With regards to advocacy I don't think advocacy of political or theological positions is different in principle from mission. In both cases, it is morally acceptable I think if it is formally a two-way process: you are listening to the other person and open to anything they might say in favour of their position.
Okay. So I get that some of you think Erin was The Way. That's great, she is not here. So why don't you fill the shoes of Erin and do what Erin would do? Be her Peter, her rock and continue the catholicity of the ship which has fallen away since she died. How about that? Because most of what I read about is things about sensational profanity and put downs, with somehow a heart of gold shining through. It does nothing for me at all. (And no, I am not required to care about someone I don't know)
Too much of the time, it goes along with a sanctimonious refusal either to do anything other than repeat bigotry in Purg and stay the cold side of the portals of hell.
As such, the fact that their "theological" views are a personal attack on me is allowed to pass.
I know, that's what Ephanies is form, but I still think this is a meaningful point to make. Debate cannot proceed on the basis that opinions have no effect in the real world, or that their effect in the real world is no basis on which to judge the argument or, potentially, the arguer, particularly if they refuse to say anything other than "I'm right, the bible tells me so"
cit. Posters passim
I'd like to address this. It's going to sound hair-splitting, but it's not.
Nobody's theological opinions are by definition a personal attack on anybody else. They can easily be turned into a personal attack, yes; but as long as they stay in the realm of discussion (ideas, academic, theoretical, the opposite of "let's do this"), they remain inert.
I say this as a woman who has spent my life engaging with individuals who strongly hold the belief that the possession of a vagina unfits me for basically anything but "kinder, kueche" (they leave out "kirche" on purpose). *"children, kitchen, church"
Now I find such people deeply unpleasant to work with, live with, or otherwise cope with in real life. And I find their principles abhorrent. But their principles ARE debatable, and do not become a personal attack on me until and up to the point that they say to me, "Hey, LC, why the fuck did you get a graduate degree?" At which point we're off to Hell.
Debate and discussion are meant to be something of a safe field, where you can deal with ideas, even radioactive ones, and demolish them logically as needed. For me to run screaming from the room the first time a person asserts those radioactive ideas is basically to abdicate the clean-up to others. Or even to let the radioactivity go un-dealt with, unattempted, even, and the poster goes out into the world in the sublime confidence that he/she is right and may act on those ideas without hindrance.
tl; dr You need a certain amount of personal detachment if you're going to perform delicate surgery, including the attempt to surgically remove racism, sexism, etc. Immediate strong emotion is a hindrance in argumentation.
Sometimes a group statement is apropos, sometimes they are not. But go on, you were saying positing a blanket statement about blanket statements...
Bull fucking shit. I was saying a blanket statement about PEOPLE.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
Thanks Lamb Chopped. Very thoughtful.
It links to some extent with the mousethief/lilBuddha exchange. Maybe also some recent exchanges on pond wars? The issue is unfair generalisations which attack members of a group.
Since no one else has picked up on my ideas re Purgatorial dogpiles, I'll shelve that. The existing 10Cs and Purg Guidelines do give us some discretionary scope over gratuitous discourtesy which gets in the way of serious discussion. That needs to be balanced against legitimate unrest! Thinking about that.
It links to some extent with the mousethief/lilBuddha exchange. Maybe also some recent exchanges on pond wars? The issue is unfair generalisations which attack members of a group.
That's EXACTLY what I think it's about, thanks! It's so insidious because Poster B is getting at Poster A by insulting Group C members-one-and-all, and it's entirely likely that Host X doesn't even know that Poster A belongs to Group C (and hence won't make the connection).
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
It is frustrating when one writes up (what one thinks is) a detailed and coherent position, only to find that the entire focus of the discussion shifts to centre on some minor side-issue that one only referred to parenthetically.
This happens, sometimes, and them's the breaks. But if it happens all the time, you're going to give up and stop posting detailed thoughtful posts, and the ship becomes weaker as a consequence.
I don't think there's a good way for hosting to address this, though.
Sometimes a group statement is apropos, sometimes they are not. But go on, you were saying positing a blanket statement about blanket statements...
Bull fucking shit. I was saying a blanket statement about PEOPLE.
People constitute groups. Saying one cannot comment on a group without painting every member of the group with the same brush is ridiculous.
And not all groups are the same. Being Jewish is not equivalent to being Republican.
It links to some extent with the mousethief/lilBuddha exchange. Maybe also some recent exchanges on pond wars? The issue is unfair generalisations which attack members of a group.
It is incorrect to say that generalisations inherently attack members of a voluntary group. And unfair is a value judgement if applied too liberally. It is unfair to say all Group X think or act the same way. It is not inherently unfair to say that all members of group X share a particular responsibility.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
It depends on how group comments are worded. That's a distinction a Host can make a judgment about. The distinction between descriptive and pejorative can get a bit fine.
It is frustrating when one writes up (what one thinks is) a detailed and coherent position, only to find that the entire focus of the discussion shifts to centre on some minor side-issue that one only referred to parenthetically.
This happens, sometimes, and them's the breaks. But if it happens all the time, you're going to give up and stop posting detailed thoughtful posts, and the ship becomes weaker as a consequence.
I don't think there's a good way for hosting to address this, though.
That's a cycle I've been through multiple times. And I agree - I don't think it can be addressed through hosting. I think it's just an unavoidable aspect of online debate.
I had a long draft post for the Purg thread, which I think I'm going to abandon, but in brief, I think there are problems with the way argument in Purgatory flows, at least often enough to make it worth thinking about whether there's anything we can (or should) do about it. Increasingly, it seems to me, arguments in Purgatory get very heated and very positional very fast, so you get the point where either you have a thread where pretty much everyone on the thread is intensely in agreement about something, or you get an atheist-fundamentalist-type argument dynamic where you have two groups of people talking at each other at but it's pretty clear that neither group is really listening to the other. Neither scenario is necessary always a bad thing, and perhaps some arguments really do involve a binary choice between two opposite positions. But I think many topics we discuss on the Ship have a lot of room for complexity and nuance and if we're frequently crowding out this kind of discussion with the more heated and positional style then to say the least I think we're not using Purg at its full potential.
Is this crowding-out actually really happening much? Impossible to know, because we have no way of knowing who isn't posting here and why. Anecdotally, I've occasionally passed on commenting on some threads because of the way the thread has progressed, so I can say at least that it happens sometimes. Unless you like shouting there's not a lot of point in entering a thread that's become a shouting match, or would become a shouting match if you expressed disagreement with a point of view that everyone is intensely in agreement about.
As to hosting:
I think ideally, Purg would work best if it combined minimal hosting with a culture that recognizes that just because you can doesn't mean you should. (It's like academic freedom: scholarship needs academic freedom to flourish, but academic freedom only works the way it's supposed to if it's combined with scholarly standards.) Purgatory can tolerate heated and positional on occasion, but it can't tolerate heated and positional all the time, at least not without losing something important. Basic civility, and trying to understand and engage what the other person is saying, are nonoptional in a well functioning discussion board. Dialing down the rhetoric, looking for reliable sources for information rather than the first source that happens to support your position, and generally thinking before posting all generally contribute to increasing the ratio of light to heat. The thing is, I don't think any of this can be enforced through hosting, at least not a consistent basis. If we try to make every Purg post conform to some ideal of rational discussion then Purgatory is going to become very quiet very fast.
I was hoping that maybe the Purg thread that spawned this thread might contribute to some broad agreement that we need to nudge the culture of Purgatory to become a bit less heated/positional/hyperpartisan. But it's clear from the contributions to that thread that this is not going to happen.
I'm doubtful that there's any consistent rule-based hosting change that we can implement without losing a lot of what we value in Purg. But I wonder if we might consider giving hosts more discretion to step in when a thread is heating up - especially if the thread didn't start out that way and it's the actions of one or two posters that are causing the problem. The thing is, it would have to be a discretion, rather than a simple application of the rules, which would be a change in the way we do things around here.
... which circles us back to my notes on how Erin's community editor position functioned. She had major discretionary power, which allowed her to address just such (what's the opposite of cut and dried?) situations. Of course, that kind of power can only be trusted to someone who is unusually astute and trustworthy.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
edited May 2020
lilBuddha
Give me an example of a pejorative criticism of a group that you think is justified. A wording that you think you can use.
Increasingly, it seems to me, arguments in Purgatory get very heated and very positional very fast, so you get the point where either you have a thread where pretty much everyone on the thread is intensely in agreement about something, or you get an atheist-fundamentalist-type argument dynamic where you have two groups of people talking at each other at but it's pretty clear that neither group is really listening to the other.
Back in my old USENET days, it was possible to avoid this somewhat by using a threaded newsreader. I could just mark as ignore the tangent sub-thread or the gang of people yelling at each other, and only follow the sub-threads that had a decent signal to noise ratio.
That, and killfiles, of course,
Threaded newsreaders weren't to everyone's taste, of course. But the point is moot, because that's not what we have on the ship. We have a single linear conversation on each thread, which means it's easy to lose interesting things in the swamp.
Give me an example of a pejorative criticism of a group that you think is justified. A wording that you think you can use.
I don't sit around thinking of pejorative statements, those arise in the friction of discourse. The point was that heat is a by-product of the consequences of the positions argued. Off hand: Tories/Republicans are fucking over the poor and driving middle income people closer to poverty.
I don't know about Tories, but the Republican _party_ certainly is. That's one thing that hasn't come up, the difference between individual members of a party, and the party as a whole, and phrasing things that way in debate. Little Buddha is using "Tories/Republicans" as shorthand for "the Tory party" and "the Republican Party". Robert Armin asks about individual people who identify as members of those parties. Two different things, bound to cause friction and resentment.
So maybe the practice to be encouraged is posting a more prolix but accurate response, such as: the policies as enacted by the current Conservative Government have led to increased child poverty - with a reputable reference to back up that assertion.
