Jim Macdonald #293 -- I confess I did not fully apprehend the function of the list from abi's post. In truth I was keying on her "to express an excess of emotion, or to seek to produce an improper effect upon the unsuspecting reader" phrase. That sounded like an effort to list words (1) capable of use as exclamatory epithets or (2) notorious for their ability to shock or otherwise elicit strong reaction. Hence my argument -- which of course I put forth purely in a sense of fun -- that MILF qualifies on neither ground.
I do confess that I can't think of an appropriate reason to use the tag in the sort of user submission system abi is working on. There's certainly no *harm* to having it on the list. I guess I'm just missing how it's more "core list" worthy than any other acronym that incorporates the initial of a profane word.
Speaking as a semi-professional purveyor of porn, I take very mild issue with the inclusion of "MILF" (it's an acronym, never seen in small letters, and I'd say meaningless except in capitalized form) on the list.
That's because it's a highly-specialized term for a porn marketing category and (by subsequent pop-cultural adoption) the mothers featured therein. It's virtually impossible to use MILF as an epithet, as the word is utterly lacking in derogatory connotation. In its original sense, it was both plural (M for "mothers") and entirely, though lustfully, admiring. It has since been de-numbered, or perhaps singularized, in popular usage ("Did you see that MILF?", "Wow, check the MILFs at that table") but I have never once encountered its use in traditional cursing (you'll never hear "Dumb MILF!" or "Sorry MILF-licking dog!" or any constructions of that sort).
In fine, it's both more mild and less common than similar acronyms (see, e.g., the much more common and more derogatory military slang REMF, or the gaming term BFG, for big f-ing gun) that are not included in the core list. Although it's indisputably naughty, its presence on any core list of naughty words strikes me as anomalous.
From my mother, upon my departure to college:
1) Don't move in with the first girl who will have you.
From my father, about a week before that:
2) Son, whatever you do, don't get involved with a depressive woman.
So what do you think I did? First chance I got, I disregarded both pieces of advice -- with the same woman.
Yes, of course my folks were right.
As I was reading this thread I couldn't shake the idea that I saw photos of bombs with Russian writing on them earlier today.
Dredged my memory, found the photo. It doesn't prove anything -- it's at a Russian porn/humor site that serves a mix of porn, cruel pics of drunks and ugly people, and the "college humor" style of shock / low humor pics that people email each other. Photoshops are common there, believe nothing.
The blog post title translates to "Our answer to Saakashvili"; my Russian is not up to translating the words on the bomb. There are 150ish comments afterwords, many of them vulgar according to the words I know and the ones Google Translate knows. But I don't actually know what the bomb says, and of course it could be a photoshop or a bomb somewhere in Siberia that's never gonna see the front.
The URL follows, for the brave and curious. I shan't link it, because the destination is unsafe in several different ways, including at least one pop-up warning. You DO NOT want Russian malware on your computer, visit this URL only if you are 100% confident in your cyberdefenses:
http://urod.ru/news/8796/
Lizzy L #412: "The specialist website FiveThirtyEight.com has a simple comment policy. Don't. Be. An. Asshole."
I tried that on my adult blog -- my phrasing was "don't be a dick" -- and it was a miserable failure.
What I discovered, to my dismay, was that "not knowing you're being a dick" is one of the common qualities of dickishness.
So now I moderate ruthlessly and with many silent deletions, so that my site remains a place I can, metaphorically speaking, stand to live in, or at least to visit, every day.
James D. Macdonald #33: "And half the time if you do bookmark something, when you go back it'll be 404."
Oddly enough, I've been criticized for urging people not to contribute to that problem, which is to say, for urging them not to break links when it's avoidable.
This thread eloquently demonstrates that web resources often have value that is completely invisible to, and unexpected by, the owner/hoster of the resource.
More like scoring points on than scoring points with, I think -- if I'm right, it's a status game, where the goal is to reduce the other guy's status. If you can trick him into admitting honest sexual attraction, and then successfully (convincingly?) denigrate the object thereof, you wind up reducing his status relative to your own, I guess. Remember I don't play this game and don't understand it very well. I think the intended audience is male and that this is a sort of male versus male dominance conflict, but it's obviously not universal or I'd understand it better.
Dr. Science, I'm uncertain how our host and hostess would feel about my dropping direct links to a somewhat commercial sex blog, even when it's the easiest way to answer your question, so I'll just say I've got a pair of posts with "Crapping All Over Beauty" in the titles that distills the best of the grappling -- typing that phrase plus "erosblog" into Google will get you there mighty quick.
