C2W Suspension

[Bruce Dazzling]

I just suspended C2W for one week.

Read all about it here.

And note that at the end of it that I mentioned that I might be retiring as a mod.

I just doesn't seem to be worth the trouble any more.

[DrVolin]

This is why I don't usually moderate in public. PMs tend to minimize the drama and the energy investment. I am tempted to suggest that we build a list of posters who habitually make the agruments personal and just go ahead and ban them. How many 1 or 2 week bans can we give out? John Simkin just blew a gasket on the Ed Forum and I am monitoring to see if it makes a positive difference:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=20259

[Bruce Dazzling]

I'm pretty sure that I no longer care enough about this place to carry on, but I'd be interested to hear who you think may deserve a permanent ban, if such a step were taken.

[Wombaticus Rex]

You've been most understandably burnt out - you have been The Hammer, indeed.

Although members strongly disagreed about some of these subjects all the members treated each other with respect and no one was banned nor did we need to have moderators.

Perhaps it's just a matter of scale, or more precisely, Dunbar's Number.

Definitely interested in the conversation on perma-bans. Unfortunate that many of our most active contributors are the most disruptive members.

I am also willing to be The Hammer now, regardless of whether you retire or merely take a breather / earned vacation.

[Bruce Dazzling]

I'm just overjoyed that OP ED has magically resurfaced just in time to join the barracda/C2W RI Steering Commission.

Truth be told, I'm still really unsettled by the whole barracuda as stealth mod/drew fibs to C_w about revoking his privs/Jeff won't respond to direct questions about it and basically disappears again saga. That's the kind of support that really warms my heart.

Dunbar's number is an interesting concept, WR. I had never heard of it before, but I plan on reading up on it a bit more. Thanks for the heads-up.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Truth be told, I'm still really unsettled by the whole barracuda as stealth mod/drew fibs to C_w about revoking his privs/Jeff won't respond to direct questions about it and basically disappears again saga. That's the kind of support that really warms my heart.

Dude, YES. I am still EXTREMELY BOTHERED by that, and it seems so f'ing bizarre coming off the whole fundraiser/new design momentum.

[Bruce Dazzling]

This is from the Personal Attacks thread.

In it, C2W basically accuses me of using my mod status to fight a proxy war on behalf of Canadian_watcher. I really would prefer that one of you gentleman respond to it's length and breadth. I'm merely going to mention in the thread that I've suspended C_w three times, including as recently as two weeks ago, and wonder aloud whose proxy war I was fighting on those occasions...

But really, it's probably time for me to allow someone else to step in.

Thanks in advance.

A message I received from a a friend...

It's also worth noting that after being pushed by C2W, I was able to document two recent occurrences where C2W made the exact type of name-calling posts that led me to find it interesting that she, among others, seemed to be bothered by the enforcement of the rule as it pertained to barracuda's "dickhead" comment. I said I found it interesting, and I still do, and it's still not an ad hominem for me to say so.



I'd really appreciate it if you stopped rewriting history. I appreciate that's how you experienced/understood it. But you're not impartial. And your word carries the imprimatur of authority. So please recuse yourself.

What happened was:

I was completely baffled by what your standards and guidelines were for determining whether something was or wasn't name-calling/a personal attack. So I asked for elucidation and/or guidance and/or an index of terms/phrases.

You chose to regard this as a defense of name-calling.

You cherry-picked two instances of what you regard as name-calling out of the total of perhaps a dozen or so you'd find in a close examination of my eight-thousand-plus posts, which, let's face it:

It's less interesting that you were able to document than it is utterly predictable since I'm completely sure that Canadian_watcher reported them at the time, along with what were doubtless who-knows-how-many false positives.

Because that's the only explanation for your even having been aware of something as completely unexceptional as my having asked stickdog99 why he was being such a douche to me when I was respecting his request from earlier in the thread to begin with. Nobody else would have noticed or cared. Or been incapable of understanding who was attacking whom. Or been so narrowly focused on my actions to the exclusion of all else as to construe it as an instance of my bad behavior. That takes a unique kind of genius, that I've come to recognize as my friend, Canadian_watcher.

