The FAQ isn't the policy.
That's the problem, isn't it? It looks like a policy. People use it to understand what the policy is. That's what it's there for, isn't it?
There's a reasonable assumption that bare breasts are inappropriate.
There is not a reasonable assumption that breastfeeding is inappropriate depending on exactly how much nipple you can see. We have established that this is not reasonable. That is what the peasants with pitchforks are marching about.
Shall I wonder in turn if you've been reading my counterarguments?
Yes I have, and it was the accumulated speciousness of your counterarguments that caused me to weigh in in the first place in a thread I had previously ignored, as it doesn't affect me. I just couldn't believe the things that you and Jenett were posting.
Because you said "previously unexpressed policy", and it wasn't.
But ... you just said, "The FAQ is not the policy." The policy is not available for the users to see. It is unexpressed to any given user until someone tells them about it. There's nothing for you to disagree with in this phrase.
If there were some kind of flood of inappropriate userpic requests involving bare breasts, maybe, but we don't have any evidence that that's happened in the past.
Right. That's what I'm saying: it must not have.
the FAQ has been modified to clarify the policy. Is that not one of the things being objected to?
The FAQ has been modified to retroactively change the expressed policy, the policy that users have access to.
So, my "you sit here baffled" is a "personal attack," and your "picking a side arbitrarily" isn't? OK, one rule for the goose, one rule for the gander. Very typical of LJ, I guess.
I have yet to see a convincing defense of the idea that LJ is obligated to allow naked breasts in default icons.
I don't think anybody is saying LJ is obligated to do anything. People are just expressing their strong disapproval of what LJ has chosen to do, its total ineptness at expressing what it has chosen to do and the arbitrary way it jumps on people to enforce this, and a wish things could get better.
The alternative would be to allow anything in default userpics, which would be worse than what's going on now.
That's ridiculous. I'm sure we can both think of pictures that would unambiguously violate the nudity rules in a way that the most nipple-revealing breastfeeding does not. Those, we're not arguing over.
The difference being that speed is exactly one variable and can be tracked numerically. Nudity and inappropriateness are neither...
Precisely! Therefore it would be wise to stop treating them as if they were. "Remove that picture from your default, or we'll suspend your account."
this whole analogy flawed before we even get to this part: while a cop of that kind may be called draconian, nobody says they should be fired or that they can't be ticketed for it.
Nobody's saying that LJ can't enforce its rules, however arbitrary. The protest is over whether they should. And, uh ... overzealous cops do get disciplined, y'know. At least in conscientious jurisdictions. Even if they don't themselves break laws. (If they do, they get arrested. That's not the kind of discipline I mean here.)
Sorry, the rule didn't exist if it wasn't expressed to the users. And it's been explained to you over and over again that nothing in the old FAQ implied the coverage of this. You can claim that it was in the heads of the Abuse team, but it wasn't in the heads of those who had to abide by it. I wonder if you've actually been reading the arguments, from Yonmei and others.
Or, and far more likely than any of those, the Abuse team sent warnings to people with icons with nipples on them on several occasions and the person said "Oh, oops! I guess I'll change my default. Thanks for telling me!" and that was the end of it.
Now I know you haven't been reading me, because that scenario is exactly the last one in the list of mine that you just quoted above that!
"The individuals asked to abide by this previously unexpressed policy were willing to do so."
But however you wish to express this scenario, it can't have happened very often, because if it had, an intelligent FAQ writer would have realized that the FAQ was not conveying what they wanted it to convey.
They have addressed the issue. ... They've said no.
That's not addressing the issue. That's refusing to accede to a request. Addressing the issue would require an explanation of the policy of "inappropriateness." There hasn't been one.
And then I'd go find out what the grievances were
Yes, that would be a really good idea, wouldn't it? As it is, you sit here baffled by these angry users whose legitimate complaints you wish to invalidate.
