[QUOTE=Shodan]
You liberals are fond of telling those of us who are a minority on these boards how we should suck it up and quit whining. If that is good advice, why don’t you take it once in a while?
[/QUOTE]
I’ve vocally defended unpopular minorities around here several times, from Christians to conservatives, and I’ve almost always been reasonable about dissenting viewpoints. The few times that I haven’t been reasonable, I’ve apologized.
I just want you to be really clear about the culture you are defending here. These are the people you want at your party.
In response to a woman’s story about having her clothes practically torn off while she was alone in the woods with a much stronger man:
[QUOTE=Shakes]
But when I hear shit like: " I had to say yes and give him sex or he MIGHT have beat me up. I’m a victim, I was raped!" It makes my head want to explode.
[/QUOTE]
In response to women talking about how it’s not always easy to follow their gut in avoiding rape situations:
[QUOTE=Drunky Smurf]
Same here. My gut told me to sell my Microsoft shares at $17.35 but I didn’t listen and got raped.
[/QUOTE]
I just want you to be really aware of what this conversation is about. You seem to be deluding yourself into thinking it’s all about boob jokes. I could give a shit less about boob jokes. Apparently letting everyone have a good time at the party is a lot more important to you than making women feel like shit about what was probably one of the worst things that ever happened to us. It’s no different than mocking a parent who lost a child or someone with a serious illness, and it happens all the time. It’s a fucking sick mentality and I’m getting increasingly more embarrassed about participating in a culture that accepts it.
I don’t have any ‘‘issues’’ to resolve. I’m beyond that phase of my life. I’m not oversensitive. I’m not misandrist. I’m not hysterical. I’m not even particularly angry. I’m just this person who would rather not walk away from a message board interaction feeling like I’m covered in an inch-thick layer of slime. I don’t blame the mods. I blame the hand-waving apologists in these threads and every poster who has refused to take this conversation seriously. I blame every man and woman who have gone out of their way to undermine and minimize the legitimate concerns that some of us have. By and large, women are treated like shit here, and since it continues to happen, I have to assume most people on this board are okay with that.
Dude, I already know there is not going to be any meaningful understanding. Do you honestly think I don’t know that? It’s been apparent from early on that we’re just supposed to take it. If we complain, we’re bitches. If we don’t complain, we’re losers. If we leave, we’re cowards. If we don’t leave, we must like it. If we say what has happened to us, we’re victims. If we don’t say, we’re demanding men be mind readers. If we’re tired of fighting, we take it too seriously. If we’re loving the fight, then how can we complain?
I get it. I wish I didn’t get it, but I get it. I got it a long time ago. It has always just been a matter of how long I could put up with it.
I don’t think that’s a fair summary of what Marley is saying.
If we include racism and misogyny, there are still two different types of posts that we should consider:
The sincerely-held beliefs that are disgusting. “Women send mixed signals all the time, so we need to be understanding of men who accidentally go too far with a woman!” or “Black people are innately less intelligent than white people, so we should not be surprised when they persist in scoring lower on academic tests!”
The sneers. “When you women calm down, we can have a discussion,” or, “Wow, you’re black and you can string together a sentence? Might articulate of you!”
I think there are good cases to be made either way for whether the #1-style posts should be allowed. I think the case for allowing the #2-style posts is very weak.
Marley appears to me to be saying that the #1-style post, odious though it may be, will continue to be allowed, because on balance it’s the best way to fight ignorance. He seems to be saying that the #2-style post is moddable, if reported right away.
Is this a fair summary, Marley?
Certainly you might argue that there’s no relevant difference between #1 and #2-style posts: they’re both odious. Even if they’re very similar, though, I think it’s worth acknowledging the difference. It looks to me (although I may be wrong) that the administration is showing more willingness to take this issue seriously than in the past; I was pleasantly surprised by the warnings issued in this thread, for example. If that can continue, that’d be a great thing.
Here’s the problem: nobody’s talking about Good Morning or Honey except you. It would be far more illuminating if you could use, as your examples, the examples that people are talking about.
You may recall, for example, that “Maybe when you women calm down, we can talk about it” is what started the thread. Do you think that comment “can be read as anything from a warm welcome to curt dismissal”? Do you think “it’s not like everytime” that phrase is used, “it’s misogynism”?
Because I’d suggest that that phrase–you know the one we’re discussing, not “good morning” or “honey”–is always misogynism (except when it’s used in very specific contexts designed to mock or discuss the misogyny of the phrase itself). It’s always a curt dismissal. If you disagree–and from the lack of warning issued to Ibanez I’m guessing you do–your reasoning would be appreciated.
Could you perhaps recognize an example as an example? Because he goes on to say that we’ll consider reports but that there are going to be differences of opinion regardless. Do you think that post was intended to defend what Ibanez said, for example?
Good Morning and Honey are certainly examples. My point is that they are deeply flawed examples, as neither phrase is “one person’s misogyny”. Indeed, their subtext appears to be that people complaining are being oversensitive.
I don’t think they were intended to defend what Ibanez said. I think they were intended to address the situation in general, but did a very poor job of illuminating the situation.
I’ve asked, and I’ll ask again, for some discussion of what Ibanez said. Do the mods read his comment as light-hearted banter?
