roachboy

interesting thread....i have a couple of questions first

1. this term "highbrow" keeps coming up.
it is apparently a bad thing.
but i dont know what it means for anyone...there seems to be some kind of consensus about it, but the content of this consensus is a complete mystery to me.
could someone explain?

i derived a meaning from exploring c:a--but it was not a flattering. i would prefer to think i am wrong.....(but see what being coy does?)

2. i really dont get the status that politics seems to have in any discussion of the state of things here. there seems to be a history of some kind of problem that predates me (i havent looked at when i started playing here...it doesnt seem important): what is the deal?

there are two main thing that drew me here iand that keeps me hanging around: (1) i have found the journal space to be interesting and productive (this is an entirely personal matter) and (2) the potential for interesting types of conversation about often contentious issues in politics. i'll leave the first aside for now as it doesnt seem to be on the table. on the second: things can get heated in politics--and if things get heated, i usually figure "so what?"--but this seems a minority view, as it has (in the past, more than once) appeared that there a perception that heated discussions=some kind of Problem brewing--but the source of that Problem has always appeared (to me at least) to come from this mythical history of the forum rather than from what anyone is doing or saying in real time. a couple times i remember mod clampdowns of one type or another on the forum that seemed to me to be entirely about fear of Something That Happened Once Happening Again--not only did the motivation behind these periods seem to me obscure, but the clampdowns were not done well. politics has been referred to as a blight in the past, a space that brings some bizarre negativity to other spaces....so repeating repeating, i dont understand the status of politics in either the historical world of tfp, the imaginary world of tfp or frankly the realtime world of tfp.
i dont see it as a problematic space.
i do see it as one that has been damaged at times by its own history and the perceptions of it that seem attached to its history for (some of) the mods.
i see it as one in which you can actually have complex discussions.
for that reason, it seems like a space that should be valued rather than one that is framed as somehow Problematic.

on the convo: (1) i really do not understand the treatment of daoust.

(2) i'd like to applaud supple cow and hal both up there for navigating a potentially very awkward conversation. i think there is interesting material for thinking about this space there. also i understand more about where jj at least is coming from there (i didnt really get the c:a post) and in some ways agree with him.

but i would really like answers to the questions before i say more.

reading jj's post above, i have another question: there is obvious some kind of backstory to the charges of mod-manipulation to resolve disputes. what is that story? as it stands, i do not understand what is being discussed across this terminology. there are obvious concrete instances at play in the background. generally, this sort of thing is of no interest to me, but in this case it seems germaine.

thinking about the questions, what seems maybe problematic and what links them is a lack of transparency....but i havent formulated this as an objection in principle--i just want to know what is motivating at least some of the problems that folk are raising. because i have been here for quite a while now and i have no idea what is really going on (or what appears to be really going on)...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite