Now I know how Piggy felt when he got bashed with that rock.
Lord of the Flies enough for ya around here lately?
This diary is not about providing any suggestions for improving the situation. That may come later. For now, I just need to get something off my chest about what happened over the weekend, and why I feel like I know how Piggy felt when he got bashed with that rock.
For background please browse my diaries and my comments. I apologize in advance, this is another pretty long diary.
If you only ever read Lord of the Flies because of a school assignment, I humbly suggest you go read it again. While it is most often presented to relatively young people, because the characters are all children, it is not a children's book. The themes and meanings are much more complex and subtle than you are probably aware.
It's been years, maybe decades, since I last read it myself. It is a very good book, and very powerfully written, but not as straight-forward a story or narrative as the "standard meme" packaging usually suggests. It is not a book you can know or understand by reading the Cliffs Notes.
"Let's bash Piggy with a rock." That sentence is orders of magnitude more chilling than most people recognize. That's true even though most people realize it is supposed to be chilling. I'm just working off my own recollection and impressions, not any scholarly dissection or analysis. But one of the very disturbing parts of the book is the way it doesn't merely suggest, but compels the reader themselves to hate Piggy. It is only after sucking all the sympathy and compassion you might have for him away, not by saying you should not have sympathy or compassion for him but literally (literately) making it inevitable, unavoidable, that you couldn't possibly have the tiniest shred (okay, maybe I'm overdoing it, but you get the point) of ability to relate to him, to care about him, or to feel any concern for him at all, really. You're right with the characters, supposedly children, but no more childish than any adult really, in downright hating him, and wanting those glasses.
If you think that's all in the service to a simple message, that if we allow ourselves to become "uncivilized", or lose our sentimental good will, or simply find ourselves without the social structure and support we take for granted, then doing things like simply taking the glasses from Piggy is what we can expect from otherwise intelligent, self-aware human beings when left to their own devices and unstructured social organization, well... You're on the right track, but nowhere near the station. It is, as I've suggested, more complex and more subtle (and more terrifying even) than that. It is not really just a simple didactic moral story, the way it is often taught or understood. Well worth going back and checking out IMHO. Particularly if you are what is (apparently euphemistically) called a "Trusted User" on DK4.
Yeah, so last night I was Piggy, and I got bashed with the rock. It's all a metaphor, so I'm not dead, and I'm not gone; this isn't even a TTFN diary, although I do plan to take a few days away from the Big Orange, because it is looking a bit too much like Satan to me. So let me belatedly get to the background for my babbling, and tell you what seems to have happened, from my perspective.
You may or may not be aware of the incident with a certain user's racist-looking comment last Wednesday night. (I'm not going to mention who, or ever use any name in a diary again; I will bow to the pathetic practice of preventing anyone from knowing what I'm really saying, to provide the deniability that seems something of a survival skill around here. I'm not even going to give you any links to where any of this happened; you'll have to find it yourself, if you are interested. If you're not, stop reading now and move on to a better diary with a less self-centered focus than this one. I'm sick of writing for your potential benefit, at the cost of mine; this one is all about me.)
I happen to have seen the incident on Wednesday very soon after it happened, and happen to have posted a message describing what I think was the cause. I happened to be right, as I often am in these kinds of situations. And I happen to consider it (the incident, not my being right about its cause) an opportunity to address two larger related issues on DK, which have both been getting noticeably worse since the "hands off" moderation policy was quietly implemented with the DK4 upgrade, two issues which I have a sincere interest in dealing with.
These issues were the context and content of my diary last Friday night. I spent the evening, and into the early morning in fact, and then all day Saturday (except for a few hours to enjoy a party here at home) discussing that diary in comments. Saturday night, I happened upon a thread from last week between our previous official moderator and several users who's usernames I recognized from my Friday night diary. This conversation also related to one of the issues I'd opened up in that diary so I thought I would use that as a springboard for my next diary. I wrote that Saturday night, and scheduled it to post Sunday morning while I was away so that it would be getting comments just about the time I returned home.
