Serge's collection of faces, for the little good it will do you.) You do not ever, under any circumstances, have my permission to let me know, through word or deed including but not limited to facial expression, forum post, carrier pigeon, or rumor whispered to a mutual acquaintance that you're doing it, either at the time or after the fact, past our agreement here. I really will never feel the difference, and it doesn't bother me if you do it, so long as I don't know.

And on a different but related topic:
I've never said this to you, and I don't know if anyone else has said it lately either - you did an amazing thing, being at MIT in the 70s. That had to have been unbelievably hard. I cannot imagine how hard it was (and I'm not entirely sure I have the guts to hear the stories.) Things were hard then, and they're far from perfect now. But you're a part of the reason they're better. Brave, tough women who went into these boys' clubs and took (or fought against) that crap and helped show that women really are people too are part of why things are better.

Thank you.

#355 R. M.

I agree that that violent behavior increases are wrong-headed ways to equality!

2000+ years ago one of the rabbis said, "Do not do unto others as as you do not want done unto you" -- the negatives in that were deliberate.

Some things I read/heard about violence, include that violence showing that there are bad things resulting from violence, is more "moral" and does not result in the viewers having the value that they should copy violent attitudes that they see on film/TV.

I was distressed at at least one of the Hugo-nominated films because there it was, a killing field, and there were stabbings, dead and dying fighters, and no blood and no gore, none--it was sterile no pain no suffering no blood not guts no squicky stuff, no stomach-churn, no remorse.... sterile battle and no-gut-impact cold death.

Sqqqqqqqqqqquuuuuuuuiiiiiiiiiccccccckkkkkkk.

That is, the scene horrified me for it distancing of violence from gore and pain and suffering and messiness, the utter lack of conscience and downside and moral repugnance and ethics.

Years ago Star Trek Next Generation bothered me with the Tasha Yar character because the writers had her not act to use violence as last resort, but rather had the character kick first and ask questions later... that is no mature professional way for a security head to act.

Perhaps the grossest example of film/TV making life follow art, was the Tailhook scandal.... Top Gun apparently was a major influence on causing the conference to descend into juvenile deliquent assholishness, with the jackass character portrayed by Tom Cruise, having become the standard to live down to....

I'm not at all clear how you define "public space," but you clearly can't mean MetaFilter, a site you have to register - and pay - to comment on, and which has a code of conduct enforced by summary removal of offenders.

I don't think language hat meant MeFi was a "public space" in the sense we've been discussing it (re: unmoderated speech) in this thread, no. I'm one of the three people who actually enforces the guidelines you're citing, and you're correct: sufficiently bad behavior is grounds for getting one's comment(s) deleted and, in extreme cases, one's account disabled.

How we got to that, as far as MeFi vs. ML vs. BB vs. USENET and so forth, is I think more a matter of comparing degrees and styles of moderation. Neither Mefi nor ML is a public space in the sense of having unmoderated speech; it sounds as if most folks here agree that, on the other hand, Mefi is closer to that notion of the public square in that the threshold for moderation there is higher than it would be here in a lot of respect.

That language hat likes spending time on Mefi has, as I understand it, in part to do with just that relatively open discourse model that we try to support. That model has advantages and disadvantages. Much of this has been discussed upthread, I won't retread it right now.

And there are folks on Mefi who have been vocal, in on-site discussions of this issue, in their respective support of both less and more moderation of discussions. Some feel it should be, as in e.g. unmoderated USENET groups back int he day, a place where no speech is limited and moderation is wholly a matter of community response to problematic speech. Others feel we should move more aggressively or more proactively to quell or block ugly or heat-not-light commentary, and ban folks from the site for bad behavior much more often than we do.

That spectrum, that great collection of stops along the line from a wholly unmoderated public square to the most restrictive of moderation protocols, is a fascinating thing to explore, and I think that while on the one hand some of that exploration has happened in this thread, on the other hand there may be some misreadings of we're saying to one another about these things -- mistakes of intended scope and target -- such as the idea that lhat is equating Mefi with an unmoderated (rather than, say, a more lightly moderated) space.

Paula, R.M. is right in 357.

If you, and women like you, hadn't done a lot of the work in the '70s, I wouldn't be sitting here now, posting to making light when I should be writing code for my PhD.

Thank you.

#357 R. M.

The MIT stories were a lot more civilized than the military service stories. Student engineers and scientists contemporary with my college days had a respect/love/yearning for Truth and sometimes even Beauty, that tends to involve accepting "You are actingly like a jackass and here is why" as an honest non-offending appraisal. The MIT students generally tried to be honest about their intentions and goals and such, and wanted to -know-, and were curious about the world.... it was the first time in my life, that when I used a word that a classmate didn't know, that the classmate said, "I don't know that word, tell me what it means" with the eagerness to learn something new--as opposed to getting ticked or beating me up for I surmise their feeling stupid or feeling I was showing off or something....

#361, Paula -

I'm sorry that you had to deal with the crap wherever it was. But I'm glad to hear that you ran into genuine lovers of learning too.

(I'm especially impressed with the ones you ran into that could take "You're acting like a jackass and here's why." I don't always do well with that one. If I get that far, it usually takes a bit of effort to get the old cranium out of my posterior. *grins*)

Josh Millard @ #359

I appreciate the clarification. Thanks for responding.

That spectrum, that great collection of stops along the line from a wholly unmoderated public square to the most restrictive of moderation protocols, is a fascinating thing to explore, and I think that while on the one hand some of that exploration has happened in this thread, on the other hand there may be some misreadings of we're saying to one another about these things -- mistakes of intended scope and target -- such as the idea that lhat is equating Mefi with an unmoderated (rather than, say, a more lightly moderated) space.

Agreed, and the tendency of conversations about things people react as viscerally to as they do speech to spin into absolutes never helps.

What point I have is that it seems to me that the current debate isn't about freedom v. unfreedom but about models of private discourse, and (jmo) models of private discourse are better measured in terms of degrees of latitude than in terms of rights.

Might I suggest we direct the conversation away from evil thoughts and towards something more... measurable.

If we start getting into evil thoughts, and whether or not I should or should not have this or that thought, it goes beyond telling me what to do in my bedroom and gets into what I can think in my head, and I can't see any difference between that and the "thought police". (If it's "should" versus "legal", then change "police" to whatever enforcer/preacher there is for politeness.) Call it "mind crime" or "thought bleach" or whatever, it's neither something you can tell me how to think nor is it justification for actions.

So, I won't use my thought to justify acting like a male pig and you won't use my thoughts to convict me of thinking like a male pig, and we'll call it even.

#362 R. M.

What was unnerving was such behavior as, "I'm next in line for being involved with you once you stop being involved with the person you're involved with." That's related in some ways to the sort of thing heresiarch was referring to in #336 with It tries to describe the ways in which a man interacting with a women has nothing to do with the woman, and everything to do with his buds who're watching. The kind of insulting objectification permeating the discussion Leah mentioned is a textbook case of homosociality. I wasn't to have the choice of who I would be involved with next, I had the choice of if/when to break off with the person I was dating, at which juncture this other fellow would be the new boyfriend.... He got quite offput when things failed to go the way of his expectations in that matter.

heresiarch, 336,
Can we agree that powerful sexual urges among young men is healthy and normal, and discussing those urges is fine, but that using that as an excuse to behave badly is wrong?
I agree :)

Lee, 339,
Tangentially, this is also why I have no patience with the Christian teaching that having lustful thoughts about someone is "committing adultery in your heart". If the thought is the same as the deed, why should I resist the deed once I've had the thought?
That bit is best understood as saying that the psychic consequences of an act counts, aside from all other physical consequences. If you are a man accustomed to thinking of women as possessions to be used, you are corroding your own humanity.

The context for that teaching, btw, was a God addressing a bunch of men in culture where adultery was punishable by stoning - but only for the woman - in the middle of laying out all the reasons why His audience needed to be honest with themselves and own up to what kind of people they were really being.

To put it a different way, the original audience was already quite clear that there was a difference in consequences between putting your penis in someone else's wife and not doing so. What was new was that they were being taught was that there was a difference in consequences between being the kind of guy who had every intention of doing so (but couldn't due to fear or circumstance) and the guy who never intended to at all. Is this an important difference? Probably yes; consider which kind of guy you'd want to be your neighbor.

(There's a parallel teaching about hate, which would be apropos for this discussion, but I'm a little tired to draw out the text. I realize I'm responding to a tangent, but I just couldn't resist this time. No offense?)

What Don Delny said (@366).

I think Miss Manners got it right about there being a distinction between manners (where "rudeness" applies) and morals (where other terms like "evil" or "sinfulness" apply).

But I'd draw the line at a different place she does in her "if you don't get caught, it doesn't count" quip. For instance, I'd consider spying on someone to be rude (as well as wrong) even if the person you're spying on never knows. But the rudeness still comes from it being a social interaction-- it's just an interaction that you weren't permitted to partake in, rather than an interaction where you communicate something unwelcome.

(Or, to look at it another way, it might not be rude per se-- though it might be wrong, depending on the circumstances-- to *imagine* someone naked. But it is rude to actually *watch* someone naked, if they didn't intend to be seen naked, even if they never find out about it.)

Paula, #353: You're still not getting it. If they allowed their fantasy to influence their actions, that was very rude indeed. But just having sexual fantasies about someone, without ever acting on it? Hell, no. What you're describing is rude ACTIONS, not rude thoughts... along with a certain inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. That ability is exactly what needs to be taught, and is too often not taught to men in the specific area of gender relations.

R.M. Koske, #355: The way I remember it being phrased was, "You can show a man cutting off a woman's breast and get an R rating. But if you show a man kissing a woman's breast, it's an automatic X."

Paula, #358: Re Tasha Yar -- true, but it was still a huge improvement over the female "security guards" in ClassicTrek, who had 3 stock responses to anything that happened: scream, cry, or faint. And it cleared the way for more balanced kick-ass women such as Kira Nerys and Susan Ivanova. In order to reach the point at which it was okay to show a woman using violence professionally, we first had to get past showing a woman using violence at all.

don, #366: That's the first explanation I've ever seen anyone make of that teaching which has MADE SENSE. Thank you! It sounds to me as if you're saying something very like my own view of morality: if the only thing that keeps you from doing X is fear of the consequences (whether that be going to jail or going to Hell), then you really cannot claim to have any personal morality -- what you've got is somebody standing over you with a whip. Personal morality comes into the picture when you don't do X because you know it would be the wrong thing to do, even though you might not suffer any significant consequences for doing it.

Shorter me: Morality must be internally rather than externally enforced to be of value. External enforcement leads to the law of the jungle.

#368 Lee
Being the object of someone's unrequited sex fantasies--ICK!

There are lots of boundary issues--stalkers for example, whose fantasies play a part in their impetus to stalk.

I remember years ago someone having a really obnoxious crush on (if I mentioned the name of the person the crush was on, there likely would be much "someone had a crush on whom?!"), and the person kept spinning all sorts of fantasies in about it. The person who had the crush, kept trying to interact with the object of desire, while the object of desire presumably was completely undesiring of the attention and interest.

I think that it would have been a much better idea for the person with the fantasies to have clamped down on them instead, or at least made some effort to try to.

There's another thing about fantasies--who can live up to them?!

