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interesting.
almost unsure what there is to say about all this---greater transparency, fine---reduction of snarky posts, fine---elimination of ad hominems--good, glad to see. but these are all positions that assume clear cut types of posts--but the policy is not always implemented in the context where things are clear-cut.
i was going to pm this to you gentlemen, but in the interest of helping to define what transparency in fact means, i'll do it here.
the transparency being outlined here operates with only one public side---it functiosn as a gloss on mod actions--it is good that the flip of that is a feedback loop for questions that can be posed to the mods---what is not so good is that the questions are confined to pms---why not have public space for questions about particular choices the mods make when they fall into grey areas?
are mod decisions irreversable? if so, why?
it seems to me you have a choice within the larger choices that you are making concerning transparency---the current mode is a kind of nice dad approach, within which decisions to shut down a thread are accompanied by a slight expansion of explanation--but the decisions themselves stand regardless.
a more community oriented mode would be to create a public space for meta-discussion about some of the decisions themselves, which would function (maybe) as a way to include the community itself in the generation of the discursive norms within which it operates. this present style is not really such a mode because it is not about the criteria that shape decisions, really--it is about modulating responses to them--the norms themselves are not being discussed here, only how those of us who post are to react.
it is very american, this split of debate away from questions of the actual exercize of Authority. kind of a recurrent quirk.
i think the torture in iraq thread that i started opens onto grey areas within this new regime.
let's review....
i had some difficulty working out how to present the ny times piece on section 6-26 as a generator of discussion---and i am not confident that i worked it out--but i thought the information in it important.
at the same time, i felt something kind of shift in my mind as i read it--i understood something of the attitude i was seeing in films about groups like baader-meinhof and other aspects of the mid 70s militant/"terrorist" left that i hadn't really understood before---what they saw, in effect, that motivated their actions. i also saw the enormity of their tactical mistake in choosing to go the direct action route, but that came a bit later, and did not make it into the thread because it was shut down. it probably would have come up at some point. no-one puts all their cards on the table in an op and so it goes.
i fully expected that folk from the right in particular would respond by trying to avoid the information one way or another, and so it went.
i wondered about tipping points, the places in which information reached a mass that caused problems for maintenance of positions, even in a messageboard format---the format is important because it tends to reduce almost to zero the possibility of folk changing their views based on any information. something about the distance in it, about the net format itself seems to play a role in this, but it is hard to work out exactly what functions in this way beyond that.
anyway, sure enough, dismiss-the-nyt-as-source came, and two very different responses to followed. it was pretty clear to me at least that this was a blip in a conversation that would probably be left behind, or could be if it was managed right--but the thread was shut down.
so what exactly do you folk see this reduction of polemical responses as entailing for threads that involve controversial information?
what seems to be taking shape here is a quick and easy way to get controversial threads shut down: if you dont like the information, post something facile dismissing it on arbitrary grounds but without any superficial features of an ad hominem. and this would be fine, within the rules.
what the new policy really effects is the ability of folk to react.
in this place, you get the same posts from the same folk over and over---there is no learning curve in some cases.
the positions that are advanced through this repetition are no more legitimate outside a particular frame of reference at the outset than they are at repetition 30---what are we to do about such situations?
if we cannot respond strongly, does that not de facto mean that these absurd posts are now to be understood as adequate intellectually?
why is it ok to continually post the same kind of thing, over and over, in the form of zippy one-liners?
for myself, i take this kind of thing as patronizing, as working on the assumption that i, as a reader and participant here, am being positioned as an idiot, not deserving of an actual argument.
why are these posts not themselves then understood as a personal attack?
further, i have said this before and i'll repeat it here: if you really want to manage snippiness in this forum, you might exert pressure on folk to raise the intellectual content of their posts.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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