But this isn't speech, it's written communication, so is missing the nods, winks and body language of a face to face chat. To avoid misunderstanding, we do have to be clearer in our posting.
So maybe the practice to be encouraged is posting a more prolix but accurate response, such as: the policies as enacted by the current Conservative Government have led to increased child poverty - with a reputable reference to back up that assertion.
If there were no context, then a short declaration that the Tories are bastards would need a bit more explanation. However, ISTM it is rare that this actually happens. It usually happens within the context of a discussion of those things that enforce that declaration. If every comment needs footnotes, discussion will be massively cumbersome.
And #NOTEVERYTORY ignores the person's responsibility for the party to which they belong. We voluntarily join political groups and we have a shared responsibility for that group. We can work from inside to influence the direction, but at some point, we also own the actual road taken.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
edited May 2020
The reaction is interesting! I think it's more accurate to assert that this/these Tory/GOP policies are leading to increased social inequity.
Personally I don't see what it costs any Shipmate to put it that sort way in Purgatory. And I'd have no problem with your statement as part of a rant in Hell. In Purgatory, there's a simple way of avoiding the risk of giving gratuitous offence and derailing serious discussion.
It's worth noting that in an ongoing conversation, "The Republicans" (or other such reference) is going to have an antecedent. For example, if you've been talking about Congress, people will understand this to mean "The Republican members of Congress."
The trouble comes when someone shoots off a one-liner snark about "Republicans" (etc.) when there is no clear antecedent. That generally leads to "Republicans" being understood in its broadest sense, which is more or less "All Republicans like, ever".
The issue is unfair generalisations which attack members of a group.
I think it goes beyond that, and includes things like an assertion that an issue has already been decided. It doesn't take many atheists asserting that religion has already been debunked for a theist to feel unwelcome. Purgatory ought to be a place where you actually have to do the debunking if you want to make that sort of claim.
Sometimes a group statement is apropos, sometimes they are not. But go on, you were saying positing a blanket statement about blanket statements...
Bull fucking shit. I was saying a blanket statement about PEOPLE.
People constitute groups. Saying one cannot comment on a group without painting every member of the group with the same brush is ridiculous.
And not all groups are the same. Being Jewish is not equivalent to being Republican.
Change the subject nicely. Deflect, deflect, deflect.
Give me an example of a pejorative criticism of a group that you think is justified. A wording that you think you can use.
I don't sit around thinking of pejorative statements, those arise in the friction of discourse. The point was that heat is a by-product of the consequences of the positions argued. Off hand: Tories/Republicans are fucking over the poor and driving middle income people closer to poverty.
I have no trouble coming up with an example: Trump's GOP is a death cult. Evidence: They don't want people to have accessible, affordable health care; they are in bed with the companies that caused the opioid epidemic; they are willing to trade lives in exchange for re-opening the American economy. Loyalty to the supreme leader supersedes all other considerations; they twist themselves into pretzels to accommodate and excuse his follies. They place no value on truth, logic, reason, facts, or science; they prefer "alternative facts" to construct a worldview that justifies misery and death.
But this isn't speech, it's written communication, so is missing the nods, winks and body language of a face to face chat. To avoid misunderstanding, we do have to be clearer in our posting.
And what I belive is the original: How the Modern GOP Is Like a Death Cult, by Chauncey DeVega in 2011. If you want a strong defense of this highly pejorative criticism, read this article.
Sometimes a group statement is apropos, sometimes they are not. But go on, you were saying positing a blanket statement about blanket statements...
Bull fucking shit. I was saying a blanket statement about PEOPLE.
People constitute groups. Saying one cannot comment on a group without painting every member of the group with the same brush is ridiculous.
And not all groups are the same. Being Jewish is not equivalent to being Republican.
Change the subject nicely. Deflect, deflect, deflect.
No change in subject. Talking about balnket statements dealing with republicans, you mention Jewish people and I respond. But whatevs.
I was just thinking that the Tories are a death cult, e.g., austerity has killed a lot of people; the handling of covid, ditto. I think generalizations are OK, but it depends on the genre. In a short text, they are necessary, in a 5000 words essay, not.
The reaction is interesting! I think it's more accurate to assert that this/these Tory/GOP policies are leading to increased social inequity.
No one talks like that. It is very common to say X group when referring to X group's policies. I'm not sure why this is such a sticking point. One of the things that I like about SOF is the allowing of curse words and choosing to instead monitor actual insult. It is a more difficult road, but it allows the reaction to difficult subjects.
Barring supposed uncivil language about uncivil behaviour is akin to giving climate change deniers equal time.
Personally I don't see what it costs any Shipmate to put it that sort way in Purgatory. And I'd have no problem with your statement as part of a rant in Hell. In Purgatory, there's a simple way of avoiding the risk of giving gratuitous offence and derailing serious discussion.
ISTM it doesn't belong in Hell because it is not about a shipmate, nor even a particular person. Hell has its purpose, and serious discussion can be part of it. However, because of its structures and because most of the Ship doesn't venture there, it can also miss a larger contribution.