It also explains why it is you can't see that my having called Mac an asshole was the direct result of my shock that after fighting with him for years without any loss of respect or affection on either side, he was suddenly unable to see that I would never do anything as low or bad-faith as invisibly, maliciously back-edit my posts. Which is a completely specious concept that owes its existence to the same person who'd insinuated (as she has previously outright stated) that I was barracuda's sock-puppet only days earlier.

And, seriously. I'm sticking strictly to the instances of her making an effort to influence and/or interfere with threads for no other reason than that it was disadvantageous to me that are pertinent to this flare-up. A comprehensive catalog of them would be book-length. She thinks she has a righteous cause. So she doesn't recognize any limits or care whom she hurts. And that's assuming that she's even capable of acknowledging the pain of others. The last time I objected to being victimized by her, she mocked me for it. It was one of the most painful things anyone's ever said to me.

Despite all of which, I like and respect her, I should add. She's got a right to her feelings. And to her opinion. Within limits THAT THE MODS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENFORCE.

I can't post here if the moderators can't tell the difference between the attackers and the attacked. Speaking of which. That might be for the best, though. I'm just saying.
_____________________

Anyway. Of course your understanding of what constitutes disruptive name-calling is going to appear incomprehensible and biased to sensible people if you're getting it via Canadian_watcher's tunnel vision. Anyone whose views weren't as blinkered would be saying to themselves:



But name-calling isn't now and never has been a significant or frequent or chronic cause of conflict. On the contrary, as any search for words such as "asshole" or "dickhead" or "douche" instantly reveals, when nobody Canadian_watcher hates does it, it rarely disrupts the thread for as much as a single post or upsets a single poster, as (for example) here:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 95#p489853

and here:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 40#p478095

and here:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... 65#p497369


(Apologies to those three blameless posters.)

And if you think those are cherry-picked examples, do your own search. What you'll see is that those appellations have only ever been the source of sanctions when they were used by someone who was engaged in the kind of sustained chronically hostile or angry personal assault on another poster or posters that can and do also frequently occur without any name-calling whatsoever. Because THAT'S what leads to most of the conflict and thread-derailment on the board.

As it did here.

________

That said, I'm not personally a fan of name-calling. I just could not, for the life of me, figure out what your standards were, since they didn't appear to be based on any organized or systematic principles I'd ever come across or could think of any way to discern via inference. And that's why I kept asking you what they were.

Now that the penny's dropped -- and, btw, I find it interesting which posters didn't think they needed any explanation -- they make perfect sense to me, though.

I kind of can't believe it took me that long to figure it out. Please accept my sincerest apologies for having mishandled our exchange as badly as I did. The reason I said that post was a petty abuse of power was less because it seemed to me that you were threatening me with suspension for asking a question (which you were, it turned out) than because I couldn't understand where it was coming from. So I'm very sorry to have added to your difficulties. I wouldn't have done it if I'd realized what they were.

Not that that's an excuse. It's just a reason. But fwiw, I am sorry. I appreciate your hard and thankless work on the board's behalf. And....TBH, it's once again become more stressful than it's worth for me to post articulately while at constant risk of assault for any random, exploitable word that could conceivably be construed as problematic. So my judgment's probably a little more compromised than it should be. But once I get over that, I promise to do better in future.

As for the rest:

What you said was ad hominem. But since I don't really care and it would be a very linguistically technical and minute case to make, I'm willing to retract it if you can't live with it. And I definitely do retract the abuse-of-power thing, as well as apologize for it with much shameful remorse. I completely misunderstood what was going on.

And....I wouldn't be surprised if none of this seems sincere or on-point to you, even still. Actually. We're not really proceeding from a shared perception here. So communication is a little chancy. But that's due to factors beyond my control. And I am sorry. So there you have it.

I apologize in advance for skirting the ban with this. But after a certain point, rebuttal becomes obsolete. And you're really being very unfair.