Okay, so certain posters can continue to DDOS the topic, and instead of banning their hobby-horse, you allow them to ban discussion of alternatives to their hobby horse.
I’m not insensitive to the dilemma this poses for you, because I’ve read all those threads and actually learned a ton of details about just how wrong they are, which is valuable in itself. I would suggest that you could, on per-hobby-horse-rider basis, ban their particular participation from a particular angle (let’s call it “The Lissener Solution”), once they’ve clearly demonstrated that their particular angle has been driven into the ditch. I recall one thread by even sven where she started it by begging to have a discussion about Africa that didn’t end up there, but no luck because you’re afraid of moderating your way down a slippery slope.
This is a pretty good example, actually–could we have a link so we can discuss it better?
If someone is interested in why Africa is economically behind the other regions of the world, or whatever, there are a host of interesting issues to discuss: is it colonialism’s residue? Is it related to diseases like malaria and AIDS? Is it related to an abundance of raw materials? Is it due to specific cultural norms? There are a lot of interesting ways to discuss it.
But if a racist comes in with crazy racist theories, a lot of people will feel that they’ve a moral duty to refute the racism, that staying silent about it risks letting someone else think the racism is persuasive. The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, and so forth. And if the racist is willing to answer every single post, then anything else will quickly get lost in the wash.
Certainly you can argue that everyone else shouldn’t respond to the racist. But that’s not what happens, so you’re left with a board with no intelligent discussions of what’s really going on in Africa, instead discussion after discussion about whether the racist is right or not. Is that the board you want to have?
If not, there’s a solution. And it doesn’t need to be clearly laid out in advance. You’ve got the judgment necessary to say, “Y’know what, racist, you’ve made your stupid racist points already in other threads, and now you’re just crapping up the board. You’re gone.”
In no way does that make the board a worse place. Instead, it means that we can have a real discussion again about something other than how “scientific” racists are wrong.
This. One example for me was a thread brought up earlier. I reported comment #5 for its painfully stupid sexist horseshit and (not wanting to flood the moderator notification section) said that posts #4 and #6 were crap too but IMHO to a lesser extent. It’s not only painfully stupid every.single.time but also may very well stop other women who are reading to chime in with answers or ask their own questions, especially when (like we’re told to do!) someone gently complains about it in post #7 and gets told to next time wear undies in the sandbox in post #14.
Now, a moderator does come into the thread after I reported it and before the sandbox comment and does absolutely nothing about the guys with their stupid LOLBOOOOOOBS jokes and even throws in her lame boobs joke for good measure. I like Ellen Cherry, but she dropped the ball and then added to the crap with that one. Only after the sandbox comment does she say anything.
At that point I decided to make my feelings known since apparently the report I made was dismissed without doing anything about it. To the sandbox guy’s credit he did come in and acknowledged what I said in what I took to be a “yeah, you’ve got a point” kind of way. Still, nothing was done about the report I made and that is most CERTAINLY not the only one I’ve made.
So while it’s great to hear “let us know when something happens” line, it just feels like lip service because in my experience, it doesn’t help at all. In some cases, like this thread, it only becomes more disheartening because as gracer pointed out in post #378 this is exactly what we get for trying to fight it.
IOW, you are proposing exactly what Marley23 has said cannot and should not happen.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
This is the exact problem with these threads: you’re proposing we allow a very controversial area of discussion and then not allow one specific opinion. That’s pretty much the one thing we can’t do. We can’t allow threads asking ‘is there a link between race and intelligence’ and then bar people from saying ‘yes’ (even though they’re wrong).
[/QUOTE]
This is exactly what happens on debates about vaccines on the mothering boards. They are interested in all points of view - except the one that says vaccines’ benefits outweigh the risks.
Same here. We can have a nice interesting debate about race - provided you agree with me.
Following a link from there, this thread. The racist posts start, I think, at 33, and every single post for the rest of that page (until 50; I didn’t continue past there) was another one of, or in response to, the racist posts. Up to that point, there had been a reasonably interesting discussion going on (I skimmed it; please correct me if I’m mistaken).
Is this the kind of thread we want? Or would it be reasonable for the admins to take a harsher line with the trying-to-make-a-real-point racists?
I almost think that should be branched off into another thread, though, as it is, I think, a harder question than whether we should get rid of the sneers.
So instead we’re forced to relive the same wrong viewpoint over and over again, to the exclusion of discussing other viewpoints, in order to… what? Keep alive the possibility of discussing that same wrong viewpoint?
Fair point, if I’d said anything like what you’re addressing.
If there’s a thread called “Is there a link between race and IQ?” that’s one thing. Let the racists do their best.
But if there’s a thread called, “Turning a developing country into a developed one,” there are many different viewpoints on the question. Many were expressed in that thread. Forbidding one viewpoint (that you can’t do it because brown people are dumb) doesn’t reduce the thread to an echo chamber, any more than forbidding one viewpoint from a thread on the new pope (that since all religious people are con artists or idiots, we ought to throw poop at the pope) would reduce that thread to an echo chamber.
If there’s a thread on an anti-vaxxer website about whether vaccines cause autism, to use your lousy example, of course the science folks ought to be allowed to speak. But if the science folks are going into threads about puppies and saying, “maybe if you vaccinated puppies they wouldn’t DIE OF PARVO!” it’d get old and they should stop.