Regarding Tasha Yar--I didn't object to Tasha Yar shooting and hitting per se shooting and hitting, but rather, the use of violence first. The character wasn't walking softtly and carrying a big stick and using the big stick after diplomacy failed, the character was acting like a certain chief Executive of the United States of America, who when authorized to use force as an intended last resort if and only if diplomacy of the talk-talk-talk-persuade-and-attack-only-after-
making-threats-of military action, used that authority to go forward with apparently what had been a premeditated intention and plan to invade of a sovereign nation, without any interest/attention/attempt to do anything but attack with a large military force and take over.

I didn't object to Tasha Yar fighting/ordering people to fight, I objected to the writers having her fight and give orders to fight without even attempting to analyze the situation and use non-violent intervention methods first, or use defensive measure of shielding, etc., and waiting to shoot or hit back, instead of essentially using pre-emptive first strike actions.

Paula Lieberman @ 340: "Thinking further along that, that sort of group-thing prove-to-group stuff is what's involved with frat initiations that get out of hand into lethality, what's sometimes involved in drinking contests, etc... it's peer pressure, both actual, and perceived."

I think that's a really good way of putting it--homosociality is sexism plus peer pressure. From which description it's pretty obvious the damage it can cause.

Lee @ 368: "The way I remember it being phrased was, "You can show a man cutting off a woman's breast and get an R rating. But if you show a man kissing a woman's breast, it's an automatic X.""

The documentary This Film Is Not Rated makes that point quite well, with the added twist that homosexual sex scenes are far more likely to get X ratings than almost shot-for-shot identical hetero scenes.

More extended catching up:

Colin Roald: I am bothered by the false equivalence of misandy/mysogyny. The latter is both more prevalent than the former, and far better recieved.

Paula @ 201 hits on something which slipped past me earlier (no, it didn't, I was lazy and let it go by). Things said on the internet do make me less safe, just as things said in newspapers do. When someone goes ranting about how, "those people" (insert target of choice) do "those things" (insert behavior of choice) others take it at tacit approval for actions which will "keep them in their place".

I can't stop it, but no more than Jesus comment "the poor will be with you always" means I can just ignore the plight of the poor, should I just raise my hands and say, "this is just people being assholes on the net, it doesn't touch me."

So, though I don't do it enough, I don't think it's acceptable, and I should say so more often. I hope that when/where I do, it adds to the chorus of social reprehension, and works to arrest it.

Dave Bilek: Social opprobrium worked on me, so I don't think you are right. I also don't think, "wow nice hooters" is the best of things to say. Yes, I do think that sharing one's opinion of people going by is 1: not offensive on it's face, and 2: something I have done/do. I also think that how one does it (and to what level of public awareness) matters. "she looks good in that dress" is one thing, "look at that rack" is another. What you think is one thing, what you say is another, and what you tolerate others saying yet a third.

The difference between the women of your acquaintence and the men/boys in this example is right here, comment privately . The issue isn't private behavior, it's public.

It's not, as you say to Micheal Roberts, gaucheness. It's (in this context) sexism. It's public expressions of objectification, not just the acceptable level of seeing people for form when one doesn't know them.

I don't know if you saw the SA nonsense about Wiscon, but that' was exactly the sort of thing you are saying is just, "boys being boys".

You ask if anyone has said it was socially acceptable... not in so many words (see comments on contextuality of Cory's comments about Digg, and implicit, vs. explicit assent). The thrust of your argument seems to me (which is why I've said so much about it) is that, since they will do it, we just have to put up with it, because nothing can change adolescent boys.

That's tacit acceptance, and you seem to be encouraging us to do the same.

Language Hat: one tradeoff for free speech is that some will feel silenced because they perceive the environment as too harsh for them. No, the tradeoff isn't they will feel silenced, it's that they will be . You may not think emotional abuse is as effective as a punch in the nose, but your feeling is wrong (though it means we cannot have meaningful discussionl; because you are dismissive of those who disagree on this).

I don't think it means we need to silence them, but it doesn't mean I think those places were moderation doesn't take place are somehow less free, just differently free.

They certainly allow (IMO) for a broader range of opinion, because making those of more uninhibited response restrain themselves is less difficult that insisting those who are put-off, offended, or abuse, "just deal" if they want to take part is a very different set of limits.

Your characterization of those who prefer not to enjoy those wide open spaces as being in need of protection- across the board- is dismissive, and a little belittling.

As to the problem of, "self-censorship".

When I was studying communications theory, the model included "noise", and the understanding that, "The meaning of the message is the message that's received." When I write my hope is to communicate. If a given turn of phrase is going to alienate the audience, it doesn't matter at all how clever it is, nor how heartfelt, it's not effective communication. Which sort of defeats the purpose.

Caroline: Even the "unmoderated" spaces have rules. Show the least sign of "weakness" at SomethigAwful, and you can be ripped to shreds; no one, much, will rise to your defense.

So one has to conform, or leave. It's just that nothing, in those places, is explicit. The bar is to find out what the rules are before you break them, or be "tough" enough to ride out the penalties.

Edward Oleander: Humiliation isn't, ispo facto torture, but when added to a thing, for the express purpose being humiliating, torture is much closer to the result.

That much judicial punishment has elements of humiliation is not to our credit.

And, speaking from a small place of expertise... a swirlie most decidely can be torture.

Greg @ 315: "Some might suggest that my ability to recognize the term [Jerkosphere] is because I'm a member of said group."

No, I wouldn't say that. Hardcore members are too oblivious to realize that they're in the Jerkosphere.

"Look at the hooters on that one."

This was, I think, Ben Stein's only line in Soap Dish, and I keep hearing it in his dull, slow delivery.

Paula, #369: No, you're doing it again. You keep talking about ACTIONS -- stalking, obnoxious hitting-on -- and yes, those things are rude. But the THOUGHTS themselves, if not translated into action, just aren't. You seem to be making the assumption that everyone ACTS on their sexual thoughts, all the time, and that just isn't true.

Someone else mentioned a different kind of example up-thread -- being outwardly polite to your boss, or a co-worker, even when they've done something so egregiously stupid that it makes you want to shake them until their teeth rattle. As long as you don't let on what you're thinking, you can THINK any damn thing you please and it does no harm. Same-same for sexual thoughts.

And yes, it can be squickful to one level or another to think about being the object of someone's unrequited sexual fantasy... although anyone who lives in the public eye has to deal with this, and somehow they manage. Realistically, though, it is not something you can control, and therefore the amount you can accomplish by freaking over it is severely limited.

#375 Lee

Dissembling is not one of my talents....
And the art of the plastic smile got used against me so much that I loathe the things....

Terry @ 371 - actually, David didn't use the word "gaucheness"; I did. And what I meant wasn't the categorization of certain acts as gauche versus sexist, but rather the fact that considering sexist actions to be gauche is the first step in eliminating sexist actions. In other words, the feeling that what you've just said was gauche (or, to use a less latte-swilling word, "uncool") is the corrective mechanism in action -- a positive thing.

Mm. Now I want a latte. Wait, no -- I've never had a latte in my life! Actually, I just want another Coke.

Paula @369 - your example of the person with fantasies -- the squickiness might be from the existence of the fantasies, but the rudeness (and I argue, the squickiness too) arise from the attempts to interact, not from the otherwise undetectable neurological events in somebody else's brain.

Paula @375 - the art of the plastic smile is itself a (deniable) means of communicating a particular proposition of your worth in the smiler's eyes. To ignore that channel as not being communication is, well, is what makes it so effective in our society.

Court French in Louis XIV's day actually shaded (or inverted!) meanings of vocal speech depending on the facial expression used when saying it. Well, duh -- look at Jon Stewart sometime (or even better, Stephen Colbert) and you'll see that in action.

There's more to communication than just the words said. So the rudeness there is, again, the plasticity of the smile, not the thought behind it.

#341 Xopher
OK, I have to admit there are some people whose deaths I really do desire. I really, truly think the world would be a better place if they dropped dead this very instant. That doesn't necessarily mean I think any method of getting rid of them is OK, or that they should be eliminated "at any cost." Here is my list:

This is my guilty secret: I have a mental game called Three Deaths. Three peaceful, pain-free, immediate deaths from natural causes that improve the world. Which would you pick?

Xopher @ 341: "Specifically to heresiarch, I note that you not only dismiss my explanation of what I meant (on the grounds that the rhetoric itself is hurtful), but also, apparently, my apology for the impression I created. I apologize now for the hurt my rhetoric created."

I didn't mean to disregard your apology--I do appreciate it, and I do believe it was sincere. Thank you. I'm sorry for ignoring it earlier.

Brenda @ 378 - only three? Whew.

Hi. De-lurking for a moment here...

This thread is a perfect example of why I keep coming back to ML. Though there were plenty of disagreements and misunderstandings, in most cases the people involved actually worked through them, figured out where miscommunications happened, apologized when necessary, and carried out the whole process with an entertainingly high degree of flair and verve.

In so many places, the norm seems to be that discussions degenerate into flamewars full of people talking past each other. ML isn't immune to that, but I can't think of a place where it's rarer, except maybe some obscure little messageboards among friends. Kudos to all of you, except for the one or two trolls early on.

I always learn a lot here. Maybe someday I'll learn enough to feel less intimidated about commenting at a place with this level of discourse. Yeah, OK, maybe I sound like a squeeing fankid, but I am genuinely in awe of what I see here, dangit, and I'm tired of keeping quiet for fear of not having anything clever enough to say.

J. Random: If I may offer a bit of encouragement...very few of us ever start off getting everything we'd like just right. But this is a place where good will counts. Chime in more often!

I'd like to come back to some things Terry Karney said, and old thoughts of my own. I think that the "free self-expression" vs. "self-censorship" dichotomy is ultimately a sterile one, and one that misses a bunch of the really interesting things about our choices in writing for others.

Since few of us are reliable telepaths, everything we say to others goes through at least two layers of filtering. First, I turn the thoughts and feelings inside my head into text. It's not just the individual words I use to encode the message, either; grammar, punctuation, capitalization, everything helps shape the expression.

That last part isn't one that gets as much attention as word selection sometimes, so I'll illustrate:

• 1st i turn the thots & feelins inside my head in2 text
• FIRST I TURN THE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS INSIDE MY HEAD INTO TEXT
• First, I turn the thoughts - and feelings - inside my head, into text!

Anyway, I do my part and then send the message off. You get it, and you interpret what I've sent, words, formatting, and all. You develop an understanding of what I meant and you have a reaction to it.

One of the basic questions for this sort of long-distance communications we're doing is: How much of the burden for useful signaling is mine, and how much is yours? The answer implicit in the claim that repressing any old thing that comes into my head is "self-censorship" is that it's pretty much all yours. But I find this very unconvincing. When I drive, I don't go just where I please, and it's not just a matter of the law - I don't go driving in the incoming traffic lanes or turning on red lights because it is predictable that someone is likely to hit me, to both our detriments. And while I'm willing to cut slack for newcomers, people who've been using the net for a while can predict most angry, argumentative, and otherwise unhappy responses pretty reliably, too, and persisting in sending stuff that I can expect to generate heat rather than light can and should be taken to mean that I value the heat at least as much as the light.

If, on the other hand, I actually value the light more than the heat, I'm going to work some at shaping my expression so that it can be understood easily and felt to be constructive rather than hostile or destructive. It is, basically, a courtesy to my readers and a service to thoughts and feelings I feel worth sending in the first place. Because I value what I'm trying to say, I put as few obstacles to its friendly reception as I can into my presentation. I do it because I want to be received favorably.