The reaction is interesting! I think it's more accurate to assert that this/these Tory/GOP policies are leading to increased social inequity.
No one talks like that.
That’s an absolutely ridiculous assertion. People talk like that all the time.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
Good examples Ruth. But what characterises then all is that the headline statements are backed up with analysis. Which is not the same as single line blanket assertions in Purgatory. Headlines without content can just be provocative.
Beware the GOP death cult would make a good thread title. I think that thread might very well do better in Hell. Folks would be freer to vent and rant away as well as consider the seriousness of what has happened to one the two major political parties in the USA. Besides, I've always appreciated serious Hell threads. Some serious discussions need the pissed offness, the anger, the rage as essential components.
But if it were in Purgatory, I'd still prefer the serious discussion to avoid blanket assertions about all GOP members. There are serious reasons, serious arguments, serious blocks of evidence behind the headlines. That's what such a thread should be about in Purgatory. Not just the assertions themselves.
As to making comments about groups, lilbuddha's defence of this is somewhat missing that the problem is frequently with the choice of group in the first place.
Equating Republican leadership with Republican voters is inaccurate. Equating the Tories with people who voted Tory is inaccurate. I mean, even within a political party you may have a range of views, and equating a party policy with each member of a party is liable to mislead, though there is a whole interesting side-discussion there about the extent to which MPs in a political party feel bound to publicly support a party policy regardless of what they personally think...
The broader the group you pick, the greater the risk that the generalised statement you make is not accurate for the group. That's frequently not a problem with the statement but with who you attributed it to.
I have a suspicion that many people who, like me, live in a national capital get completely exasperated when the name of their city is used as code for the government. "Canberra" said this, "Canberra" did that. There are over 220 politicians who descend on Canberra from time to time, but just 5 of them were elected by the residents of Canberra. Meanwhile over 300,000 people live here and most of them had little to do with any decision that "Canberra" made, and most of the remainder are mere underlings paid to do what the government decides to do. The problem with the reporting of government decisions is not about inaccuracies in reporting the decision, it's with attributing that decision to the city instead of the government that happens to meet here.
Understand? The problem is usually in the choice of group.
I have no trouble coming up with an example: Trump's GOP is a death cult. .
The problem with that example is that it assumes that the GOP belongs to Trump. That is a whole debate in itself.
The other thing that makes it different from what a number of people have expressed concerns about is that it’s clearly a statement about the party, not a generalization about members of the party or people who voted for candidates of the party. It’s “Trump’s GOP is a death cult,” not “Republicans don't care who dies.”
As to making comments about groups, lilbuddha's defence of this is somewhat missing that the problem is frequently with the choice of group in the first place.
Let me give you a simpler example. The NRA membership have varying opinions about gun control. But as long as they send in their cheques, they support the leadership's decisions.
Political parties are a little more complicated than this, but the same principle exists.
We control who we elect to represent us. It is a struggle to effect change, but that doesn't change that we can have an effect. Being a Tory that wants to keep the NHS public is meaningless if the direction of the party is to increase privatisation. Being a fiscally liberal Republican is meaningless as the party is headed into the other direction.
As to making comments about groups, lilbuddha's defence of this is somewhat missing that the problem is frequently with the choice of group in the first place.
Let me give you a simpler example. The NRA membership have varying opinions about gun control. But as long as they send in their cheques, they support the leadership's decisions.
No. As I've said on the other thread, you keep saying this as if it's some kind of self-evident truth. It's nonsense. For one thing, if you leave an organisation you abandon all hope of achieving any kind of leadership change.
Treating membership of an organisation as tacit support for every decision that the leadership makes is just fundamentally bad. I mean, it's pretty much the same thinking that leads to Muslims being told they have to stand up and denounce everything that some nutjob ISIS person says or does. Fractionally better perhaps because it's the same organisation and 'leadership', but still fundamentally the same: asking people how they can be a Muslim and have the same religion as a suicide bomber. Asking a person how they can be in the church when the church condemns gays or abuses children or whatever. Expecting a Catholic to leave because of something a particular Pope said.
If you don't accept that it's correct to treat all members of a religion to be in lockstep with each other, then it frankly makes no sense to do that with other groups. I mean, I seem to recall you suggesting people ought to leave an entire damn country in order to not be associated with that country's governance. As if that's the easiest thing in the world!
Are you a Buddhist? I forget. But if you are, I certainly wouldn't go around assuming that any other Buddhist is like you. I don't see you as representative of your nationality, or your gender, or your ethnicity. You're just you.
And leadership doesn't alter that. Leadership does not involve turning everyone into mindless drones. Nor does leadership mean nothing at all, but you try to turn it into meaning everything.
You seem to believe that it's the simplest thing in the world for people to abandon whatever drew someone to a cause, a social group, a job, a belief system, a country, because of whatever decisions the current leadership made. Which is just bullshit. It's not simple. It's hard. You seem to have deliberately evaded my question in the other thread as to whether you have any practical experience of doing this, whether you hold your own attachments so lightly that you think that everyone else does too.
