The Locking of the Avril Thread

sorry to "bait" you, but i keep coming up with counterarguments to your prodigious nonsense and then lack the energy and interest to post them, seeing as how you so rarely respond to such things in an honest manner anyhow. i probably should just be silent on the matter.

Before I get to this - I'm not "keeping quiet," just keeping busy! Now. If you really believed "oughtn't" and "can't" were the same voice, you wouldn't have reacted as you did to the bit about telling someone whose mother is recently dead that you fucked her fat dead cunt. You CAN do that! No man can deny you your right to do it! "Oughtn't" IS different, and you know it or you'd never bother being polite. (And please: don't even suggest that it's becaue politeness "works." If you were interested in what "works," you wouldn't be an artist.) Oughtn't refers to whether we feel we should be decent to one another. Can't refers to oppression, authority, all that stuff you like to IMAGINE you hear in "oughtn't" and which you PRETEND people are implying, because it's always easier to argue from the point of the persecuted. But there isn't any persecution, censorship, or threat of interference! Just people saying that things they've read made them feel angry, not in a "this challenges my preconceptions!" way but in a "this is hurtful to people I love!" way. One ought to avoid being hurtful, I think, unless one has a point that desperately needs getting across: and I know that you agree with me on this question. Vice is not challenging nor daring; it's just hurtful. That's everybody's complaint, I think.

Poets in the Soviet Union: Here they kill you for it.
Poets in the West: You're lucky. Here they ignore it.

And the thread comes full circle back to Calum!

"Why, in fact, do you not live up to your own wish, and de-escalate rather than escalate? Why are the rules different for you?"

push up against the rules of polite argument (without going too far) more than anything Momus has said to Ned or Stencil here. I am not saying "BAD Ned", I am saying that Ned's not-overly-rude questions are based on a false assertion.

But I know you don't feel that; you just resort to the radical position when you feel cornered. I know that you feel for the disenfranchized, and the marginalized, and the Other - you've said so so many times! And you feel that people oughtn't marginalize or disenfranchise! So please. Argue from your honest position, not from this de Sadean "all must be permitted, nay encouraged, else There Is No Freedom!" pose.
x-post note that you feel we "oughtn't" censor trolls! or even call them trolls!

And the thread comes around and steps on my emotional toes by making what seems like a well-timed comment about my male pattern baldness!

(Though I have to say I don't often say "Losing some hair-ious" sadly. I don't really think about it one way or the other often.)

This is so far outside of my realm of experience that I can only ask Momus if he's EVER been on Usenet (and I'm sure the answer is yes so asking is a futile act).

Dan: I'm not really a Usenet sorta guy. The word 'trolls' (like the word 'hipsters') is something I would only use on ILX, they're not in my vocabulary otherwise.

(oh, and this makes it obvious that I haven't read the entire thread but oh well, im a busy lady)

-- VengaDan Perry (djperr...) (webmail), June 18th, 2004 3:32 PM. (Dan Perry) (later) (link)

i take it this isn't a page from the history of the north african campaign...

Jealous Ned

*Jealous* of C-man? Please, try again. There's nothing to be jealous of there.

push up against the rules of polite argument (without going too far) more than anything Momus has said to Ned or Stencil here

I should note that Momus brought up the specific image of 'deescelation' first. If he argues for that and proceeds to almost immediately go *against* his -- I'm sure well-intended -- advice, then I'm a bit curious, and in this case, I *will* ask.

Dan: The Meows thing I just read (some FAQ somewhere) was a little too 'sheep and goats' for my liking. 'They're not entirely worthless' says some Moderator, 'they do fight spam and make some acceptable posts'. There's a line between moderating and judging someone as a person. And what's disturbed me most on this thread has been Ned saying 'It's no one individual instance, it's my decision that this is a bad person'.

I actually agree with you about the vindictiveness shown towards Calum; I would much prefer to wait to lock his threads until something kicks off (whether it's instigated by him or someone else; I had been punititively locking his threads when people showed up and started being dicks on them, mostly in an attempt to get people to look at how THEY were contributing to the problem, but then I remembered that attempting to get the average person to be introspective is about as likely as trying to get a cat to shoot chocolate milk out of its ass).

You are missing something that Sundar happened to note a long time back -- namely that in between those two phrases is the important 'it's because of this *cumulative* collection of instances which can be traced over time, and that in turn etc.' Sundar didn't fully agree with my decision still but has made more of an allowance than you have for that cumulative activity being demonstrable and having an effect. I most certainly did not think of gunning for Calum the first minute he started posting.

As Dan has just noted, there are different opinions among the moderators on how to address this, and it is precisely because of this difference that I'd like the policies considered and addressed more consistently -- and like I've said, it's in Dan's and Tom's hands and ultimately I am more than willing to abide by what they decide. But I value Dan's opinion more than yours on the matter, Momus, not because he is a fellow mod but because he has much more and better experience dealing with this kind of thing than you say you have, or are willing to admit to, or are willing to try out doing yourself.

Ta

P.S. No one is ever really anti-censorship. Otherwise we'd have animal pron and kiddie stuff on sale and we don't want that. nor do many of us want bullfighting/ fox hunting etc (oh how we laughed when the Tory government who approved two private members bills to outlaw such "threats" to our society as uncut videotapes of "Driller Killer" complained about a ban on foxhunting being an attack on personal freedom). I'm certainly not anti-censorship. No one is.