[Wombaticus Rex]

That is a huge WTF sandwich. I'll read through it tonight and take notes.

(And mumble "...fuckin ban everybody..." a few dozen times, too.)

[Jeff]

I'm still trying to catch up with events, so I shouldn't comment too much until I have completely, but one week does seem especially harsh. We've usually only doled that out for egregious trolling.

Some things I need to say: I'm very appreciative of your efforts as mods, especially since I've had a habit of disappearing lately. Depression and stress have been causing me to avoid responsibilities. That's not working well for me. So I'll try better to stop doing that.

[Jeff]

I hate to be a Rahm Emanuel about it, but let's not let a good crisis go to waste. What constitutes a "personal attack" needs to be properly defined. I'll start accepting suggestions and drafting a guideline.

Given the lack of clarity in the rules, I think c2W's penalty should be reduced to time served.

Thoughts?

[DrVolin]

In my opinion, the guideline should be simple. Discuss the post not the poster, the issue not the person.

Example:

WBR: Ban them all!
DrV: You're a Facsist!

not acceptable.

WBR: Ban them all!
DrV: Would banning them all be a form of Facism?

acceptable.

Given a very simple guideline such as this, for a while we should patrol the threads and privately warn any poster who makes it personal. After a month of re-education of the population, we should start handing out ban to personalizers.

Proposed draft:

Discuss the post not the poster, the issue not the person. Don't make it personal. For the next month, the mods will patrol the threads and privately warn any poster who makes it personal. After that, we will suspend or ban posters who make the discussion personal.

[Bruce Dazzling]

I hate to be a Rahm Emanuel about it, but let's not let a good crisis go to waste. What constitutes a "personal attack" needs to be properly defined. I'll start accepting suggestions and drafting a guideline.

Given the lack of clarity in the rules, I think c2W's penalty should be reduced to time served.

So I'm sorry, but I don't see that there's grounds for a lack-of-clarity reprieve on this one. She wasted gobs of my time and energy, during which I patiently addressed all of her issues repeatedly.

Thoughts?

The point in question, name-calling as an attack, was never lacking in clarity. It only became muddled by reams of cut and paste rhetorical gymnastics in which C2W falsely accused me of making an ad hominem attack on her, and repeatedly requested a list of verboten terms, which as I pointed out multiple times, isn't really a feasible undertaking due to the inevitable size of such a list. And besides the point in question was simply name-calling, specifically, that we shouldn't be referring to other posters as dickheads, which is what barracuda did to earn his suspension, and is what prompted the discussion between myself and C2W to begin with. Don't-call-people-names isn't really a complicated concept to grasp, especially for someone of C2W's obviously high intelligence.

Here's my alleged ad hominem attack on C2W, btw:

In fact, I also think it's interesting to note which posters seem bothered by the enforcement of a rule that has always existed, simply because I can't believe that any of you are actually fighting to preserve the right to end intelligent debate by calling someone a dickhead, and that's exactly what it does. It ends intelligent debate.

So the above was somehow twisted into being an ad hominem against C2W.

This can all be found here, in the With Love and Gratitude to Hammer of Los... thread, of all freaking places. That link will take you to the key exchange, incidentally.

So again, I don't see that there's grounds for a lack-of-clarity reprieve in this instance. Sorry, but that's how I feel.

As for DrVolin's idea, I like it, except that we need to determine the appropriate length of suspension.

I think that one week is the way to go. Anything less than that just seems trivial to me, and not very likely to make an impact.

[Jeff]

I'd really like you to reconsider this.

I think a week's suspension, without warning, is unjustified.

[Jeff]

Maybe more than a tighter definition of personal attacks, we need a new protocol for suspension and banning.

With the exception of banning obvious spambots, moderators used to deliberate and arrive at a consensus. I think we probably need to return to something like that.

Bruce, you said you recused yourself from this situation in another thread. I think I'm going to take you at your word, and reactivate c2w.

[DrVolin]

I agree that we should deliberate before suspending. Start a thread here, go with the consensus. There are several examples of such discussions below.