Frankly, you seem to believe that I as a public servant need to abandon my job when the party I didn't vote for becomes my boss. A view that most public/civil servants around the world would find most troubling. But hey, because I work for the government I must be seen as endorsing all the policies, right? Never mind that in my particular job I actually spend a lot of my time discussing policies with people and testing them, trying to weed out ones that won't work or don't make sense. No, in your worldview, any policy that makes it out into public view is one that I must have endorsed. It's not possible to be part of the internal debate, it all has to be where you can see it and give your tick of approval or scowl of disapproval.
You keep using this reasoning to justify the way you treat groups. And it just doesn't resemble the complexities of the way real live people navigate their way through the world or the complexities of their feelings about the groups they belong to.
Addendum: It's also worth noting, in relation to your 'simple' NRA example, that there is currently a great deal of disquiet within the NRA, centred on the way money is being used by leaders to enrich themselves.
You seem to think the only solution to this is to withhold funds. Not to hold people to account as to how the funds are used going forward.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
edited May 2020
The issue for Ship's business is not whether such statements are right, but whether Hosts should be expected to control them, for the greater good. My understanding about the inaccuracy and insulting nature of these statements is very much the same as orfeo's. The colloquial defence just doesn't cut it for me.
(BTW I think Trumpism is well on its way to turning the GOP into a cult. All the more reason to recognise the possibility that there may be plenty in the GOP who don't like that at all, recognise the dangers. Their silence does not mean their assent. We can still criticise the complicity of party leaders and representatives without broadbrushing everyone.)
So here is the issue for Hosting. Should we leave the criticism of such broadbrushing to Shipmates via debate in Purgatory. Or calling the broadbrushers to Hell? You have those options. We could do that. In many ways I'd prefer that.
Or should Purgatory Hosts get a bit more proactive over such occurrences? Hosts are not nannies. I don't think any of you want us to be. But we could step in if we see serious discussion being derailed. This kind of broadbrushing can derail serious discussion. That's an option which is always open to us. One of my predecessors used to say 'play nicely' when doing that. It may be an option.
While reading some of the posts on both this thread and the Purgatory thread several have triggered a mental comment of "pot, kettle, black". I suspect I'm guilty of this too, but is there a lack of self-reflection as well as empathy? The pause to read back a post and reflect "how would I feel reading this?" if I am being addressed here?
Various Shipmates have called broadbrushers to Hell, but it is not unknown for individuals involved to refuse to engage in Hell, listen, learn or change their style. I have been wondering whether to try again alongside this thread. But if both Hell and the posts on threads are ignored, I'm not sure what else the other Shipmates can do.
Maybe more use of Hell with heavier hosting when it is obvious that certain posters are crossing or pushing lines from the Hell threads? As an aside, I've always hoped that a Hell thread was partly a signal to trigger more interest from admins. I suspect I have that impression as maybe it's how Erin operated, read the Hell threads and, if she spotted boundary pushing, fired a broadside across that poster's bows.
I think echo chamber effect is being fairly well demonstrated by the generalisations that are being used as examples on this thread.
Though I would ask what the difference is, between an echo chamber and an Overton window.
Hate speech is not acceptable on this forum. Eugenicist speech is, interestingly. It has never been the case that you can say anything you want in debate.
Inevitably, people writing at edges of the Overton window in any direction are going to get more pushback.
(There comes a point where it is difficult to have a civil debate with someone defending the leadership and political decisions of a party and a president who are prepared to set up concentration camps at the country’s borders. Likewise, if (generic) you voted Tory, and are now out on your doorsteps applauding the NHS and standing in silence the dead keyworkers at 11am on Worker's memorial day - what fucking shiny thing distracted you for the last decade, and will you remember this for more than three seconds after lockdown lifts ? With the crops rotting in the fields and immigrant workers turning over your loved ones in the icu so they can breathe, do you still want your precious Brexit ? One of our colleagues died of covid last week, sickness rates are rising amongst our patients in this area, that’s as civil as I can manage right now.)
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
Hosts can get Hellish in Hell! You're right CK. It's another way of signalling.
I don't do Hell very much because my style doesn't really work there. But I take your point.
Just to respond - "indefensible" I think I was using in the sense that the defenses exist, but the arguments are so weak, And I know this because I have been there and supported these (some of these).
People supported these not only because of religion, but because of science - the science had progressed, the religious texts haven't (obviously), and the interpretation in some areas has not accepted the science.
It is not about one or the other - it is about interpreting each in the light of the other.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
Istm that anyone who can’t play nicely in purgatory either has not Read the 10 commandments. (completely possible).
Or is so caught up in keyboard warrior-ness that they are unable to Apply the 10 commandments.
Purgatory is where debate happens, so if debate can’t happen because of repeated violations of those 10 commandments, I’m all for the hosts getting handy with their pitchforks.
Comments
I'd like to address this. It's going to sound hair-splitting, but it's not.