There's an additional argument to the effect that putting out a more thoughtful expression is an act of respect toward the audience, but I think that's trickier in some ways. I don't have to like or respect the people I'm writing for to still wish them to get what I'm saying and find it agreeable, informative, persuasive, whatever. There is something to be said for the idea that dumping poorly crafted junk out is a gesture of disrespect toward the reader, but whether it is or not, it certainly is requiring them to do more work, work of basic comprehension that could have been spent being won over while thinking about the actual message you were trying to send. So it's inefficient, insofar as one wishes to make an impact more nuanced than "whoof! ugh!".

It's my experience that light moderation encourages people to put that bit more effort into their messages, and that this is one of the reasons moderated environments tend to be richer in real signal as opposed to sheer untrammeled emotion, whose ultimate information content is usually quite low. But the distinct styles can both exist anywhere, and it's not moderation that affects how any individual message is received or responded to.

Bruce Baugh: You are talking about the signal/noise questions of comm-theory. A really interesting aspect of the subject.

The signal (in the case of fora like these) is text. The noise is how one spells, punctuates, capitalises, etc.

It's why I don't mind, so much, minor spelling/punctuating errors. I may have to work a little harder to parse the meaning but they are pretty much harmless noise.

But when grammar is fractured, or the care for spelling is gone, I wonder if the person cares. Unhappily I am often not as charitible as I might be, and assume ignorance; which makes me discount the arguments.

I hate the "defense", "that's just semantics" as if semantics don't matter. In something like this clarity of message is all we have going for us (no, we also have continuty of voice, which allows for slack to the locals; and may even stretch enough to allow for the occasioanly rude, by intent, comment, but that's icing on the cake, and hinders interaction with people new to a site, because they don't know why the other person is getting the slack, and assume it's a case of dimissing the newbie, or not allowing disagreement with a regular).

Because few of us are, as a rule, eloquent, it happens attacks on grammar can be very effective at gatekeeping, preventing someone from getting a foot in the door. That's a dilemma, one I try to avoid by only harping on a point of grammar when it truly causes misunderstanding (language hat's use of, "as I please/like" appears to have been one of those, and I confess I took it in the way which led to much of the heat).

To fix/avoid that requires the active participation of the sender, and the reciever (one of the problems with the model the Army uses for comm-theory is the lack of feedback from receiver to sender). Absent a sense that this is happening in good faith, the noise will swamp the signal.

I think the strengh of ML is that we do engage in that feedback, with regularity, and vibibly. The newcomer can see that misunderstandings are not; usually, going to lead to slagging and ostracism.

And now, as it is late, I am going to get some sleep.

Terry: Yeah, I've read a fair amount on information theory over the years, but was popularizing and adapting. :)

Bruce: How much of the burden for useful signaling is mine, and how much is yours? The answer implicit in the claim that repressing any old thing that comes into my head is "self-censorship" is that it's pretty much all yours.

Except the thing at issue isn't whether I translate a thought into action or not. The thing at issue is whether I can have the thought at all.

The argument for policing thoughts seems to hinge on the unproven assertion that every thought I have will always leak through into some action or another such that it is visible to the people around me. The "plastic smile" being one example of how thoughts always come through in action and therefore the thought must be eradicated. Except I have all sorts of thoughts when I'm alone in my office. The counter argument to that is that once I am in physical proximity to anyone I had thoughts about, the thoughts will leak through into some physical sign, and therefore the thought alone in my office ought be suppressed.

And while I tend to agree with Paula that using thoughts to justify sexist actions is "sociobiology horseshit", I think the assertions that impure thoughts leads to impure actions and therefore all impure thoughts must be suppressed, is, similarly based on unproven sociobiology.

when going from thought to action, that is communication. If you have a thought and don't communicate it, you can call that self censorship or self control or self editing or whatever.

But there's a subthread going on here that isn't about thought converted to action or thought NOT converted to action. It's about removing the thought itself because there is something inherently wrong, rude, squicky about even having the thought. With a sometimes implied reasoning that said squickie thought will leak through your brain and turn into actions that will communicate to the other person that you're having a squickie thought about them and make them feel squickie.

part of the argument that thoughts are evil is that it is impossible to NOT communicate them, that they must leak through.

Brenda 378: Thank you. Good to know I'm not alone. I'm going to a party of thoughtful people this weekend; I'll see if I can get them to play the game.

heresiarch 379: Thank you. More via email.

Michael 380: Think of the game as a meal in a restaurant, where we all try to order something different! :-)

J. 381: I encourage you to post more, especially if this post is an example of your style and content! Also, it's nice to hear. As for "not having anything interesting enough to say," that never stops me! :-) But seriously, try starting by asking clarifying questions. Trust me, if you think a comment's meaning is unclear, there are other people who also found it so—and others who didn't, but interpreted it in a way at serious variance to that intended by the author!

Also, what Bruce said.

Terry 383: I hate the "defense", "that's just semantics" as if semantics don't matter.

The word 'semantics' is popularly used to mean choice of words. Technically, that's diction (whose popular use is for what is technically called enunciation). Semantics is the underlying meaning conveyed by the words, and thus is the most important aspect of language!

But even in the popular sense of the word, the choice of words conveys as much as the translated meaning. If I refer to someone's "glistening torso," I'm saying something different about my attitude toward it than if I refer to his "sweaty upper body."

Bruce Baugh @ 382: "How much of the burden for useful signaling is mine, and how much is yours? The answer implicit in the claim that repressing any old thing that comes into my head is "self-censorship" is that it's pretty much all yours."

I think that's a very insightful way of putting it. It hints at the existence of an important step in the communication process that you don't explicitly mention: the part of the thoughts-into-words process where I not only try to capture my ideas as well as possible, but also try to shape them into a form that can be best understood by my target audience.

This is what I think bothered me the most about language hat's "I absolutely feel it is both my right and my obligation to speak my mind in whatever way seems fit to me at the moment." This suggests a sort of insensitivity to one's audience that seems really, really inconducive to good communication.* Other than "self-censorship," the phrase I've often heard used to describe modifying your words and phrasing for the sake of your readers is "writing to your audience," and it's generally considered a good thing.

*Having read language hat's blog on and off for a number of years, I can say it's not an opinion that I see reflected in his writing, which is typically quite lucid and interesting, even to an ignorant linguistics noob like me.

Brenda #378:

I don't think I'd ever use my three, unless I was in some kind of last-ditch self-defense situation. The problem here comes in two parts:

a. There are people I know well enough that I could, conceivably, come to recognize a person who could best improve the world by their absence[1]. But of those people, I don't know anyone who I would kill, given a no-chance-of-being-caught method for doing so.

b. There are many people I don't know, about whom I learn by reading the news. Many of those people come off as being genuinely worthy of death. But I know how amazingly inaccurate the picture of reality from the media can be, and I don't know the consequences of doing away with some apparent bad guy. That's true even for such apparent badguys as Saddam or Osama or the nut running North Korea, though they're at least closer to being sensible targets.

I visualize myself somehow deciding to strike someone dead based on media reports, and then later coming to realize that the media lied/got it wrong, and the guy was really not so guilty as he looked. Or striking someone dead, and then watching as some Iraq-like social meltdown followed the sudden death of the evil dictator.

[1] This phrase is stolen from David Friedman.

Bruce #382:

I think the main thing that encourages us to write carefully here is the quality of writing that's common. It's like the way that living in a neighborhood where everyone meticulously maintains their lawn will convince you to spend more time on your lawn, just so you don't stand out as a slob.

heresiarch #387:

I took language hat's comment there to be talking about the topics or ideas expressed, not the wording. Maybe that's me mapping it onto my own beliefs and worldview.

If I'm going to bother to say something, I want to say it well. Part of that means not needlessly giving offense. But if my ideas or thoughts or beliefs are going to give offense, I'm not inclined to censor them to avoid that. (Though I do avoid topics like brtn that lead to unproductive flamewars, at least most of the time.)

And even with jokes or expressions of feelings, spending too much time worrying about offending anyone will kill every bit of spontenaety and life from that kind of writing. The kind of writing I associate with that goal is massively-caveated almost-legalese written by committee, thick with the latest euphemisms used self-consciously. It's hard to imagine a good funny story or poem written with that level of oh-God-what-if-someone's-offended concern.

Finally, there's a duty on the part of the listener/reader, too, as important as the duty on the part of the speaker/writer, to try to find a non-offensive way to parse things. If I do my best not to needlessly give offense, I'd like my reader to do his best not to try to find some way to get offense from it. That won't always work--some people are very sensitive[1] to specific issues, some people will read your words in a different way than you intended, etc. But communication works best when both sides work at keeping it working and civil.

[1] If you think this is an insulting term, please reread the sentence and think about it a bit. I'm pretty sensitive to casual dumping on libertarians, frex. I don't think I've just insulted myself.

This is what I think bothered me the most about language hat's "I absolutely feel it is both my right and my obligation to speak my mind in whatever way seems fit to me at the moment." This suggests a sort of insensitivity to one's audience that seems really, really inconducive to good communication.

I can dig the idea of what you're saying, but in my opinion there's a great big asterisk here that needs to go next to "good". I might say "comfortable", or "non-confrontational" (for the spikier senses of "confrontational").

The idea of not creating heat through speaker-listener disconnect is a useful one -- more casual discussion and easier understandings, less stress and piqued feelings -- and I'd venture that part of what makes ML so attractive to ML regulars (and Mefi to Mefi readers, and so forth) is that a general acclimation to how the locals communicate makes it easier to achieve that kind of easy-going understanding.

But there's the cost there of a natural (and, I think, at times easy-to-forget) insularity and stasis to conversation. Terry's example there is good:

Because few of us are, as a rule, eloquent, it happens attacks on grammar can be very effective at gatekeeping, preventing someone from getting a foot in the door.

But while surface things like attacks on grammar (or gross differences in e.g. profanity or use of escalating personal attacks) make for a very visible dynamic and thus one that is easy to identify and consider and correct for, there are always more subtle and thus more insidious elements of in-group communication in play in these situations as well.

None of which I think is news to anyone here, so I don't bring this stuff up to lecture. (I gather there are a number of folks here who could do a much better job on the subject than me, anyway; my background is computer science, not communication theory.)

But while I understand that "good communication" can mean clear signals and lack of misinterpretation as discussed above, and agree that there's benefits in that -- precision in the exchange of ideas, peace in the valley -- I also think that what language hat defends is not just some bull-headed self-serving insensitivity but, functionally, a willful rejection of favoring in-group peace over the potential turbulence of broader interactions.

Would ML be a better place without new voices from different conversational climates? Would Mefi? It's a loaded question, but I don't mean it to be so open-and-shut as it might read -- if I'm willing to argue the "good" in "good communication", I'd be dishonest to assume that my "better" in "better place" is etched in stone. It's a real question, and not one with simple answers, but I think it's in that light in part that the defense of the importance of, say, "speaking freely" should in part be considered.

albatross @ 390: "I took language hat's comment there to be talking about the topics or ideas expressed, not the wording. Maybe that's me mapping it onto my own beliefs and worldview."

If that's what language hat meant, then I think "in whatever way seems fit" was a poor choice of words. I can't quite twist that enough in my head to believe it refers to content, and not manner. Wouldn't the "speak my mind" part cover the content?

"But if my ideas or thoughts or beliefs are going to give offense, I'm not inclined to censor them to avoid that."

The only person I can think of on this thread who even comes close to advocating otherwise is me, so let me clarify: the only idea I truly think shouldn't be expressed at all, no matter how politely it's done, is the advocation of violence, especially against disempowered groups, especially with the intent to silence. In other words, hate speech--I'll tolerate anything but intolerance. Does that make sense to you?