The first diary, Friday's, was, I thought, pretty well received. I got a huge number of complaints, of course, because I'd given some people reason to take offense, but it was justifiably (I thought) considered a worthy, even successful, effort to address the points I mentioned (but didn't name) earlier. With Sunday's diary, I was not so lucky. Nevertheless, it generated discussion, and I considered it a moderate success as well. Overall, I'd had a really nice weekend. I even managed, I thought, to make some "friends", owing to what I thought was my calm and integrity in the response to the comment incident last Wednesday that had started it all.
Early Sunday afternoon, another aspect of "moderation policy" and DK4 was presented to me, as well. Along with the upgrade we have an internal messaging system. This was not restricted in any way that I know of, but was generally intended to facilitate the organization and maintenance of groups, meaning group diaries, I thought. I don't "belong" to any groups, though I follow several, and hadn't much used messaging. But I was informed by the little banner at the very top of the page that I had a message, so I went and read it.
A user I had never seen before, entirely unfamiliar and unknown to me, had sent me a message. It was obviously and entirely nothing but a comment on my Sunday diary. Cloaked as concerned advice, it was horribly insulting, and also wrongheaded. I replied through the messaging system to this stranger that comments on a diary should be posted as a comment in the diary to which it refers, and that I would be doing that in order to reply.
I did that, without identifying the user who sent the insulting message to me, and it is viewable by any TU who wants to go look. As you should be able to tell, the only thing personal about it were the insults leveled at me, and as I didn't even have a clue who the sender was other than the screen-name which I had never before seen, I didn't see any reason to believe it was a "private message". It wasn't. After posting the text as a blockquote, I responded in what I thought was a fair and reasonable manner to the points raised and the tone taken. That comment was quickly hidden by the user who had sent me the message, under the fanciful assumption that since it had been sent to me through the messaging system instead of posted as a comment as it should have been all along, it qualified as a "private message" and supposedly violated a ban on posting such things. The reason for that ban is relatively obvious. Equally obvious, in my mind, was that it didn't apply in this case, in fact couldn't apply in this case because I didn't even identify who had sent it, it was not part of any ongoing "correspondence", and there wasn't any personal or confidential information in it. As far as I was concerned it was nothing but unsolicited and purposefully inflammatory spam, and the sender had abused the messaging system to send insulting comments and might well be in trouble if I raised a stink. I could have easily just written, without blockquoting, the gist of the comments by writing "someone sent me a message saying..." But I wanted to explain the circumstances to inform people of my opinion of both the content and the context of the comment.
The comment quoting the message got hidden rather quickly. So I reposted it, adding further explanation and a bit more response to the original message. I will admit it is at best bending, if not breaking, the rules in some respects (different literal interpretations of those rules are inevitable, aren't they?) but it was my diary and I was getting even more incensed about someone using the message system to send insulting comments out of the blue. When the second post got hidden even faster and harder, I got concerned for two reasons. The first should be obvious; this wasn't actually a matter of adhering to rules of moderation. It is a public secret that right now those rules are worth the paper they're printed on, more often used to justify bullying rather than used to guide civilized judgments about community self-moderation. The second was that some of the people I'd thought of as allies, or at least reasonable conversational partners, had piled on as well. From what I managed to read before getting so upset I decided to move to other exchanges before replying, nobody even read the text or my reply or cared anything about them, they just blindly said "I must hide this" because of a blind blockquote and then concentrated on defending their action and ignoring everything else. So I gave up and sent a message to Meteor Blades to ask for clarification and/or assistance.
The sequence of events is clouded for me, as more issues seem to pop up. I don't want to give the impression that each of these events I'm describing are part of a chain or directly related. Some of the participants (besides me, of course) do cross over, though, from one thing to the next. The thing that made it really seem like I'm Piggy and someone said 'Let's hit Piggy over the head with a rock and take his glasses' is this next part. I say that to illustrate my personal reaction, not to suggest anyone necessarily intended, planned, or conspired to waylay me.