Nobody's theological opinions are by definition a personal attack on anybody else. They can easily be turned into a personal attack, yes; but as long as they stay in the realm of discussion (ideas, academic, theoretical, the opposite of "let's do this"), they remain inert.
I say this as a woman who has spent my life engaging with individuals who strongly hold the belief that the possession of a vagina unfits me for basically anything but "kinder, kueche" (they leave out "kirche" on purpose). *"children, kitchen, church"
Now I find such people deeply unpleasant to work with, live with, or otherwise cope with in real life. And I find their principles abhorrent. But their principles ARE debatable, and do not become a personal attack on me until and up to the point that they say to me, "Hey, LC, why the fuck did you get a graduate degree?" At which point we're off to Hell.
Debate and discussion are meant to be something of a safe field, where you can deal with ideas, even radioactive ones, and demolish them logically as needed. For me to run screaming from the room the first time a person asserts those radioactive ideas is basically to abdicate the clean-up to others. Or even to let the radioactivity go un-dealt with, unattempted, even, and the poster goes out into the world in the sublime confidence that he/she is right and may act on those ideas without hindrance.
tl; dr You need a certain amount of personal detachment if you're going to perform delicate surgery, including the attempt to surgically remove racism, sexism, etc. Immediate strong emotion is a hindrance in argumentation.
Bull fucking shit. I was saying a blanket statement about PEOPLE.
It links to some extent with the mousethief/lilBuddha exchange. Maybe also some recent exchanges on pond wars? The issue is unfair generalisations which attack members of a group.
Since no one else has picked up on my ideas re Purgatorial dogpiles, I'll shelve that. The existing 10Cs and Purg Guidelines do give us some discretionary scope over gratuitous discourtesy which gets in the way of serious discussion. That needs to be balanced against legitimate unrest! Thinking about that.
That's EXACTLY what I think it's about, thanks! It's so insidious because Poster B is getting at Poster A by insulting Group C members-one-and-all, and it's entirely likely that Host X doesn't even know that Poster A belongs to Group C (and hence won't make the connection).
This happens, sometimes, and them's the breaks. But if it happens all the time, you're going to give up and stop posting detailed thoughtful posts, and the ship becomes weaker as a consequence.
I don't think there's a good way for hosting to address this, though.
And not all groups are the same. Being Jewish is not equivalent to being Republican.
That's a cycle I've been through multiple times. And I agree - I don't think it can be addressed through hosting. I think it's just an unavoidable aspect of online debate.
Is this crowding-out actually really happening much? Impossible to know, because we have no way of knowing who isn't posting here and why. Anecdotally, I've occasionally passed on commenting on some threads because of the way the thread has progressed, so I can say at least that it happens sometimes. Unless you like shouting there's not a lot of point in entering a thread that's become a shouting match, or would become a shouting match if you expressed disagreement with a point of view that everyone is intensely in agreement about.
As to hosting:
I think ideally, Purg would work best if it combined minimal hosting with a culture that recognizes that just because you can doesn't mean you should. (It's like academic freedom: scholarship needs academic freedom to flourish, but academic freedom only works the way it's supposed to if it's combined with scholarly standards.) Purgatory can tolerate heated and positional on occasion, but it can't tolerate heated and positional all the time, at least not without losing something important. Basic civility, and trying to understand and engage what the other person is saying, are nonoptional in a well functioning discussion board. Dialing down the rhetoric, looking for reliable sources for information rather than the first source that happens to support your position, and generally thinking before posting all generally contribute to increasing the ratio of light to heat. The thing is, I don't think any of this can be enforced through hosting, at least not a consistent basis. If we try to make every Purg post conform to some ideal of rational discussion then Purgatory is going to become very quiet very fast.
I was hoping that maybe the Purg thread that spawned this thread might contribute to some broad agreement that we need to nudge the culture of Purgatory to become a bit less heated/positional/hyperpartisan. But it's clear from the contributions to that thread that this is not going to happen.
I'm doubtful that there's any consistent rule-based hosting change that we can implement without losing a lot of what we value in Purg. But I wonder if we might consider giving hosts more discretion to step in when a thread is heating up - especially if the thread didn't start out that way and it's the actions of one or two posters that are causing the problem. The thing is, it would have to be a discretion, rather than a simple application of the rules, which would be a change in the way we do things around here.
Give me an example of a pejorative criticism of a group that you think is justified. A wording that you think you can use.
Back in my old USENET days, it was possible to avoid this somewhat by using a threaded newsreader. I could just mark as ignore the tangent sub-thread or the gang of people yelling at each other, and only follow the sub-threads that had a decent signal to noise ratio.
That, and killfiles, of course,
Threaded newsreaders weren't to everyone's taste, of course. But the point is moot, because that's not what we have on the ship. We have a single linear conversation on each thread, which means it's easy to lose interesting things in the swamp.
And #NOTEVERYTORY ignores the person's responsibility for the party to which they belong. We voluntarily join political groups and we have a shared responsibility for that group. We can work from inside to influence the direction, but at some point, we also own the actual road taken.