Also, if LJ doesn't want to write a 20MB FAQ, it shouldn't enforce it as if it had written a 20MB FAQ.
A 55 mph speed limit is a clear and unambiguous border between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Unlike, say, whether breastfeeding counts as "nudity" (let alone that "nudity" wasn't in the FAQ before), or what is "inappropriate."
Yet most cops don't give out tickets for going 56, and those who do get reputations as draconian speed-trap demons.
Suspending someone for a breastfeeding icon is being a draconian speed-trap demon.
Which they apparently did [i.e. understand the rules], since this disagreement didn't happen for four years.
This makes it sound as if everyone knew for four years that breastfeeding icons were inappropriate, and somehow suddenly forgot.
Which is ridiculous. What it means is that either the issue didn't come up (there were no breastfeeding icons, or Abuse didn't come across them, or didn't bother to enforce them), or the individuals asked to abide by this previously unexpressed policy were willing to do so.
It must not have come up very often, or an intelligent FAQ-writer would have added it a long time ago, instead of when it was added.
idonotlikepeas: everything you say here has already been responded to, eloquently, by several others uptopic on previous occasions, so one gets the feeling that explaining it to you is like talking to a brick wall. But OK ...
Sorry, but this wasn't a "clarification" of an existing rule, it was a rewording to mean something new, regardless of what was going on in the heads of the people who re-wrote it. It was retroactive harassment. This has been explained to you over and over again on this topic by many people.
And if the policy is inane in the first place (pictures of breastfeeding are "inappropriate"?) and arbitrarily enforced (obscenity lies in default icons, not in other icons?), it only makes it worse.
I'm not interested in the specific minute etiquette violations of the e-mailers, about which I know nothing. That's a procedural issue with no relationship to the merits of the argument, and unjust when applied to the cases of the people who filed individual complaints. (Also, it was established uptopic that it's not true that LJ Abuse wasn't the place to go. I can't find it now, but a post was quoted directing people to LJ Abuse.) LJ Abuse should address the issue, rather than dismiss a whole category of complaints because of procedural violations.
Addressing the issue would consist of apologizing for being misleading, and of ceasing to issue draconian suspensions for retroactive violations of unexpressed rules.
If I see a mob of peasants attacking a castle with pitchforks, my first thought is going to be, "Gee, they must be really angry about something," not to whine over the lack of permits for their pitchforks.
idonotlikepeas: Yes, the "SixApart changed the policy" meme is still alive, because it's still the best way to describe what happened. The policy is what LJ tells the user base it is, not what LJ secretly enforces without revealing it to anybody. (Your own words: "The document which says 'no nipples' is not public. To be honest, I don't even know if there is such a document.")
Agreed, LJ doesn't have to itemize every prohibited thing. But it does have to give users a reasonable expectation of what is covered by the prohibition list. And nipples simply didn't apply in the original statement. That - since the reaction seems to be puzzling you - is why the users asked to remove their default breastfeeding icons got their backs up over it: because they were being asked to abide by a previously existing unwritten rule that they could not fairly be expected to infer from the rules that were written.
Read Dave Bell's definition of an abusive patriarchy again: "SixApart are running LiveJournal like an abusive father runs his family; punishing his children for breaches of rules which, for all they might know, only came into existence at the moment his desire to punish was formed." Doesn't matter if they did only come into existence at that moment or not. From the children's perspective, they can't behave properly unless they do know. They know now about this, of course. But what will be the next thing they don't know? Since neither you nor Jenett are admitting the massive disfunctionality of LJ Abuse, problems like this are going to keep on happening.
Now, about your defense of LJ Abuse getting its back up and refusing to reconsider its policy because a lot of emails (whether they're "spam" or not) got sent to irrelevant as well as relevant administrative personnel:
That's a natural human reaction. But here on planet Earth, as PNH pointed out way way uptopic, the way a large number of people indicate that they are a large number, and that they protest some policy, is by organizing a letter-writing campaign. Get used to it. If LJ Abuse wished to be responsive, rather than truculent, it could have nipped the campaign in the bud by addressing the concerns raised by the campaign. There's nothing like responding to the problem to calm down angry people. I've worked in customer service, and I know how this works.