"Finally, there's a duty on the part of the listener/reader, too, as important as the duty on the part of the speaker/writer, to try to find a non-offensive way to parse things."

I almost agree with this. My only problem is that sometimes the speaker/writer honestly does mean the more offensive possibility. If the reader was to deliberately choose the less offensive reading (i.e. the one s/he agrees with more), then the reader would be misreading the piece, and manufacturing agreement where there is none. I think what a reader owes is an honest reading, and a generous one. If something is ambiguous, I think the best thing to do is ask, not to assume they really meant what you wanted them to mean.

"[1] If you think [sensitive] is an insulting term, please reread the sentence and think about it a bit."

I'm not insulted by being called sensitive, or by the idea that people are. I'm insulted by the idea that someone being sensitive is an excuse for not engaging with their arguments, or an excuse to disregard their feelings. What I want is for being sensitive to get some bleeding respect. (Which, here on ML, it almost invariably does. The flailing blows of the preceding paragraph are directed at the aether, not at anyone in this discussion. Nasty, nasty aether!)

heresiarch, are you advocating doing violence to the aether? I'm just asking for clarification.

(To clarify: I am very much kidding.)

Greg: Since you want to drag me into your quarrel with Paula, I will say that I don't think that all thoughts are dangerous to simply hold and not express. But some are, and the problem is that nobody can tell from inside their own head which thoughts are corroding their moral sensibilities and which aren't. Some thoughts fester for twenty or thirty years and do nothing. Others fester for twenty or thirty years and produce support for attacking Iraq and engaging in torture. I think it's better to err on the safe side, and to take the mental policing of "but hey, that's not something I want to admit to" as an opportunity to train myself to better reactions in the first place.

I also think, based on my experience with being disabled and sometimes in immediate need of assistance from strangers, that this truly is something where the relatively powerful need to shut the hell up about it, mostly, and listen to the concerns of those more likely to be preyed upon. Bluntly: Paula is more qualified than you or me to talk about things that put her at danger, just as I am better qualified than you (so nearly as I know) to talk about some things that put me at risk. I know you aim for an omniversal perspective, but none of us actually get cosmic awareness, and there are times when there are assymetries of experience that good will alone simply does not cross.

The needs of those at risk are not always fully comprehensible to those closer to power; part of civilization is seeing that risks get reduced anyway. We are never promised the opportunity to grok in fullness anyone else's life, but a moral system that doesn't oblige us to act so as to improve others' lives anyway is a mighty poor one. "You were not put on this earth to get it, Mr. Burton," to quote one of my favorite movies. And it's true: sometimes we can and should and ought to act whether we get it or not. You may judge for yourself how you'd feel about anyone else refusing to do anything differently once you've explained the threat and what helps relieve it, just because they didn't quite, you know, feel it, man.

Since you chose to bring me into it.

Heresiarch: Yeah, I agree very much about the shaping. And if I were to go on at even more length I'd emphasize how one style of phrasing isn't any more natural or free than any other.

Josh Millard @ 391: "I can dig the idea of what you're saying, but in my opinion there's a great big asterisk here that needs to go next to "good". I might say "comfortable", or "non-confrontational" (for the spikier senses of "confrontational")."

I don't think that sensitivity to the people you're communicating with implies non-confrontationalism. You can be exquisitely sensitive to someone whom you are confronting in a very profound sense--imagine an intervention for an alcoholic friend, for example. "Good" communication isn't non-confrontational, or favoring in-group peace; very simply, it's communication that works, that actually communicates something. I think you're right that having community standards definitely makes that a lot easier, but in my experience, having those standards doesn't enforce stasis--rather, it provides a stable platform from which you can disagree even more profoundly, while still maintaining the respect and emotional investment that are crucial to good, effective communication.

Xopher @ 393: LOL! Okay, that was good. Touché, sir, touché.

Terry Karney @ 371: Even the "unmoderated" spaces have rules. Show the least sign of "weakness" at SomethigAwful, and you can be ripped to shreds; no one, much, will rise to your defense.

*YES*

language hat said, somewhere way up there, that, while there should be moderated spaces to protect those with lower thresholds of tolerance for high-temperature invective, the public space "should always be free." (Pace abi, who is wise and also made me blush, I simply am having trouble finding the entirety of the exact quote. This is my honest-to-goodness understanding of lh's communication.)

Problem is, "should always be free" never happens. The totally unmoderated public space that language hat appears to be championing is not free for all the reasons Terry listed and more.

Public spaces are always moderated by public pressure and the court of public opinion. Depending on the majority communication mores of the people inhabiting a public space, either jackasses will be chased away or the jackasses will chase everyone else away. Which is a rather blunt and unnuanced way to describe the de facto moderation of unmoderated spaces, since often a combination of both things happen, and "chased away" is not always the right descriptor, but as a summary I think it gets across my meaning.

This is another part of why I was having a hard time taking language hat's argument as anything other than a wish for the jackasses to moderate the public spaces. Because if you make it morally wrong for civility to be required via official moderation (because The Public Space Must Be Free!), it is extremely likely that unofficial moderation will be provided by the jackasses.

It is even more likely that such will be the case if any unofficial requests for civility result in a general outcry of "Oh, here comes the politically correct brigade here to silence my free speech!"

It's a dynamic that seems so obvious to me, which yields so many instructive real-live examples at every turn, that I have a hard time believing that someone as well-spoken and intelligent as language hat can be blind to it. And if he's taking it into consideration but still championing the idea that only an unmoderated public space can be said to be free, what else can I conclude but that he is in favor of jackasses in control of the free space?

Now is probably a good time to link to Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy".

"Good" communication isn't non-confrontational, or favoring in-group peace; very simply, it's communication that works, that actually communicates something.

But in any setting where there is an existing set of boundaries, of comfort zones and mutual understanding of what generally is and is not permissible, some communication -- some "somethings" that could be communicated -- will fall by the wayside as a result. This isn't a terrible thing on a per-context basis; no place is (or, I think we're agreed, even could be) the end-all be-all venue for all kinds of discussion. But it is a real and unavoidable limitation of having such conventions and comfort zones.

Some discussions become likely only to proceed from miscommunication or violation of the expected norms. There's a reasonably (and obviously very complex and ongoing) question in any worthy community of how much to (a) insulate itself by customs and policies against disruption for the sake of the comfort of the regulars, and how much to (b) inure itself to such disruptions for the sake of facilitating a broader sum total of potential communication.

By what fulcrum and to what point of equilibrium that balance is set and managed and adjusted by any given community is an essential part of the story of communication there. And I think that even in communities that actively and openly pursue such a balance well, it's nearly impossible to truly look from an outside perspective at one's own place of comfort and objectively perceive what is insular, what is static.

In that sense, it's easier for me e.g. to make criticism of ML-as-new-place than it is for me to make the same criticism of Mefi-as-home-place, and not because I believe there's anything fundamentally better about one place than the other. It's just very hard to see one's blind spots -- even when you work very hard at it, the best you can hope for is to identify as many of them as possible, but blind spots are inherently difficult to track down -- and I think as a general rule one's internal definitions of what "good communication" constitutes is tied to that. It's harder to credit something as signal rather than noise when it's a signal that chafes or disrupts, might be one way of putting it.

Public spaces are always moderated by public pressure and the court of public opinion. Depending on the majority communication mores of the people inhabiting a public space, either jackasses will be chased away or the jackasses will chase everyone else away. Which is a rather blunt and unnuanced way to describe the de facto moderation of unmoderated spaces, since often a combination of both things happen, and "chased away" is not always the right descriptor, but as a summary I think it gets across my meaning.

But the ideal of the public space is that it begins as a blank slate. That from there sub-groups proceed selectively to either de facto or explicit moderation isn't surprising (here we are!), nor does it undermine the value of that ideal as a default starting point.

I'm not going to argue it as a strictly moral proposition -- that's another context where I'm afraid I'd be out of my league -- but I'll make the argument that the notion of a public space that starts truly unmoderated is at least important as an ideal, because the alternative is canonizing some moderative principle or principles as fundamentally correct. I don't believe that's a good idea, at all, because I don't see any authority from whom such principles could be taken, any unquestionable axioms of discourse from which those principles could be derived.

To be clear: I think civility is a very good thing, and I prefer to spend my time in civil places. I think the case is so for most people, most of the time, and I don't think there's anything wrong (and much right) with the communication that takes place in such contexts.

But I do not believe that the value of an uncivil (or maybe I should say "acivil"?) unmoderated public space is nil. I think it's important, for a number of reasons, that we absolutely preserve the ideal (and whenever possible the implementation) of a space where no speech -- even the ugliest, most morally reprehensible speech -- is forbidden. With that goes the understanding that no individual should be required to spend time there.

From there, I guess it's partly a question of how you get to the idea of such a place. Either the default is civility and you create the unmoderated space by stripping something way from that, or the default is tabula rasa and you create the moderated space by building on that. I don't like the idea of the former, for some of the reasons I've gone into above -- manners shouldn't be canonized, however valuable there are -- and so I see the latter, the idea of public space as default ideal onto which we build civility, as the way to go.

I have no idea how closely that hews to what language hat believes or what he has tried to say upthread, but from what discussions I've had with him and what I've read of his feelings on the subject elsewhere, I get the feeling that's the right neighborhood at least.

Bruce Baugh: I was just bouncing off your opening (comm-theory is really interesting stuff, and I haven't really kept up as I'd like). I was playing pretty fast with the details when I brought it up (a pithy aphorism and a reference to noise).

Xopher: Re semantics Those are my complaints with that defense, yes.

Josh Millard: I also think that what language hat defends is not just some bull-headed self-serving insensitivity but, functionally, a willful rejection of favoring in-group peace over the potential turbulence of broader interactions.

I take, moderate, exception to that idea (in that it seems implicit you are saying there is a streak of that here). I don't favor in-group peace, I favor peace in general. I also know that in-group peace isn't something we refuse to abandon when the need to communicate is high.
There was a thread, now locked, in which Teresa warned us not to go a certain way; informed us our vowels, one and all, were in mortal peril, and we went there (at least some of us, myself included), knowing there was risk of grave offense to peace. We all the polite and the impolitic, lost our vowels.

We've had great fests of hurt feelings and passion and people leaving (most to come back, after greater, or lesser absence). We have people (some of them regulars) who have hot buttons, who get impassioned and say harsh things (don't push me past a certain point on torture).

I think it's, actually, sensitivity. Empathy for the other participants in the conversation, and especially for the specific other person to whom the response is being made which colors the convsersations here. Snark, at people, for the sake of snark is rarely on.

Even when told we have free rein to hose the newbie who knows not the norms, we aren't all that viscious in it.

That has made all the difference.

But I do not believe that the value of an uncivil (or maybe I should say "acivil"?) unmoderated public space is nil. I think it's important, for a number of reasons, that we absolutely preserve the ideal (and whenever possible the implementation) of a space where no speech -- even the ugliest, most morally reprehensible speech -- is forbidden. With that goes the understanding that no individual should be required to spend time there.

I think there is a conflation of things. I mentioned something about SomethingAwful because the norms there are simple, be cruel to everyone, or die. Show the least sympathy; or even change an opinon, and the dogs will shred you.

Boing-boing has a group which affect the nihilistic hateur of being above it all (which makes the impassioned repititions that BB has sold out funny, not for the content, but because once it works, twice it's even believable, after that, well they aren't above it all).

Incivil discourse has it's place, sometimes that place is here, more often it's not. But giving those who wish to be incivil license to engage in it, at whim, is a recipe for places like SomethingAwful (I was going to say Redstate, but realised that's not true, they are moderated, heavily, and make an interesting; if false, argument that moderation is bad... they want the air to be toxic to dissent).