Two paragraphs from the initial post in the series:
"What I’ve learned running a sex blog is that there are a whole host of guys whose only mode of discourse about bodily appearance is to make a negative comment. I think perhaps it originates in adolescent one-upsmanship; one guy says “Sally’s hot, I’d like to do her†and the other guys all say “No, man, she’s a pig, she’s got a huge ass†as a way of belittling the first guy. However it started, the result is a fairly large class of guys whose reflex response whenever they see an erotic picture is to say something mean and ugly about the body depicted.
It’s clearly an act of emotional aggression, some sort of attempt to establish superiority by expressing contempt for that which other people consider beautiful. An extreme form of this (which I’ve seen in various places on the internet) is the “It’s a tranny†game. The way the “game†is played is to post a picture of an unknown but pretty woman, and then wait until other men admit that the woman shown is lustworthy. Then the trap springs, as the original poster (or others) assert “It’s a tranny!†It doesn’t have to be true; the point is merely to score points by belittling another man’s opinions about sexual attractiveness."
Wild theorizing of course -- no more than that.
Rikibeth, I am that Bacchus, and you are welcome. I feel I owe Teresa a considerable debt for her expositions of the ways in which moderation enables a community of folks who otherwise would simply not show up. It wasn't until I happened on one of Teresa's explanations that I understood that unapologetic strategic moderation can be a perfectly legitimate (and sometimes absolutely essential) community-building tool.
My long history in the anything-goes freewheeling parts of the net left me fairly comfortable with the "completely unfiltered" approach to moderation, until I actually tried it in the context of nekkid pictures. Then all the folks with broken sexual attitudes (or at least broken sexual communication skills) showed up and trashed the place, making it somewhere that nobody with (what I see as) healthy attitudes about sex would want to be. Only by strenuous moderation have I been able to make the place inviting to a community of commenters and readers whose company I actually enjoy.
"I greatly admire the shape of her breasts, and the urge to press my face between them is very strong" in #588 gave me a giggle, because I had this vision of nice Amish boys sitting around having a conversation like this. "I imagine her hair is very pretty also, were she to remove her bonnet!"
More seriously, the recent trend in this thread is of great interest and utility to me. Specifically, the "homosocial" jargon-word is new to me, and useful; I've spent a fair few posts on my sex blog grappling with the mystery of why male commenters seem obsessed with making negative remarks about the women in the nudes I publish, and I had independently concluded that it was a form of posturing before other men. Homosociality as described in this thread expands usefully on the theory/explanation I had groped for on my own.
As for our expectations of adolescent boys (or anyone else) in how they react to breasts, I myself think it's pointless, futile, and not necessarily even desirable to stamp out all expressions of admiration for the female form -- hardly a surprising position on my part, given that I make an income from republishing nude pictures. However, my blog requires heavy, even brutal, comment moderation, to prevent it from becoming a festering cesspit of misogyny. And one of the things I have to moderate ceaselessly away is the short, three-to-five-word expression of lust, usually including some de-humanizing pronoun.
I'm talking specifically about comments like "I'd do her", "I'd hit it", "I'd like to **** some of that", "I'd tap that ass" and numerous cruder variations. These short blunt comments fail as useful or interesting commentary, and they strike me (a man) as sufficiently objectifying or dehumanizing as to create a potentially unpleasant environment for the women in my audience, so I tend to moderate them away. However, longer and better written expressions of admiration and lust tend to survive, if only because they aren't quite as tedious. Thus, I find myself firmly in the "it's not the idea that's censurable so much as how that idea is expressed" camp.
It is a mark of the rough-and-tumble nature of the internet threads I've been participating the last few days, that when first I saw this thread title, I felt a fight-or-flight feeling of dread, and wondered which of the valued people within my radius of treasured linkages would be either the source or the target of the sentiments in the thread title.
Words cannot describe my relief when I realized that I was reading one of Jim Macdonald's treasured (and too few) medical-details posts, this one with juicy history. I sank gratefully into the five minutes of pure reading pleasure that followed.
Thanks, Jim!
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.
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.
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.
Bruce, I don't think you're splitting hairs or tentacles, but I do think you're using a different mental construct than I am about what the internet is and what makes it valuable.
Some people think the Internet (esp. the web) is just a big pile of documents. To them, it's the documents that are valuable.
Some people, and I'm one, value the documents a lot, but what we think makes the internet humanity's brightest jewel is the linkage between the documents, the concretized indicia of the collective wisdom of a great many people with respect to what is valuable, interesting, and worth somebody's time.