Personally I don't see what it costs any Shipmate to put it that sort way in Purgatory. And I'd have no problem with your statement as part of a rant in Hell. In Purgatory, there's a simple way of avoiding the risk of giving gratuitous offence and derailing serious discussion.
The trouble comes when someone shoots off a one-liner snark about "Republicans" (etc.) when there is no clear antecedent. That generally leads to "Republicans" being understood in its broadest sense, which is more or less "All Republicans like, ever".
I think it goes beyond that, and includes things like an assertion that an issue has already been decided. It doesn't take many atheists asserting that religion has already been debunked for a theist to feel unwelcome. Purgatory ought to be a place where you actually have to do the debunking if you want to make that sort of claim.
Change the subject nicely. Deflect, deflect, deflect.
Oh but that's so much worrrrrrrk.
I have no trouble coming up with an example: Trump's GOP is a death cult. Evidence: They don't want people to have accessible, affordable health care; they are in bed with the companies that caused the opioid epidemic; they are willing to trade lives in exchange for re-opening the American economy. Loyalty to the supreme leader supersedes all other considerations; they twist themselves into pretzels to accommodate and excuse his follies. They place no value on truth, logic, reason, facts, or science; they prefer "alternative facts" to construct a worldview that justifies misery and death.
Both the generalizations and the shorthand use are used in written communication all the time:
The Republican Death Cult: How a Party Sacrificed the Future for Power
The Party of Life Embraces Trump's Death Cult
The Republican Death Cult: Gather in polling places, gather in churches, and let 11 million die; the new GOP vision
The GOP Has Become a Dangerous Cult
The GOP Is a Nihilistic Death Cult and Centrism Won't Stop Them
Trump's death cult finally says it: Time to kill the "useless eaters" for capitalism
And what I belive is the original: How the Modern GOP Is Like a Death Cult, by Chauncey DeVega in 2011. If you want a strong defense of this highly pejorative criticism, read this article.
Barring supposed uncivil language about uncivil behaviour is akin to giving climate change deniers equal time. ISTM it doesn't belong in Hell because it is not about a shipmate, nor even a particular person. Hell has its purpose, and serious discussion can be part of it. However, because of its structures and because most of the Ship doesn't venture there, it can also miss a larger contribution.
Beware the GOP death cult would make a good thread title. I think that thread might very well do better in Hell. Folks would be freer to vent and rant away as well as consider the seriousness of what has happened to one the two major political parties in the USA. Besides, I've always appreciated serious Hell threads. Some serious discussions need the pissed offness, the anger, the rage as essential components.
But if it were in Purgatory, I'd still prefer the serious discussion to avoid blanket assertions about all GOP members. There are serious reasons, serious arguments, serious blocks of evidence behind the headlines. That's what such a thread should be about in Purgatory. Not just the assertions themselves.
Several people have taken the opportunity of this thread or the thread that spawned it to discuss exactly that. So no, it's not impossible to know.
Equating Republican leadership with Republican voters is inaccurate. Equating the Tories with people who voted Tory is inaccurate. I mean, even within a political party you may have a range of views, and equating a party policy with each member of a party is liable to mislead, though there is a whole interesting side-discussion there about the extent to which MPs in a political party feel bound to publicly support a party policy regardless of what they personally think...
The broader the group you pick, the greater the risk that the generalised statement you make is not accurate for the group. That's frequently not a problem with the statement but with who you attributed it to.
I have a suspicion that many people who, like me, live in a national capital get completely exasperated when the name of their city is used as code for the government. "Canberra" said this, "Canberra" did that. There are over 220 politicians who descend on Canberra from time to time, but just 5 of them were elected by the residents of Canberra. Meanwhile over 300,000 people live here and most of them had little to do with any decision that "Canberra" made, and most of the remainder are mere underlings paid to do what the government decides to do. The problem with the reporting of government decisions is not about inaccuracies in reporting the decision, it's with attributing that decision to the city instead of the government that happens to meet here.
Understand? The problem is usually in the choice of group.
The problem with that example is that it assumes that the GOP belongs to Trump. That is a whole debate in itself.
Political parties are a little more complicated than this, but the same principle exists.
We control who we elect to represent us. It is a struggle to effect change, but that doesn't change that we can have an effect. Being a Tory that wants to keep the NHS public is meaningless if the direction of the party is to increase privatisation. Being a fiscally liberal Republican is meaningless as the party is headed into the other direction.
I think the result of the Senate impeachment vote, and the grandstanding that preceded it, are a pretty convincing argument in that debate.
No. As I've said on the other thread, you keep saying this as if it's some kind of self-evident truth. It's nonsense. For one thing, if you leave an organisation you abandon all hope of achieving any kind of leadership change.