The public space is a commons, and just as the commons need controls (lest the greedy destroy them) so too the places of public discourse need understandings.

how you'd feel about anyone else refusing to do anything differently once you've explained the threat

But the "threat" being explained is someone else thinking a thought. Whether they act on it has been removed from the equation. And once you remove the objective measures from the equation, it means Alice no longer judges Bob based on what Bob does, but rather Alice judges Bob based on what Alice fears.

And sometimes fear is valid and actionable. And sometimes it isn't. And fear of impure thoughts seems to be in the "not" category.

And in complete opposition to this idea of thought suppression, every bit of training I've had to do life coaching would say suppressing certain thoughts is about the worst thing a person could try to do. People make certain thoughts in their head "wrong", and that can cause a lifetime of trouble for them.

So I'm not questioning whether Paula is better suited than me to speak about gender discrimination or whether you're better qualified than me to talk about handicapped issues, but specifically about whether or not someone else's thoughts about women or someone else's thoughts about handicapped are valid targets in the fight against discrimination, and whether or not targeting someone else's thoughts and labeling them as improper thoughts, will in fact actually help fight discrimination, and whether it is in fact based in any sort of reality of how to deal with humans who are thinking such impure thoughts.

What little experience I have says not only will it not work, but it will actually make the target individual worse, and turn others away from fighting discrimination because they've become targets of the fight.

I take, moderate, exception to that idea (in that it seems implicit you are saying there is a streak of that here). I don't favor in-group peace, I favor peace in general. I also know that in-group peace isn't something we refuse to abandon when the need to communicate is high.

I'm saying that there's a streak of it everywhere, inherent in the very existence of group norms of expectation and permissibility. I don't mean it as an attack on ML -- this seems like a very nice place, and I've enjoyed what little time I've spent here so far, which is saying something considering the bumpy circumstances by why I got here -- and I don't exclude from that assertion any other place I like to spend time.

Not Going There is a reasonable and often laudable dictum. We've danced with that directly in the Mefi thread tied to all this in the last couple days, with a couple people stepping over a line and being dealt with through public rebuke for their statement in one case, and by deletion of comments and an account timeout in the other. Setting boundaries and enforcing them is useful and important, and insofar as you can manage to set boundaries carefully to minimize what gets prohibited as a result, it's an art of compromise that I totally support as a good thing for the health of a community.

But it remains, fundamentally, a compromise.

Josh, #398: But the ideal of the public space is that it begins as a blank slate. That from there sub-groups proceed selectively to either de facto or explicit moderation isn't surprising (here we are!), nor does it undermine the value of that ideal as a default starting point.

I'm going to take fairly strong exception to this on two counts.

First, mathematical and philosophical ideals rarely map well to the real world (cf. any political philosophy you care to name). We don't live in "the ideal of a public space," we live in the reality of one -- and reality trumps ideology every damn time.

Second, you appear to be arguing that "public space" on the internet is fundamentally different from "public space" in the streets, and I don't think that holds. It is certainly not the case that real-world public space starts as a blank slate! There's an entire generally-accepted body of law and custom which defines what you can do in a park or on a street corner. The primary difference I see with online space is that it's so new we don't yet have an internal compass about that generally-accepted standard of behavior. One guideline that I frequently find useful for online discussions is, "Would I say/do that in a real-life situation?" The phenomenon of online anonymity removing social inhibitions (aka "manners") is well-documented, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

First, mathematical and philosophical ideals rarely map well to the real world (cf. any political philosophy you care to name). We don't live in "the ideal of a public space," we live in the reality of one -- and reality trumps ideology every damn time.

And yet we proceed from ideology and philosophy and models, even when we get down to the business of realistic implementation and the necessary compromises of pragmatism. Nobody drafts a Constitution that begins "In order to make an, I guess, pretty okay nation..."

Unless you're saying that pragmatism outright negates the value of idealism, I don't see that as a bulletproof objection. I hear you, I agree with much of the thrust of what you're saying -- god save us from those who try to make the world unerringly behave according to a model -- but the usefulness of the ideal as a starting point and constant reference point isn't diminished by the various compromises that present themselves in practice.

Second, you appear to be arguing that "public space" on the internet is fundamentally different from "public space" in the streets, and I don't think that holds.

I don't actually mean to make a distinction between the two, though I may have done a poor job of conveying that. The physical public square (which is probably not a great metaphor, actually, since that kind of implies some nice brickwork in an incorporated town -- "non-private meadow", maybe?) and the internet public square are different according to the medium of communication, that's all. Whether I speak my words or type them, whether you hear my words or read them, is a matter of details. (Interesting details, practically important details, but details only regardless).

It is certainly not the case that real-world public space starts as a blank slate! There's an entire generally-accepted body of law and custom which defines what you can do in a park or on a street corner.

I think that's a contradiction in two sentences. See my public square vs. non-private meadow parenthetical above -- that a park or a street corner has had law and custom applied to makes it something less than a starting point. Whether those customs and laws are considered good is beside the point that they don't exist to two cultural strangers meeting in an empty meadow on a desert island (except if those strangers happened to carry congruent customs from wherever they arrived).

Which is an unlikely example, I know, but that is the starting point. That's the blank slate. The laws and customs that exist, that have been applied to that meadow on the island as it became a village and then a city and then a nation, weren't there at the first encounter, and it's safe to say that the shape of the laws and customs that have been established in different places in the world vary wildly. There's nothing baked-in to the default space.

The primary difference I see with online space is that it's so new we don't yet have an internal compass about that generally-accepted standard of behavior. One guideline that I frequently find useful for online discussions is, "Would I say/do that in a real-life situation?" The phenomenon of online anonymity removing social inhibitions (aka "manners") is well-documented, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

I agree with you on pretty much all of that, actually, though I'm going to be stubborn and go and throw a (smaller-point-size) asterisk next to "good" again. What's obnoxious and ugly and ill-considered isn't fundamentally bad, even though I don't want it to be what I spend most of my time dealing with.

I think it's important, for a number of reasons, that we absolutely preserve the ideal (and whenever possible the implementation) of a space where no speech -- even the ugliest, most morally reprehensible speech -- is forbidden.

This comes up fairly often in discussions of the first amendment, and while I'm not a William O Douglas absolutist on free speech, I'm inclined to give an awful lot of latitude in cases where there isn't actual incitement.

What also comes up fairly often in discussions of the first amendment, and which seems to be a thread running through this conversation, is the idea that since it is a virtue to protect the ugliest, most morally reprehensible speech, it is unvirtuous to object to ugly, morally reprehensible speech, or to assign damaging effect to it.

(I want to make it clear that I'm not responding to any specific commenter here)

It seems to me that if you're going to insist on laying claim to some platonic ideal of communication in which the person you're interacting with is flawed if they respond to speech according to cultural norms of perceived threat, you've pretty much let the wind out of any concerns you might have about the violence inherent in the system if people seem, inexplicably, to want to repress you.

If it's the semiotic wild west out there, any speech of theirs which has the intent or effect of attempting to stifle your voice are equally an unweighted form of pure communication.

If, on the other hand, there are values and real consequences attached to communication, they're attached to all of it, not just the bits that get on your wick.

What also comes up fairly often in discussions of the first amendment, and which seems to be a thread running through this conversation, is the idea that since it is a virtue to protect the ugliest, most morally reprehensible speech, it is unvirtuous to object to ugly, morally reprehensible speech, or to assign damaging effect to it.

Ah, and that's a good thing to point out; I certainly don't think it's a matter of flawed virtue to object to ugly or unpleasant speech, and I can see arguments for the ideal of unchecked speech seeming to carry that as a subtext.

I consider objections to ugly speech to be wholly defensible -- answering speech with more speech is good, and defining specific places where speech is other than unchecked only makes good sense. I just don't believe those objections should be made into any fundamental policy for speech itself, and I think that the broader the scope of limits to speech are (i.e. book club vs. community vs. nation), the more restraint should be shown in implementing prohibition as policy. And there's no scope broader than the fundamental ideal of the abstract substrate of communication-space itself.

As far as that goes, I think it's unrealistic to believe one can place limits on speech without acknowledging that they're compromising, to some degree, the range of communication permitted in the space they're defining. And compromise is far from a bad thing when done well, but it remains a compromise and it's important not to forget that.

Josh, in all honesty, I regard compromise as regards some kinds of speech exactly as I do the compromises that, for instance, prohibit assault and battery. There are no doubt times when it would feel great to initiate an attack on someone else...but so what? I genuinely don't care about the disappointment the law inflicts on some people by denying them the chance to attack others without provocation and without reprisal. Likewise, I simply don't see freedom of speech as a good in itself, but as an important means to the end of allowing society as a whole to better discover the truth (where there is one to be had) and (where not) to disseminate as many views as are compatible with the survival of the society and the general well-being of its members.

It's possible that this is not, in the end, something that can be rationally analyzed. I know that I've shifted more and more from a sort of absolutist principles-in-the-abstract view on many issues to a stance that looks at actual results. I'm interested, more and more, in the pragmatic opportunities available to people: can they can change jobs and not worry about their health care, do they have meaningful chances of promotion, do they feel able to participate usefully in public discourse about what matters to them, are they safe from assault and denial of rights because of this aspect or that of their identity, and so on.

Some of that's age and awareness of impending mortality thanks to the multiplying deaths of family and friends in recent years. I find it harder to think about abstractions when I look at real people whose opportunities are now all closed by the grave, and think about what might have given them the practical chance at better choices. But part of it is not at all age-related, and isn't really a matter anywhere close to reason, so much as it is a loss of belief in idealism as such, replaced by a greater concern to make the present as good as possible for as many people as possible even though I know it will inconvenience some stalwarts on the fringe. Part of it is, frankly, feeling less convinced of my own remarkableness, more aware of how much I depend on others, how limited I am in some ways, how...well, average middle-class white guy I am, and how much of what I used to think of as my independence was bought by my share of privilege, unearned and in the end unwanted as I realized its costs.

Fair points all, Bruce. And lengthy argumentation here notwithstanding, I'm not really much of a raging idealist. I think about compromise and pragmatism as much as I do not because I dislike it but because I spend so much time navigating it. I think the philosophizin' is as much a symptom of wanting to keep myself honest in that navigation as anything.

Plus, it's a holiday, and I have time on my hands. I should probably hush up and get some dishes done.

I may have gotten tangled in syntax. Just to clarify:

I value the overall diversity of actually speaking voices more than I value the kind of free-for-all which in practice silences many of them and gives over substantial space to those who can't (or won't) function in the presence of even very mild rules. I don't think that the practical domination of many venues by an abusive and loud few is good for society at any scale; I think it's much healthier when the largest possible percentage of those who'd like to speak do speak, and are not silenced by others. I regard this as liberty in action, as opposed to liberty by rule but denied in action.

We're not an anarchistic species, or an anarchistic culture, with mechanisms to strengthen the individual no matter what the outside pressures may be. We thrive in conditions of tempered careful governance.

I've been engaging in a highly entertaining activity, now that I've mostly caught up with work, and (crucially) slept many consecutive hours: I've been rereading this entire thread.

To my incredulous relief, neither language hat nor I said anything nearly as egregious as I remembered. But the really funny thing is that we're all arguing the same damn points from the same viewpoint! For instance, language hat at one point says something like, "That's not what you meant, but it's how I perceive it." Josh admonishes me that the way I phrased something comes off as a low blow.