All links to the Boing Boing posts in question are already broken. They are broken now. To you, it seems important that the linked documents might still exist in somebody's database, even though nobody can see them. To me, that's not really the point.
Bruce Baugh #187, I'm not making a claim about the "deliberate destruction" of anything at Boing Boing. (Although I do confess I am hard pressed to find any other implication in Cory's #158 denying ever having criticized Digg for deleting stuff.)
But no, I'm responding to the comments, like Ethan's, attacking the very idea of link stability as a good thing. People who love the internet -- a camp in which I'd expect to find all present and everyone at Boing Boing -- like it for its links as well as for the things linked to. That these are often broken is no excuse to break them deliberately or capriciously. I agree with you that we don't have evidence of deliberateness or capriciousness yet, but the "what's the big deal?" argument is already in this thread. My axe to grind is with that argument. It's a big deal every time it happens. The sound of broken glass hitting pavement is almost never good news for society, no matter who broke it or why.
I think it's important not to confuse the inevitable vanishing of things from the web with the deliberate destruction of them.
In my own space, I've compared the deliberate destruction of one's own blog archives to vandalism. The internet, conceptualized as a huge and intricate construct of information and connections, is fragile, and vast swathes are smashed every day. But that doesn't make it right to smash the tiny chunk that each of us "owns". Sure, we have the power to do so, we have the legal right to do so, only a moron would call it censorship when we do do so, but we're still damaging the greater whole when we smash the part that's "ours". It's good to have a reason, and reasonable of others to ask (though we don't have to answer) what that reason is.
If you chop down your own landscaping and pave your front yard, well, that's your right. But your neighborhood will still be uglier and poorer than it was. And if you've been a passionate advocate for green communities, your friends and your enemies will be asking "Dude, WTF?"
I don't think them out of line to do so.
There may be a good answer to the "Dude, WTF?" question, and there may even be good reasons why we will never learn that answer. But Patrick's snarky accusations of "bad faith" and lack of smartness aside, asking the question is not bad faith, it's not an attack, it's not nasty, and it's not a sign of low intelligence. It's keeping the people we care about (and I wouldn't have linked to Boing Boing for five years if I didn't care rather a lot) honest.
I have read this discussion with great interest. My conclusion is that the very real problems with Wikipedia matter in varying degrees depending on what it is that you use Wikipedia for.
Take me, for example. I write blogs for a living, on a semi-narrow topic with pop culture elements. (Sex and porn.)
Sometimes when I'm writing a blog post, I want to use a word that's likely to be unfamiliar to my readers. Explaining it would be a pointless digression that borked my post. Leaving it unexplained would make the post mysterious to many. Solution? The humble hyperlink. Near as I can tell, this is the problem the web was invented to solve, before it went all Frankenstein and amazed its creators.
An example, from yesterday. I had a netloon come on my blog and complain bitterly about my chosen favicon. I believe that last sentence is (with the Wikipedia link) a better sentence than it would be if I left unexplained the obscure jargon for a bit of Microsoft-invented browser-tech.
In order to use the word "favicon" in my blog post about the netloon, I needed to hyperlink it to something. I didn't need an encyclopedia article, I just needed an explanation. The Wikipedia article serves handsomely.
And here's the key: it's almost impossible for me to imagine likely edits to that article that would destroy its value for my purpose. For this use, Wikipedia's structural problems matter little. The value of the favicon entry to me isn't in the quality of its discussion (which is currently very good) so much as in the fact that it exists and is likely to persist. And I could find it in less than ten seconds, allowing me to move on with my work.
But there is a hint in what I just said that the structural problems do still matter to me. Although I don't much care about the content of
Wikipedia articles so long as they are at least minimally informative, it's very import to me that those articles persist in that minimally useful form, so my links don't break.
I have, apparently, been burned by the developing trend of deleting pop culture articles, because I linked to the Lolcatz article awhile back. It was another case of gesturing (with a hyperlink) to a body of knowledge with which my readers might not have been familiar. And now (I understand from this thread, haven't gone back to look) my gesture has been rendered ineffective by deletion. That is a problem (for me) in a way that poor quality articles or hostility to drive-by editors is not (for me).
Cheering this post.
I discovered early that it's impossible to run an adult (sex, porn) blog with an open comment system. I have to moderate ruthlessly to keep the comments from degenerating into adolescent misogyny.
I do find that putting all comments from first-time posters into automatic moderation substantially reduces the moderating burden.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 17 |
| 2007 | 5 |
| 2006 | 3 |
| 2004 | 7 |
| 2003 | 3 |
| 2002 | 2 |
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