Especially if, as you wrote in your next post, the protesters represent just a tiny portion of the LJ user base. A company attuned to customer service would treat a "tiny portion" as a warning, not as an excuse to dismiss it. I think the rule of thumb is one protest for every ten people annoyed. I'm an LJ user, I don't breastfeed and have no opinion on the subject, but I'm mightily annoyed by this. I haven't written LJ Abuse about it, though? Why? Because it's clear, especially from what you say, that Abuse only treats complaints as an excuse to ignore the complainers. If that's LJ's and SixApart's attitude as well as your own, there's only two possible responses: to give up, or to enlist more people and shout louder!
Meanwhile, not everyone affected by this policy was responsible for the letter-writing campaign. Why should they suffer just because Abuse was annoyed at some other people?
Lastly and most importantly: if LJ Abuse really is a customer service outfit, and not just a tool of an abusive patriarchy, it should suppress its collective annoyance at its own customers, and address the problems. Brushing aside customer complaints, for fear that the next round of complaints about something else will be worse, is the tactic of a beleagured aristocracy, not of people who actually want to help people. Instead of dampening the problem, it will only escalate it. In politics, this usually leads to the French and/or Russian Revolutions. In business, it leads to the disgusted departure of your customer base, a danger which tomorrow's protest is intended to illustrate. Is that what you want? Because if you really wanted to de-escalate future protests, you'd advocate LJ Abuse to cease its heavy-handed tactics, instead of building up a defensive wall.
[This is my third attempt posting this. The server keeps freezing on me.]
TomB, who strikes me as having made among the few really sensible posts here, suggested mildly that if management receives a lot of angry letters on a subject, perhaps they should not dismiss them as spam but instead consider what the angry people are trying to tell them.
Idonotlikepeas countered that there was indeed spam: prewritten messages that could be sent by anyone who pressed a button.
One may question whether that's really spam or not - normal spam messages are identical ones sent by one person, these were identical messages sent by many people, and thus represented a much larger segment of opinion than the average spammer - but OK, let's take peas-hater's point as read, that there was a lot of ignorable junk in the protests.
But surely they weren't all like that? The presence of mass junk-mail doesn't negate the rest of the people sharing that view.
As for the objection that these messages went to admin people not involved in the decision in question, I think it unreasonable to expect complainers, who clearly hadn't been satisfied with the answers they'd gotten before, to be intimately acquainted with the details of the workings of the administration and every point of who is responsible for what. That a message went to an irrelevant person as well as a relevant one does not negate the content of that message.
There is one argument that keeps reappearing in this thread that strikes me as utterly inane.
This is the argument that, while breastfeeding is necessary for the health of the (breastfed) infant, pictures of breastfeeding are not necessary. Therefore, the argument goes, it's OK to ban those pictures. Or, more accurately, some of those pictures - the ones that "show nipples" whatever that may mean, and from default icons but not from nondefault icons. (Apparently, then, since default photos of nipple-showing breastfeeding are being banned because the photos are not necessary for the health of the infant, then if nondefault photos of breastfeeding are not being banned, apparently those photos are necessary for the health of the infant.)
What's inane about that is - sure, photos of infants feeding aren't necessary. But photos of any given thing aren't necessary. LC user photos at all aren't necessary.
LJ could just as easily ban photos of ... I dunno, of trees. Trees are necessary for the life of the planet, photos of trees aren't. You could come up with some reason why trees are "inappropriate." The argument could apply just as well there. That is to say, it's a useless argument no matter what the subject.
Look, either the thing is, or is not, obscene orotherwise bannable. If it is bannable, then ban it. Don't draw arbitrary lines around defaults. Trees, obviously, are not bannable. If nipples are bannable, then they're bannable whether or not the photos are "necessary." The whole argument that the photos aren't "necessary" is specious.