Treating membership of an organisation as tacit support for every decision that the leadership makes is just fundamentally bad. I mean, it's pretty much the same thinking that leads to Muslims being told they have to stand up and denounce everything that some nutjob ISIS person says or does. Fractionally better perhaps because it's the same organisation and 'leadership', but still fundamentally the same: asking people how they can be a Muslim and have the same religion as a suicide bomber. Asking a person how they can be in the church when the church condemns gays or abuses children or whatever. Expecting a Catholic to leave because of something a particular Pope said.
If you don't accept that it's correct to treat all members of a religion to be in lockstep with each other, then it frankly makes no sense to do that with other groups. I mean, I seem to recall you suggesting people ought to leave an entire damn country in order to not be associated with that country's governance. As if that's the easiest thing in the world!
Are you a Buddhist? I forget. But if you are, I certainly wouldn't go around assuming that any other Buddhist is like you. I don't see you as representative of your nationality, or your gender, or your ethnicity. You're just you.
And leadership doesn't alter that. Leadership does not involve turning everyone into mindless drones. Nor does leadership mean nothing at all, but you try to turn it into meaning everything.
You seem to believe that it's the simplest thing in the world for people to abandon whatever drew someone to a cause, a social group, a job, a belief system, a country, because of whatever decisions the current leadership made. Which is just bullshit. It's not simple. It's hard. You seem to have deliberately evaded my question in the other thread as to whether you have any practical experience of doing this, whether you hold your own attachments so lightly that you think that everyone else does too.
Frankly, you seem to believe that I as a public servant need to abandon my job when the party I didn't vote for becomes my boss. A view that most public/civil servants around the world would find most troubling. But hey, because I work for the government I must be seen as endorsing all the policies, right? Never mind that in my particular job I actually spend a lot of my time discussing policies with people and testing them, trying to weed out ones that won't work or don't make sense. No, in your worldview, any policy that makes it out into public view is one that I must have endorsed. It's not possible to be part of the internal debate, it all has to be where you can see it and give your tick of approval or scowl of disapproval.
You keep using this reasoning to justify the way you treat groups. And it just doesn't resemble the complexities of the way real live people navigate their way through the world or the complexities of their feelings about the groups they belong to.
You seem to think the only solution to this is to withhold funds. Not to hold people to account as to how the funds are used going forward.
(BTW I think Trumpism is well on its way to turning the GOP into a cult. All the more reason to recognise the possibility that there may be plenty in the GOP who don't like that at all, recognise the dangers. Their silence does not mean their assent. We can still criticise the complicity of party leaders and representatives without broadbrushing everyone.)
So here is the issue for Hosting. Should we leave the criticism of such broadbrushing to Shipmates via debate in Purgatory. Or calling the broadbrushers to Hell? You have those options. We could do that. In many ways I'd prefer that.
Or should Purgatory Hosts get a bit more proactive over such occurrences? Hosts are not nannies. I don't think any of you want us to be. But we could step in if we see serious discussion being derailed. This kind of broadbrushing can derail serious discussion. That's an option which is always open to us. One of my predecessors used to say 'play nicely' when doing that. It may be an option.
Various Shipmates have called broadbrushers to Hell, but it is not unknown for individuals involved to refuse to engage in Hell, listen, learn or change their style. I have been wondering whether to try again alongside this thread. But if both Hell and the posts on threads are ignored, I'm not sure what else the other Shipmates can do.
Maybe more use of Hell with heavier hosting when it is obvious that certain posters are crossing or pushing lines from the Hell threads? As an aside, I've always hoped that a Hell thread was partly a signal to trigger more interest from admins. I suspect I have that impression as maybe it's how Erin operated, read the Hell threads and, if she spotted boundary pushing, fired a broadside across that poster's bows.
Though I would ask what the difference is, between an echo chamber and an Overton window.
Hate speech is not acceptable on this forum. Eugenicist speech is, interestingly. It has never been the case that you can say anything you want in debate.
Inevitably, people writing at edges of the Overton window in any direction are going to get more pushback.
(There comes a point where it is difficult to have a civil debate with someone defending the leadership and political decisions of a party and a president who are prepared to set up concentration camps at the country’s borders. Likewise, if (generic) you voted Tory, and are now out on your doorsteps applauding the NHS and standing in silence the dead keyworkers at 11am on Worker's memorial day - what fucking shiny thing distracted you for the last decade, and will you remember this for more than three seconds after lockdown lifts ? With the crops rotting in the fields and immigrant workers turning over your loved ones in the icu so they can breathe, do you still want your precious Brexit ? One of our colleagues died of covid last week, sickness rates are rising amongst our patients in this area, that’s as civil as I can manage right now.)
I don't do Hell very much because my style doesn't really work there. But I take your point.
People supported these not only because of religion, but because of science - the science had progressed, the religious texts haven't (obviously), and the interpretation in some areas has not accepted the science.
It is not about one or the other - it is about interpreting each in the light of the other.
Or is so caught up in keyboard warrior-ness that they are unable to Apply the 10 commandments.
Purgatory is where debate happens, so if debate can’t happen because of repeated violations of those 10 commandments, I’m all for the hosts getting handy with their pitchforks.
Hell or overboard as an outcome is their call.