It seems obvious in retrospect what happened to cause the bashing. Apparently I had stepped on some toes, in particular the toes of some of the people I had begun to provisionally think of as "allies". Here I'll provide some actual detail. What I did wrong, it seems, was take a swipe at Derrida and Whorf (a brilliant linguist from the 30s, not a klingon). It appeared to me that the reaction which ensued indicated that questioning the validity of theories of postmodern philosophy or linguistics is unacceptable; we must all acquiesce to their unscientific dogma unhesitatingly. Because I believe otherwise, several of my former allies were no longer interested in anything I had to say. Not just from that point forward, even, but including from that point back. A number (2 at first I think) of these people thought it worthwhile, based on some things I said in the comments to the second diary (and maybe the first, too; I'm not planning on pouring over them to sort it out) were so alarmingly unconscionably wrong, in their estimation, to make it worth their while to go back and unrec and untip the diary from two days before dealing with the incident from Wednesday night.
Worse, without actually identifying what it was that put them in a tizzy, they posted comments in the second diary launching the most hateful, spiteful, insulting smears possible. Accusing me of having a hidden agenda if not a false consciousness, it read like a tear-sheet from the "Derailing for Dummies" site I had been posting links to all weekend. And then I got hit by the rock, from behind of course.
The one user involved in Wednesday's debacle who was most gracious and had perhaps I thought actually become a friend praised and hugged the ones attacking me in the same message she casually announced she too, had retroactively decided to remove her tip and rec from the diary, I diary in which I sincerely praised her courage and honesty.
I think once I saw that I was in shock. I guess there was blood in my ears and my eyes, and obviously I should have given up posting then, if not twelve to forty eight hours before then. The final blow to my good will and civility came when one of my treacherously-untrustworthy would-be "allies" decided that yet another of my comments in my Sunday diary was "HRable". I'll offer my customary understanding here, and admit that this person seems to have been sincerely trying to rigorously, if wrongheadedly, apply "the rules" he is "supposed" to be following. But what he'd actually done instead ends my tale, as it ended my will to continue, as it ended my ability to get almost any sleep last night. I'd already been hit with the rock (the "unreccing" of a 2 day old diary that until then those same users had been lauding) but I was still drawing a few last, ragged breaths. Until Yet Another Commenter had provided a deeply insulting bit of text in a mistaken comment concerning the topic of my Sunday diary, stating in clear terms that I was 'not a fully formed human being'. The actual quote was "full form human" I think. As in: I was not one.
So in the reply (I always reply, whether there are insults or not, to the actual criticisms anyone offers me, if possible) which I posted I did include, after indicating why and below a full paragraph of reasoned analysis of the rest of the comment that I was responding to, the line, and I quote, "Fuck you." Certainly not nice, but then again neither is implying, let alone stating almost outright, that someone is 'not a fully formed human being'. Or so I thought. Because apparently its perfectly fine, but "fuck you" isn't, according to the rating system of today's DK4. This overzealous TU completed his dump of every HR he had that day, it seems, on providing his judgment of a diary he didn't agree with but had seemed willing to discuss and a number of my own comments in it. For replying to a grievous insult with a casual "fuck you", the insult is fine but the reply is unacceptable.
Does it say that "fuck you" is HRable in the FAQ? Has it been hinted anywhere? Do people actually get TU status around here without anyone ever actually explaining what they're supposed to do, and how to judge properly whether a comment is one where a rule might actually apply or whether it is just vaguely similar to a situation where it applies? Is any shred of a facially plausible excuse the standard for anyone here?
Apparently that's the standard for everyone here. Except me, I guess. Old diaries unrecced and untipped because of new comments, nice people doing hateful harsh things, bullying messages, and forced unilateral disarmament. Lord of the Flies enough for you these days? I got a reply to my message from MB today. "Tough luck" is the summary. I'm paraphrasing of course; you're not allowed to actually tell anyone what MB tells you, somehow.
Next weekend, perhaps, I will post another diary giving some more direct thoughts and comments on moderation policies and what DK might do, in my opinion, to find its way out of this morass. I've been planning to do that for weeks, anyway, but now it is almost unavoidable as far as I am concerned. I'm posting this diary now to set down this narrative of what I experienced last night, and why I think I know, now, what it felt like for Piggy to get hit over the head with that rock. I will be off trying to play computer games after I post this diary. The comment section is here for anyone who wants, on the off chance that there may be anyone who wants to apologize or at least explain, and also on the certainty that there will be plenty of 'Kossacks' who'll want to dance with cheerful glee to show how happy they are with how unhappy I am, right now. Or perhaps it will just be me and my hidden tipjar, alone, unsurprised, but growing just a little bit more bitter.