In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

A red "Keep Calm" poster with the caption KEEP CALM AND STAY ON TOPIC

Spillover #3

Moderator Team

[This thread is now closed. A new spillover thread is available]
A red "Keep Calm" poster with the caption KEEP CALM AND STAY ON TOPICThe second #spillover thread is getting long-ish, so it’s time to set aside a third #spillover as as part of our comment moderation system for keeping other threads on-topic.

#spillover is a constructive space for tangential discussions which are off-topic on other threads. This is part of our blog netiquette, which has the general goal of making it as simple as possible for commentors to find discussions focussed on topics of particular interest without entirely stifling worthwhile tangents of sorta-related or general interest. #spillover is also a space for those ongoing/endless disagreements and 101 issues that just keep on popping up.

Commentors are encouraged to respect the topic of each post and be proactive regarding inevitable thread-drift in long threads: we hope that commentors will cheerfully volunteer to take off-topic responses into #spillover so that each post’s discussion gets room to breathe and tangents can be indulged in a room of their own.

More detailed outline/guidelines were laid out on Spillover #1.
The Moderator Team will enforce topicality where necessary.

22 thoughts on Spillover #3

  1. I suppose I’ll condense some off topic comments here then:

    [snipped by Moderator Team]

    [Moderator note: I realise that you’re trying to abide by our guidelines here, and I appreciate the effort. However, attempting to combine so many replies to so many different people all into one comment is too clunky, and in my experience cannot lead to a coherent discussion. Perhaps try again, responding to only two or three comments elsewhere on just one tangent, and then write a separate comment responding to a few more on a different tangent, etc? ~tt]

    1. All this moderation in effort to only allow perfect discussions is looking a little silly to me right here.

  2. Tyris, I just saw your reply to me on the other spillover thread, which is now closed. I just wanted to say thanks for responding and that your comment provided the insight I was looking for.

  3. Is anyone else having trouble viewing posts on a mobile device? For me, the post title, author, content (except for block quotes), and related stories links are all blank. Comments show up fine.

    1. Yes, it happens to me as well sometimes. Especially if I try and view on my supposedly smart phone. And I get a 4G connection or high speed conections on my two mobile devices, so I don’t think connectivity is the issue.

    2. This is happening to me as well.

      The articles and their titles are blank, but images and block quotes show up. Links work, but only show up as an underline. The comments are readable, but some specific users’ names are blank as is the ‘reply’ link next to everyone’s name.

    3. Yup, this happens to me on my iPad as well. My theory is it might be Safari, as even when I run Chrome on my iPad it’s essentially “Safari with Chrome wrapping”.

    5. Thanks for letting me know. I just checked and for some reason the mobile-theme had been toggled off. I’ve now toggled it back on. I hope that improves things for you all.

      1. Also, apologies to the person who sent a report of the same difficulty to Jill a few weeks ago. Sorry it took this long to look into it, my life’s hectic right now.

        2. Also: thanks to whoever took me out of perma-mod.

          I have no idea who the douche at my law firm is who managed to get our IP address banned, but I hope that person bothers you no further.

    6. I also have trouble viewing on my iPad, but, it usually happens when the banner ad across the bottom of the page loads. If the ad is there, the titles of the posts, the text of the post, and the author of the post just become little horizontal link lines with no text or letters. Very frustrating.

  4. So I was in an IRC channel that I enjoy, we have a weekly weird news quiz and part of that is ‘creative’ answers to the question when you don’t know the real answer.

    In response to this question: “What did 30 actors dressed in Renaissance clothing depict in a flash mob event at a Dutch mall this past week?” (answer: A Rembrandt painting, The Night Watch)

    one person who I generally like posted this ‘creative’: “In a very strange and tasteless mix up of the story of Stuebenville Ohio and the History of the Netherlands, they stuck their fingers in a Dyke”

    I got very upset, I called him out on it being a nasty rape joke that I couldn’t deal with and his answer was: “okay, so rape jokes are not okay… jokes about falling out of airplanes, murder, theft, genocide, castration, impalement, evisceration, burning people alive, crucifiction, and being boiled in oil are OKAY… but not rape. I am not sure I understand.”

    I explained as best I could, but put like that it was a bit difficult, I told him all of those things were gender neutral which got me a major MRA response about how men get raped too. This pissed me off more. The most distressing was the women on channel that agreed but then wanted to shut down the discussion. Let’s not go there, etc. I don’t know how to deal with this on an IRC channel, I don’t want to stop going there, mostly a good group of ppl and honestly even the guy with the horrible joke is someone I’ve never had issue with before. so just wondering how you deal with that situation, you are on a channel with 20 people in real time and they are not the enemy, they are people you like and you want to continue to like them. If you were one on one you could explain easily and it would probably have a good outcome but with so many people it’s not so easy. love some advice for when I go back on that channel next week.

    1. You may well have already read this, but Harriet Jay has a helluva good post on this very topic. Also, sorry you had to deal with that. Rape jokes suck. Rape jokes from people you thought you could trust suck more.

  5. So on Caperton’s “Okay, lay off Beyonce, already” article, a commenter was very emphatic about referring to Caperton using her full name. It struck me as kind of… off, and maybe rude? I wanted to know if people thought I was totally off base.

    The commenter wasn’t using their full name, and in a world of google indexing, having your full name appear on something makes it very visible to anyone who cares to look, especially for those of us with uncommon names. Caperton did not choose to post under her full name and I feel like respecting everyone’s right to choose how to identify ourself in this forum is a huge part of what makes it a safer space.

    Anyway, I saw it, and it bothered me, so I figured I’d let that spillover into here.

    1. I notice that the commentor chose to do that using [Caperton’s] surname and passing it off as an error, too. Which is why that commentor’s comments will now be pre-filtered through the moderation queue.

  6. @Amblingalong and what you wrote about free speech here:

    Ambling, what do you think of Occupy Wall Street’s use of “progressive stack,” where more marginalized Occupiers were given priority when speaking up at general assemblies? When the ethos is all about more privileged people stepping back and making space for less privileged people to step up, it isn’t what I would call “censorship,” per se, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s also not a diehard First Amendment absolutist’s vision, either. The ethos isn’t “more” speech — it’s “more of some viewpoints, less of others.”

    Again, it’s not a perfect analogy, but I bring it up because while censorship is absolutely not a liberal value, I can think of definite ways in which it could be a progressive value. And I’d like to think it’s possible to craft laws that look at speech, especially hate speech, through a progressive, rather than a liberal or libertarian, lens. Does any of that make sense?

    1. I think it’s safe to say that it’s also not a diehard First Amendment absolutist’s vision, either.

      No, it’s not safe to say that, because the First Amendment deals only with government action, not the actions of private individuals. There’s no conflict between being a First Amendment absolutist and coming up with rules about who speaks when at your private meetings.

      What’s missing from all the posts advocating more expansive government power to regulate speech is an understanding of how the government actually operates. It’s criminally naive to think those powers would be used to shut down right-wing or conservative speech while leaving speech progressives like untouched.

Comments are currently closed.