And damn if I wasn't misconstruing an awful lot of things. It's truly amazing what parts of posts -- or entire posts -- I missed, 100%. Lh (@56) did say, "Honest question". I read that post several times while getting steamed -- how could that phrase surprise me now? Absolutely fascinating.

Context really is everything. It's been very instructive -- the only flamewars I've ever participated in have been in email, thus were less conducive to later reconstruction. I think I'm going to be rereading this thread for a while, to be honest. Something very interesting happened here.

What is absolute icing on the cake, though, and so perfectly MakingLight-esque, is not only that every one of these barbed comments was really well-written, but that after due administration of chocolate, the entire discussion bumped up a metalevel and started analyzing its own rhetoric.

If there's anything I could compare and contrast between ML and MeFi, it's simply that MeFi is so large that it's just too much to read; even threads here quickly outstrip my ability to follow them, and this is a much smaller community. Which is more or less what I meant when I called MeFi "contentious and voluble" @36 ("crap" was intended to be a syntactic slot-filler with no particular semantic content, and wasn't that word choice incredibly poor!)

What's also amazing as I read back through it is how certain words crept into the discourse and were recycled. Two words in particular -- contentious and gaucheness -- were words that I had used, but had come up in posts before I used them, much to my surprise. I even corrected Terry, saying Dave hadn't used "gaucheness", that I had -- but Dave did, before I did. This goes a long way towards convincing me of the validity of subconscious activation of concepts -- and I am 90% sure at this point that this subconscious activation is what causes a discussion to turn into a flamewar. When the subconscious activations start overwhelming conscious understanding, you're no longer saying what you think you're saying.

I'm just shaking my head in awe at the conceptual ecology here. It's every bit as fascinating as a good hike in the jungle.

Doing dishes brings us together! :) Or it will, when I get up from the desk and go do mine.

I've been rereading this entire thread.

Weird, isn't it? I do the same thing over at Mefi sometimes -- it's not really an official part of my duties, but I think it's really good exercise when you can spare the time, because not once have I come out the other side with my opinion of what transpired unchanged. How a thread feels as it unfolds and how it reads as a document can be two very different things, and feeling out that difference now and then is just a tremendously instructive experience.

Or it will, when I get up from the desk and go do mine.

I won't tell if you won't.

Josh @412 - Hysteresis. Engaging in the discussion in the heat of the moment, you bring with you all that subconscious activation and vague remembrance of things; coming back into it later, you have some entirely different set of activations, most of which is probably off elsewhere, thus doesn't interact with the discussion. And the whole set of activation washing back and forth is a dynamic process, thus subject to hysteresis.

It makes me want to get back into cognitive science. The requirement of having to put food on my family is a harsh one.

Josh Millard: I'm sorry, I mistook you. Yes, there is a tendency everywhere for in-groups to be preferred. I saw it as something you were positing as a declared (or at least commonly understood) idea we favored.

The thing is (and it's an important thing), the rules here (so far as I can see) are not about prohibiting people, but conduct. The "Don't Go There" dictum was to avoid a certain type of more heat than light discussion, which was certain to happen no matter the good will of those taking part; because others would get involved, some of whom wouldn't understand the rule of empathy here.

When all was said and done, the thread was locked, the vowels restored... because things were stopped before it got that far.

The peace of the in-group was violated, and the violation let stand. That's not the sort of thing which can be seen from strolling in, esp. on a thread as exemplary as this one has been for how to avoid things blowing up.

While no one goes to make a, "pretty okay nation," the idea of a "more perfect" nation presupposes the slate isn't blank.

The blank slate of the desert island isn't blank. The two people each have undsertandings. How they resolve the differences of those understandings is the question to be answered.

#380 Michael Roberts: Yes, just 3. It's no fun if you don't have to think.

#388 albatross: I never take the game this seriously. Feel free to substitute "is kidnapped by aliens" or "retires to a grotto to contemplate life" for the unfortunately realistic term "death." I'm trying to improve the world.

A further restriction I forgot to mention is that the three must be geographically separated. For a couple of years, I spent a lot of mental energy deciding whether to put the President or the Vice-President of a large Northern Hemisphere democracy on the list. But we're under 180 days and counting, so I reserve the spot for someone else.

Michael Roberts #410: I hadn't been planning to return to the thread (having actual work to do that I've been neglecting because of all this madness), but I'm glad I did and got to see your reassuring comment. By the way, I sent an e-mail to what I hope is your address (at Vivtek); did you get it?

For any who may be interested, heresiarch and i have discussed matters via private email, and with that calming situation, and some distance, I've basically come to the conclusion that heresiarch was almost completely right and I was almost completely wrong.

In order for someone to give someone else a "swirlie," the "swirlee" has to be completely in the power of the "swirler." There is no way the victim can tell how long s/he will be held under water, or how many times. That makes it cross the line into torture: the powerlessness of the victim, coupled with the lack of knowledge about the intentions of the perp.

If I had said "they should all stick their heads in the toilet," there would have been no issue of torture or violent rhetoric. Their doing so would have been an acknowledgement of their own lack of worth, and while humiliation can be torture, considered self-humiliation cannot be (however unpleasant it may be for me the person doing it).

I needed to think this out, split the issues of 1. Was I advocating it and 2. Is it torture, and write about it calmly to work out the above. I was pretty upset at first because I'm firmly against torture of any kind, and being accused of advocating it flipped me sideways.

As for other instances of violent rhetoric, I'm going to try to be more mindful of that in the future. I may use <vent> and </vent> tags more, I'm not sure.

I did point out to heresiarch that a truly hostile reader could take "my friend, you have misspelled 'supersede'" as a threat of physical violence.* But though there are limits on the responsibility of the communicator for communication, the primary responsibility still rests on the communicator, not the communicatee. I communicated ineffectively, given what I actually thought and think; and was wrong-headed about the torture-nature of the old-fashioned swirlie as administered by lumpen jocks in, say, Kinawa Middle School in Okemos, MI in 1971. It's a very mild kind of torture (especially if done only once, and quickly), but torture it is.

I even understand heresiarch's reason for upbraiding me in the thread in the first place, much as I was angered by that at the time. It was I who suggested we bring the conclusion back to the thread; heresiarch agreed, but needed to go to bed by the time the discussion reached that point, so we agreed that I would do it. Thus, this.

*It isn't, even though I think people who misspell 'supersede' should be shot learn to spell it correctly.

Thanks to both of you, Xopher, for thinking it through -- and thanks for putting it out there for the rest of us.

#85 Greg

The argument for policing thoughts seems to hinge on the unproven assertion that every thought I have will always leak through into some action or another such that it is visible to the people around me.

There's thought-chain versus thought, however. Looking at someone and getting lust in one's heart, is not the same thing as then deliberately engaging or not making any attempt to try to avoid engaging in sex fantasy daydreams about the person.

The "plastic smile" being one example of how thoughts always come through in action and therefore the thought must be eradicated.

There's been some recent research that indicates that people who have to plaster a smile on their face for the sake of the customers, when the service-workers are not happy, get very stressed out....

Except I have all sorts of thoughts when I'm alone in my office. The counter argument to that is that once I am in physical proximity to anyone I had thoughts about, the thoughts will leak through into some physical sign, and therefore the thought alone in my office ought be suppressed.

Pheremones do.... stock stuff, for that matter, in science fiction romance, where, for that matter, the leads usually are trying to repress their lusting after one another....

And while I tend to agree with Paula that using thoughts to justify sexist actions is "sociobiology horseshit", I think the assertions that impure thoughts leads to impure actions and therefore all impure thoughts must be suppressed,

I never wrote "all." My point was that it's one thing to find someone appealing, it's quite another to engage in lurid fantasies or at the extreme delusional daydreams about the person as opposed to attempting to hold down the imaginings and fantasties.... consenting adult scenes and play are one thing, making someone else into a sex -object- is quite another.

is, similarly based on unproven sociobiology.

What about the situations of interviews with rapists where the rapists' rationalizations include, "it was her fault that I raped her because she was in her apartment because where was there when I broke into it to steal" (yes, a convicted rapist actually said words to those effects, to a reporter for the recorder, which interview was taped and broadcast as part of IIRC a PBS show I was in the 1979-1981 time frame) or "I was angry at my girlfriend, I left [the apartment" and went out and raped the first woman I saw" [sounded to me like a transferrence--he wasn't going to take out his mad-on on his girlfriend, instead he took out his mad-on on an _anonymous_ woman who represented Female, but wasn't his girlfriend who wasn;t to be assaulted... but it was perfectly reasonable to him to assault some OTHER woman who was a stranger...) [from the same TV show].

I don't expect neutered/angelic behavior, I do wish there were responsibility and respect.... there's lots of porn out there, and much of it even the porn talent were consenting adults being paid for sex trade activities for distribution to porn consumers [note, I am using "porn" non-perjoratively here, as term and not as judgment/condemnation]. If someone wants to play sex fantasy stuff, there's lots of it available for downloading and in video and bookstores....

when going from thought to action, that is communication. If you have a thought and don't communicate it, you can call that self censorship or self control or self editing or whatever.

Huh?

This is just a comment that might fit either here or in the Open Thread: Why is so much of the best political coverage disguised as humor? I watched the Onion video in the links, and it brought this question to mind. At different times, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Steven Colbert, and The Onion have all managed to make really cutting, good, and very funny political comments.

My theory is that a great many people, all across the political spectrum, have learned the tactic of crying foul and shreiking in protest to almost any discussion of some issues they don't like. You can see this regularly in the current presidential campaign, where the important story each day is almost always about who apologized for what gaffe / impolitic comment / inconvenient outburst of honesty. One result is that commedians can make pithy brief comments on stuff that "serious" pundits must hedge all around with disclaimers.

Xopher's summary of our discussion is an accurate depiction of my views--thanks for doing the heavy lifting, Xopher!

#399 Terry

We all the polite and the impolitic, lost our vowels.

What, nobody owed anything in the thread anymore, or you were all obligated to Teresa?! (using the Regency England definition of the term "vowels.")
=======

Some of this thread is reminding me of a thread many months ago, in which it got pointed out that "freedom of speech" does not include the right to force someone else to be an audience... the particular thread included discussion BDSM activity and the insistence of some participants in such activities that there be a more or less public audience, as opposed to scenes conducted in rooms where all those present are adults consenting to being present as involved as at minimum the audience.

The question of "appropriate conduct" applies--what's reasonable "signal" and what's "noise." "The freedome of speech" clause doesn't say anything about amplitude, or "jamming" in which Persons A, B, C, and are so loud, or engaged in activities so loud, that no one else can hear any other conversation, or in more extreme cases, the sound levels, quite literally, are deafening.... Or, for that matter, when the situation is one of verbal harassment....

#404 Josh

Boston Common is a common space, and once a year cows graze there, as part of keeping Boston Common a public area.... outside of New England with its town and city greens and commons, the most typical name is "public parkland"

Which is an unlikely example, I know, but that is the starting point. That's the blank slate. The laws and customs that exist, that have been applied to that meadow on the island as it became a village and then a city and then a nation, weren't there at the first encounter, and it's safe to say that the shape of the laws and customs that have been established in different places in the world vary wildly. There's nothing baked-in to the default space.

Boston Common got defined very early on, as common public land for e.g. grazing cattle, and remains so to this very day! It wasn't there as common grazing ground first and then a locality growing up around it, it got defined because ther were settlers, and the settlers specified that area specifically as common ground, for the settlement.