What's at stake is the right of LJ users to use whatever icons they want, as long as they aren't obscene or violate some other clear standard. Surely we've established by now that the nipple isn't obscene? "Inappropriate" is a completely arbitrary standard, especially when used as a weapon to close users' accounts.
Elsewhere, Idonotlikepeas writes,
For instance, if you were to ask "Why was my account closed?", then receive an explanation, then say "That isn't true! Why was my account really closed?" you might not receive an answer the second time.
This is apparently intended as a defense of the LJ Abuse team, but it stands as a terrible indictment of their unjustness. For if the explanation you are given is, in fact, not true - and there's been ample evidence given that the Abuse team is not perfect - the abused user has no recourse with them. To the Abuse team is given great power - apparently they have the power to suspend accounts, if I understand correctly. Of those given great power, great responsibility is required. It's not being shown here.
Idonotlikepeas also claims that the FAQ, before it itemized nipples/breastfeeding/whatever, did not implicitly allow it because it didn't specify everything. But unless it should be generally understood that nips/brfdg/etc fell under a previously listed category, then the FAQ did implicitly allow them. "Inappropriate" is not such a category, and the category of "graphically sexual" certainly is not universally understood to include breastfeeding, with or without nipple showing.
6,000 National Guard aren't going to do it.
The Berlin Wall had 12 watchtowers every ten miles. Assume two guards to a shift, four shifts (a laughably small number) per tower, the same number of watchtowers over the 1950-mile length of the border (because if the wall isn't shorter people will just go around, as they do now), and double the whole number for support personnel, that's over 37,000 troops just to protect us against evial Mexicans.
That's not even counting all the other reasons this is ludicrous.
Meanwhile, Russell Baker has been dismissed from his job as Mr. Cooke's successor at Masterpiece Theater. The Powers That Be decided to dispense with the introductory segment, so as to speed the show up. Masterpiece Theater ... speeded up?
This is interesting, but a little confusing.
In one place you list overweightness as a warning sign of diabetes. In another place you say that diabetes causes unexpected weight loss.
You say that a quick sugar hit is the solution for insulin shock. Yet I have read diabetics saying that candy is deadly to them.
Trying to make sense of all this.
The SFgate photo is accompanied by a string of sidebar ads, one of which is for a chocolate fountain.
baltimore.bbb.org wrote of poetry.com, "The number and type of complaints are not unusual for a company in this industry."
That's the problem, isn't it?
How they figured Bush would be US president now I'll never know.
Or how the elephant got into Bush's pajamas.
Jon Carroll quoted this yesterday:
"The last time we listened to a Bush, we wandered in the desert for 40 years."
David, if I were playing a fantasy game with elements ripped off from Donaldson, I wouldn't know how to deal with them either.
But I have to say that a roomful of fantasy-savvy people who'd all never heard of him astonishes me, and I think it would astonish others here who've testified to his popularity. I'd have to know the date and demographics to parse your anecdote.
You might have just popped into an alternate universe where he's obscure. It could be a better universe than this one, believe me.
David, Rubie's word to describe the Covenant books is "famous" - and as opposed to good or even popular that's not incorrect. I found out about them by reading Dave Langford, for whom Donaldson and Covenant are never-failing sources of humor. You don't do that if your audience doesn't know the work. Hmm, maybe "infamous" would be a better word.
Just a data point, and if Rubie is accurate it's just about the only thing he's accurate about. The number of name-spelling errors alone is jaw-dropping. There's "Tolkein" which is one of those fingernail-on-the-blackboard misspellings. We have "C.J.Cherrie" but "Anne McCaffry", "Arthur C. Clark" but "Richard Starke". And when did the Great Detective get an added initial and become "B Sherlock Holmes"?
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| 2005 | 4 |
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