#410 Michael

This goes a long way towards convincing me of the validity of subconscious activation of concepts -- and I am 90% sure at this point that this subconscious activation is what causes a discussion to turn into a flamewar. When the subconscious activations start overwhelming conscious understanding, you're no longer saying what you think you're saying.

The concept of subconscius activiation of concept is behind my objections to e.g. mentally removing other people's clothing sorts of things.... because there are thought-chain concepts and self-validations involved that create feedback and resonances that are reinforcing of "these are perfectable reasonable and defensible and approprite attitudes and views..." which then constitute bases for taking action, based on established thought patterns of "appropriate."

I'm just shaking my head in awe at the conceptual ecology here. It's every bit as fascinating as a good hike in the jungle.

The Fluorosphere, however, is devoid of not only real life poisonous snakes, real life biting arachnids (poisonous or otherwise) real life biting insects, real life poisonous lizard and amphibians, but most of the virtual nasties, too!

Paula #419:

I think I see the distinction you're making, and it's the distinction I think of when I read the Christian teaching quoted above (basically where Jesus says that to even lust in your heart is wrong). There's a point where you have a choice about whether to let yourself fantasize about sleeping with someone, or telling them off, or beating them up, or whatever. It's important to recognize that your choice can have consequences in how you interact with that person later, and you probably want to think about how to minimize the negative consequences. (Among other things, if you create a romantic/sexual fantasy about some person, even if things develop in that direction later, that person isn't going to follow your fantasy lines at all--they're going to be who they are, which is beyond your ability to simulate.)

At the same time, I'm not sure cherry-picked interviews with criminals on TV are going to give us great insight into this, since most of us are never going to rape anyone, no matter how many fantasies about them we entertain. And I'm sure there's no inherent right to demand that nobody anywhere fantasize about you, since stuff that happens in your head is entirely your business. But it's definitely worth noting that this might change the way you interact with the person you're fantasizing about, and that the point where your fantasies start affecting the interaction is the point where you start potentially harming someone else with your actions.

Josh Millard @ 397: "But in any setting where there is an existing set of boundaries, of comfort zones and mutual understanding of what generally is and is not permissible, some communication -- some "somethings" that could be communicated -- will fall by the wayside as a result."

While I agree that that's often true, I feel like you’re saying that all conversational trade-offs, permitting speech X in favor of speech Y, are equal. I do not hold with that: some kinds of speech are, I am as sure of as gravity,* better than others. Making witty puns is more worthy than shouting out racial slurs. I am so sure of this that I have no compunction demanding that all spaces which call themselves public disallow that latter sort of commentary.

Certainly there’s a vast grey area where different people will value different things and make different trade-offs about them. Nonetheless, there are some truly black areas that all communities are enriched by excluding. You will never convince me that any community is well-served by allowing people to issue threats against each other. To return to the source, misogyny one of those black things that is far more often permitted in "sites for everyone" than racial slurs or death threats. And when people point that out, well, this is the conversation that results.

*Meaning, mostly sure.

@ 398: "But I do not believe that the value of an uncivil (or maybe I should say "acivil"?) unmoderated public space is nil. I think it's important, for a number of reasons, that we absolutely preserve the ideal (and whenever possible the implementation) of a space where no speech -- even the ugliest, most morally reprehensible speech -- is forbidden."

I’m divided as to whether that’s entirely wrong, so I’ll limit myself to this: whether or not such a place should exist, it certainly shouldn’t be the default. It’s like when language hat said "Fortunately, those who feel uncomfortable in unprotected enviroments can create protected ones, and I'm all for that.…But the public space must be free." Well, no. The public space must be accessible to the public, including the large proportion of it who don’t want to be treated like dirt for holding the wrong opinion or having the wrong genitalia. For this to happen, the default needs to be some level of moderation.

Completely moderated free speech is conversational anarchy. People like the idea of it for the same reasons they like anarchy (I can do what I want! People won’t tell me what to do anymore!), but in practice, it suffers from the same problems as anarchy. Anarchy isn’t a stable isotope: it decays, usually quite quickly, into a form of organization. The type of organization that usually appears is the simplest, most basic form of organization: rule by the strongest. In free speech’s case, it becomes rule by the most willing and able to argue by whatever means possible, i.e. trolls. (This is why a lot of people tend to associate arguments for absolute free speech with trolls, even when the argument isn’t coming from a troll.) Granted, moderation, like government, is far from perfect. But it’s a step up from what it replaces. Returning to the tabula rasa doesn’t get rid of the problems caused by moderation or trolls; all it does is start the cycle over again. The best you can do is try to invent better kinds of moderation.

@ 404: "Which is an unlikely example, I know, but that is the starting point. That's the blank slate. The laws and customs that exist, that have been applied to that meadow on the island as it became a village and then a city and then a nation, weren't there at the first encounter, and it's safe to say that the shape of the laws and customs that have been established in different places in the world vary wildly. There's nothing baked-in to the default space."

I’d argue that any communication between those two survivors is VERY dependent on them both coming to the conclusion that the other isn’t going to kill them, or otherwise act violently towards them. Without that assurance, nothing else will be possible. There are some strictures which are absolutely essential to communication—not a lot, but there are a few. And those few rules, usually relating to violence and who can use it, actually are universal to all human cultures. There’s nowhere you can go where there aren’t any rules about who can kill whom.

Conversation works the same way. Communities where verbal violence is entirely unregulated are usually rapidly depopulated, or some big dog shows up and starts saying, you can pick on anyone but me and mine, or this is okay, but that isn’t—a linguistic feudalism, like Leah Miller describes in 104. It’s not baked into the default space, but it’s an inescapable emergent property of the human interaction.

albatross @ 420 - Pigboy Limbaugh also calls himself an "entertainer", and arguably is. I think the disconnect is that politics is really not distinct from entertainment, but our culture maintains that it is. I'm sure somebody could -- probably has -- written more than one doctoral thesis on that.

language hat @ 416 - what, this one here that says "failure notice"? Sure did!

Xopher & heresiarch,

Thanks for working that through, and for the thoughtful post of the results. Knowing you both to the degree that I do, I am impressed but not surprised.

albatross #420: Any medium of expression that's considered less than reputable by the elite is going to be less closely policed and therefore more able to speak truth. It's why SF and horror have also been able to make pretty cutting commentary. Not to mention pretty much every form of Black music throughout American history, or teen TV, say. It's the court jester thing.

I woke up from nightmares, and while chatting with friends to regain my footing, I was reminded of an exchange on a local BBS back in my FidoNet days. I'm paraphrasing, but I think I've got the gist of it.

On one side was a guy arguing vociferously against any moderation of a particular forum (and using sock puppets to help his case). His argument was basically a social Darwinist one, that anyone who could survive and flourish in such an environment deserved to, and the free-for-all was most likely to lead to real insight into any issue that came under discussion.

The best response came from one of the older BBBers, whose response was about like this: "On the one hand, you're the king of the free-for-all. But on the other, even the slightest touch of moderation ruins it all, destroys everything for you, and forces you into humiliating surrender. Aren't you the precious little flower?"

Ethan @ 429 said what I intended to say @427. And with comedy, it's even more so than just with "less reputable" media -- with comedy, you can always say, if challenged, "Oh, I was only joking." Jokes even survived Nazi Germany, and the German-in-the-street could be incredibly cutting in their commentary on the Nazi system -- as long as nobody actually said it directly.

Michael #431: Right! Hence John Stewart's insistence on describing the Daily Show as "fake news", despite their being pretty much the best mainstream source of real news.

Paula@419: it's one thing to find someone appealing, it's quite another to engage in lurid fantasies

Maybe there's a better fallacy to describe that statement, but the one that comes to mind is fallacy of the "undistributed middle". According to one definition, it's when "you attempt to argue that things are in some way similar, but you don't actually specify in what way they are similar."

Except, in this case, you're arguing that they're different and don't specify any objective way to distinguish how they are different.

The statement is packed with an implied danger that if lurid fantasies happen, then something bad will happen but that something isn't specifically called out. This has two advantages for you. First, it allows people to imagine whatever their worst fear is. Second, since you don't specifically state the damge and since people don't explicitely state their worst case imagined fear, none of them can be pointed to and shown to be false.

The entire problem I have with this Clean Thoughts approach is that its based not on what Bob does, but on what Alice fears. And this statement is an example of that.

How are these two thoughts different based on what Bob does instead of based on what Alice fears?

to engage in lurid fantasies or at the extreme delusional daydreams

You just did a slippery slope argument from lurid (but sane) fantasies to delusional (insane) daydreams.

Delusional people DO delusional actions, and they can be dealt with objectively based on what they did.

You list sane fantasies and delusional fantasies as being within the same category, different extremes of the same thing. And you haven't provided any objective basis for that. This is another version of the unproven premise that all thoughts must leak through into action.

I think your public appearance is public property.
I think your public behavior is public property, as is your public persona.

I think anything anyone wants to think about either is entirely up to them. If they behave badly as a result, that's their problem. If they behave badly as a result of a lurid fantasy, it's no different than if they behave badly without a lurid fantasy.

Also, if people do behave themselves, whether they have the lurid fantasy or not is no one's business but theirs. It may squick you to think that they are having them, but a) if they behave properly you'll never know (either way), and b) it's really none of your business even if the fantasies are about you.

You may not like the thought of someone you find unappealing having fantasies about you, even masturbating to those fantasies, but too bad. You do not have any right to impose any kind of control, moral or ethical, over someone's thoughts.* If you want thought control, start by controlling you own thoughts: stop thinking that people may be fantasizing about you, or ever thinking they might.

That's definitely no harder than stopping sexual fantasies, and much better ethically, because you're solving YOUR problem with YOUR action, instead of trying to impose controls on someone else's real or imagined thoughts about you, which you have absolutely no right to do.

*I'm consciously denouncing the idea of "impure thoughts" as sinful here, not least because it's so often used to keep people in a perpetual state of guilt as a means of social control. Guilt is a kind of suffering; deliberately imposing suffering on someone who is in your power is, as we've discussed at length above, torture. (Please note that while the power of, say, the Roman Catholic Church is limited, and its victims usually have an opportunity to escape from it, you don't have a choice unless you know you have it.)

I think your public appearance is public property.
I think your public behavior is public property, as is your public persona.

I'm really not comfortable with that phrasing. Obviously the public will make of my appearance and my behavior and my persona what they will - they're all out there in the public space - but nothing about me is anybody's property.

Perhaps a Creative Commons model would be appropriate?

I'll take that as a friendly amendment, julia.

My point was this: you don't have any right to dictate what others may think—about anything, really, but certainly about your public appearance, behavior, or persona.

In Seeker's Mask, the protagonist Jame(Jamethiel) comes across a lifesize doll of herself in Lord Caineron's quarters, made so that Lord Caineron could eviserate the doll pulling out the doll's liver and lights.... He feared and hated her because when Jame had been an unwilling guest of Lord Caineron, she had not only gotten away from his custody, but left him in a particular state of "not quite being in touch with things" that played into a major phobia of his. Plus, she had frustrated his plans for what had intended to use her for, and, hmm, that person in the Oval Office and Lord Caineron seem to have a lot of things in common, including not being the brightest bulbs in the universe, being vindictive and vicious, wanting to play warleader, etc.

But anyway, getting back more directly to the point--I object to being treated as a public appliance sex object/toy. Someone fantasizing about me because they feel like it, is in effect treating me like a sex appliance/toy. Who gave them permission to consider that other people are their playtoys to do that to?

My experiences include that various total strangers in social settings whom I danced with, started breathing down my neck with NO encouragement from me whatsoever except apparently that since I was there and THEY were interested, they were assuming (or even accusing me...) that I had the hots for them or was "leading them on." They were putting their damned FANTASIES as transferrence in the DELUSION of perceiving that because THEY apparently were fantasizing about me, that it was MY [non-existent or limited or ambivalent....]interest that resonating with them and getting them all hot and bothered and excited--when again, it was almost all purely their imaginations....

YUCK, especially since that was back in the days when "No" got taken as "You're just playing hard to get, you don't really mean 'No!'" if the person the "No" was said to wasn't interested in hearing "No." [as opposed to the cases of people making passes to impress their buddies or because they were in a group which decided who was going to make a pass and it was them that the group-think picked out as the person who was going to make a pass [not my fault if there are people who are reading this who think that I'll telling tall tales, misunderstood the situations, or otherwise am incorrectly comprehending or relating this.... it was pack behavior, and going beyond that gets into TMI territory -very- quickly]]--the passmakers in those situations tended to not be "serious" and didn't even necessarily want to be making a pass, didn't want a positive response.... or worse (e.g., --someone who was giving himself a fidelity test....(I indicated that this stuff hits TMI rapidly!))... but pushed hard making the passes because of the social pressure to pursue the situation. All the while, of course, those making "social passes" generally, again, were expecting/requiring a "no" response, which would get them socially acceptably out of the situation "honorably" -- they would have made the pass demanded by their buddies or ritually expected otherwise as proving their masculinity or whatever, and the rejection was supposed to come from the person the pass was being made at.... of course, from the other side, it was impossible to tell if someone making a pass were doing it purely for show, purely out of peer pressure, out of a real interest the person was aware out, out of mixed bases, or out of too much alcohol and having in the inhibitions lowered--case a, someone who if sober wouldn't have because it wouldn't look good/the person was in a relationship/the erson disliked me * /etc, or case b) the person was scared/apprehensive/intimidated/hesitant/whatever and that one time the booze overcomes the shyness/self-doubt/apprehension.

Then there was the reality that the less the person feels they have invested in the situation/to lose, the more they push--the pushiest types who hit on me were married. Yes, -really-. The genuinely single types who weren't involved in relationships, were usually apprehensive about getting involved because of peer-pressure fear of anything that might involve a commitment, were apprehensive about being turned down (if it weren't buddy pressure), etc. etc. etc., and would often dither. The married sorts had little such internal unease, they had Big Mama at home for emotional stability etc.

The mix of motivations sorts could get really annoying, particularly with people who were lying to themselves even more than they were lying to anyone else about their motivations. Then there were the cases of e.g. the colonel who was hot after my ass provided none of his subordinates were around to notice, in which case I didn't exist, but as soon as they were out of that part of the bar at Peterson Air Force Base, he was back chasing me--he was the fellow who had the temerity, when I ignored him on one occasion because I was sitting at a round table with several other people talking to them, literally dragged the chair I was sitting on off with me in it to get my attention.... (the chairs were on rollers).

That's some of the sort of crap I got to deal with back in my twenties, starting before my 22nd birthday even, soaking wet behind the ears and not well socialized to start with, getting hit on from all directions........bbbbbbbbbllllllllleeeeeeeeechhhhhhhh. Oh, and bored out of my mind for the most part, in Colorado Springs as it was at the time. I had a better technical library from the texts I had from college than University of Colorado at Colorado Springs had at the time. The Air Force Academy was north of Colorado Springs, and a couple of the instructors there quite literally had been classmates of mine (from a grad-level math class) but the Blue Zoo and Cheyenne Mountain/Peterson Air Force Base/Ent Air Force Base [which was going out of existence]/the Childlaw Building [NORAD/ADCOM Headquarters) were mostly two separate universes for very different purposes... the "Zoomies" -- Air Force Academy cadets--were kept locked up there most of the time, and their attitudes towards education drove some of the people I knew who taught there nuts... "You don't want to be a pilot, you want to be a truck driver!" one frustrated instructor told me he said in class to a cadet who said he didn't see what there was any need for his to study and know any physics of flight, to fly airplanes....

Getting back to considerations regarding other people's thought, however.... my life was made quite miserable by "transferrence" of other people imputing things and values and actions and interests to me, from out of their imaginings and interests, and being concerned with their own pleasures/convenience/etc. and regarding me as -appliance- or -convenience- as regards e.g. that colonel whose attitude was that I should be receptive and attending to him etc. when his squadron wasn't around, and shouldn't exist if he squadron was around.

That was one of the more extreme cases, but it certainly wasn't the only one. I got some of the same treatment some years later in LA from e.g. a wealthy former entrepeneur who was working for The Aerospace Corporation who was blowing hot and cold at me who regarded it as improper the idea that he working for a federal contractor should be openly involved with an Air Force captain, but that a surreptiously liaison and chasing me around at conferences would be perfectly reason..... snarl

[I am not saying that everyone I ran into anywhere acted like a skirt-chasing jerk of one form or another.... there was a one person who a couple decades ago I kept wondering if the person were interested in me or not, for nearly the entirety of a Boskone.... Then there was the fellow up at Thule in the Blue Nose Club who was imbibing of liquid courage trying to get his courage up to ask me to dance, he finally had had enough reinforcement from the liquid courage, stood up, and then quite literally slid under the table, his tolerance for alcohol exceeded as regards being able to stand up straight. That was pretty innocuous, though embarrassing to the fellow it happened to, assuming he remembered that it happened!].

But anyway, the level of crap I got hit with over the years, some -respect- would have been nice, starting with it would have been nice if there had been enough INTERNAL respect for other people taught, to regard other people has being -due- some respect and not being treated as external appliances!

That's my point, that I DID get treated as if I were appliance/convenience, that there were people who didn't even have the couth to consider what my schedule was before calling me at a time convenient to them (if they even bothered to call....), who were so lacking in couth as to pretend I didn't exist when it wasn't convenient for them.... I wasn't getting respect, I was getting hit on by people trying to -use- me....

I don't know what their fantasies were. But the idea, after all that crap, that it's perfectly reasonable in the minds of other people, to IMAGINE that people should be mentally through of as sex toys... pisses me off. I know what it feels like to be a Disposable Darling, and to me, I really don't in retrospect see all much difference between mentally treating something that way, and the treatment I got.... it's all disrespectful.

I know what it feels like to be a Disposable Darling,

should be
I know what it feels like to be treated like a Disposable Darling

[miserable keyboard and WIMP-GUIs.... finger slides and words get dropped...]

Paula, you're still not getting it. Every time you talk about this, you persist in conflating THOUGHTS and ACTIONS, and you appear to be making the assumption that nobody is capable of distinguishing between the two. Until you get that straightened out, you will continue to be arguing a point that no one else is trying to refute -- that it's rude to behave toward someone else in that fashion, no matter the cause. But so far, every example you have brought up involves ACTIONS.

The point of disagreement is that there is nothing wrong with thinking things that one has no intention of doing. The number of times I've wished for some way to punch a slow leak in the tire of some asshole in a Monument to Testosterone pickup truck doesn't bear contemplation. That doesn't mean I'd do it even if such a power were granted to me.

Paula 438: Shorter Paula: Thought is the same as behavior. I've been mistreated by men who wanted a sex toy. Therefore thought is the same as behavior.

Someone fantasizing about me because they feel like it, is in effect treating me like a sex appliance/toy. Who gave them permission to consider that other people are their playtoys to do that to?

No, it's not the same "in effect." That's just bullshit, and obvious bullshit at that. If they fantasize about you and never act on it, even to letting it show so that you see it or ever hear about it, it has NO effect on you. People have explained this over and over, and you haven't addressed their objections, but just repeated over and over that you think it's the same, and brought in your ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT experiences (irrelevant because they all involve how people have TREATED you, which all agree (if it happened as you describe) was inappropriate), as you have for the bulk of this lengthy rant.

But the idea, after all that crap, that it's perfectly reasonable in the minds of other people to IMAGINE that people should be mentally thought of as sex toys...pisses me off. I know what it feels like to be [treated like] a Disposable Darling, and to me, I really don't in retrospect see all much difference between mentally treating something that way, and the treatment I got...it's all disrespectful.

(corrections made; one Paula's, rest correcting punctuation and spelling to bring it in line with Paula's clear intent) Well, one difference is that some nice guys probably never asked you out because of all the other guys hitting on you, and their deep distaste for being mistaken for one of them. There is no way, in such an environment, for a man to approach a woman who has been thus treated in a serious respectful way; you'd mistake him for another scumbag.

But the nice guys were fantasizing too (assuming they existed). Some of them may have been fantasizing about arriving at your door with roses, but they were also fantasizing about you in a more sexual way. The NICE GUYS.

I don't know about women, but we men fantasize about everything we'd like to do. That includes being a rock star, being "the greatest poet...I don't think they MAKE poets as great as I want to be," playing NBA basketball, etc. Sometimes it's grandiose dreams like these; sometimes it's just plain planning. In Revenge of the Nerds, a woman asks one of the nerds why sex with him was so much better than with her boyfriend. He replies "because all jocks think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex." Paula, any guy who didn't fantasize about making love to you would be a LOUSY LAY. And any guy you've enjoyed sex with will either admit he fantasized about you beforehand, or lie.

In my experience, guys who don't fantasize about other people sexually are self-centered, and treat sex as masturbation with a really great sex toy. They don't think about it, they "just do it." Thinking about other people sexually would be thinking about other people, you see, and NPD precludes that.

If you don't like people who fantasize about other people, you don't like men. Period. (Well, some men are pretty much thought-free and act on pure instinct, but I daresay you'd like them even less.)

____ 439: [miserable keyboard and WIMP-GUIs.... finger slides and words get dropped...]

Prufereedin. Srsly. Ur doin it rong.

Seriously, Paula, if you'd read what you wrote before posting it, you'd catch many of these errors. You've said in the past that you just rant and post, because it upsets you to read about something all over again after being upset by writing it. Look at the paragraph I corrected above. I didn't correct, for example,

the idea...that it's perfectly reasonable in the minds of other people to IMAGINE that people should be mentally thought of as sex toys...

the idea...that it's perfectly reasonable that people should be thought of as sex toys...

You either are incapable of writing more coherently or don't have enough respect for us to try. And if you're not willing to read what you've written before you post it, why should we be willing to read it after? Add to that the fact that you plainly either a) don't read posts by those who disagree with what you've said or b) dismiss any ideas that disagree with yours out of hand, and you start looking positively antisocial. I'm not saying that your lack of willingness to listen is equivalent to the scumbag men not listening to you telling them to back off, but they are related behaviors.

440 Lee: Hear, hear. If Paula listens to you, it will be the first time in this conversation. I hope she does, but the hope is increasingly forlorn, as people say more or less the same thing over and over and she consistently ignores them.

Paula, what Lee said.

440 Lee: Hear, hear. If Paula listens to you, it will be the first time in this conversation. I hope she does, but the hope is increasingly forlorn, as people say more or less the same thing over and over and she consistently ignores them.

I'm seriously starting to wonder what's happened in the last few months to make Paula suddenly turn semi-rabid. Someone actually asked over on some other thread (I think it was one about Clinton's campaign), but was totally ignored.

Carrie 443: I don't know either. I persist in attempting to use reason (along with a sort of clue-by-four). Not sure why.

Lee @ 440: Precisely.

What Xopher said @ 441, except I wouldn't have used the word irrelevant. What Paula has been writing is meaningful and it is relevant, but to a somewhat different topic than the one the rest of us have been discussing.