Thorns

Every now and then I look at someone's user info and am intrigued by all the communities they read. So I thought I'd go through the hundred gazillion on my flist. I did this a while ago but the list is now three times as large. A lot of these I joined on a whim and they update so rarely that I never bothered leaving. Dead comms marked with a %, ones I get a lot out of with a *, but the majority of them are kinda dead and/or pretty cool :)
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I'm feeling grumpy and sick and in need of distraction, and very belatedly found a fantastic resource: my friendsfriends page. You guys read some interesting stuff :)

Anyway, in the process, I came accross the feed for the latest xkcd(*) and in the comments for that the Nice Guys essay I was looking for ages ago.

(*)Since if it's anything like the feed for my blog this post will vanish soon here's the original strip

So, we have group X. They have a cause (sexism, racism, the environment etc). You support this cause in principle, but don't like the way they pursue it. That's fine, but there are certain arguments which result from this situation which come up again and again and I thought I'd address them here. I've been pondering it for a while but this was a big "inspiration" :/

Note that if you do have a problem with that cause then that's a different thing, though then you still have to be careful not to conflate the medium with the message so the arguments below are still problematic. In fact a lot of the time I think people use these arguments (especially the last) to mask the fact that they don't want to support group X, but aren't willing to say that due to peer pressure or not having any rational argument beyond "It's hard" or "it makes me uncomfortable".

( They're just not nice )
( It's in their own best interests to be nice )
( They have a moral obligation to be nice )
( If they're not nice I'm justified in ignoring their cause, maybe even actively opposing it )
( Links )

So you know how a while ago I said I was trying to resist the urge to create a fancomics community? Well, I eventually gave in: behold, fan_comics!

My plan, however, is to not promote it very much, at least for a while. And yes, I did post 14 posts in one day, they'd been building up every time I thought about making it but didn't. I accidentally posted one here yesterday instead but you guys seemed to enjoy it so no harm done :) I can see me not posting again for ages, which may disappoint anyone who does happen to join.

*feels a great sense of relief*

Someone at femmeconne asked me for some examples of times I'd screwed up talking about race on the internet, which I decided was justification for this tl;dr screed (which I've been working on for ages) I've done "not X" for pretty much every "Do X" listed here, this is basically everything I wish someone had told me a few years ago :)

EDIT: This lays it out much better, read it instead if you like :) Race Relations 101 - What if I screw up?
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So, while posting about complicated topics has done it's intended task of keeping me occupied and distracted, I find myself all out of braininess for replying to the remaining comments, what all the interesting and curly questions you guys have been asking. So rather than giving increasingly incoherent and ill-considered replies, I shall take a break from answering my email and get back to you anon (probably in a few days)

Hmm. You know the problem with using up my mental energy to stop me fidgeting around and using up my (very scarse) physical energy is that now I have nothing to do. Maybe I'll level up in FFXII...

To avoid spambots. So if you want to post here anonymously you should be prepared to say something which makes it clear you're not a spambot :P I'm tempted to delete all unsigned anonymous comments just because they annoy me (there's at least two people who leave them and it's hard to tell which is which)

So, the blog-roll of people I had friended and then somehow forgotten to add to/removed from my custom filters:

flyingmopsy
frenchiephish
haircaspian
justadecoy
linstar
ramesesniblick3
sassamifrass (though I still had you as an RSS feed)
stableglynn
stephbg
violetsquirrel

I'm going to try checking back your recent archives to see what I missed, but link me to anything particularly interesting :)

EDIT: via flyingmopsy, a radiohead cover using old electronic equipment. Be warned, it takes about 50 seconds to build up to anything resembling music :)

Does anyone know of a better way of checking this than making a text file with all the names, then checking them off against the filters? I could of course just read the combined flist but I find it works a lot better if they're organised by theme (I couldn't tell you the themes are, apart from the "creativity themed comms and fanfic" filter, but certain journals are just better read together)

So, one of the standards I try to hold myself to is to be open to criticism and other points of view. Two criticisms I've had people make of me (directly and indirectly) here and there are that
(a)This whole blogging about racism and feminism etc is pointless or otherwise a bad idea
(b)People who disagree with me (or don't feel as strongly) on these or related issues find this lj unwelcoming/intimidating

(EDIT: I'm paraphrasing, and I think I've accidentally created straw-critics who you are all defending me from when the actual things people said really weren't that bad, mostly. My plan for a "nice simple links post instead of a tricky thinky real post about race" seem to have been less than successful...)

Now I'm still feeling a bit too dumb to write a proper post on either issue, but looking through ibarw I came accross three posts which go into the first question really well:

• rilina: IBARW: Why I'm participating
  
• coffeeandink: Why I participate in IBARW
  
• The Angry Black Woman: Doing Something About Racism
  

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Freedom of speech is a nice concept, and one worth fighting for. It's not something you can assume you have a legal right to on the internet, especially when you consider all the different countries' legal systems involved (my own country offers pretty patchy support) Sop when I say "right" here I just mean in the non-legally binding moral imperative sense.

But even when we consider the principle, what it means is that you have the right not to suffer legal consequences for expressing an opinion, and the right to have public spaces in which you can express yourself.

It does not mean you have the right to avoid social repercussions. If it did, wouldn't you complaining about the people complaining about you be a violation of their right to "free speech"?

Secondly, just because something is publicly visible doesn't make it a "public space". If a private individual or organisation is in charge of a space (and this is true of pretty much everywhere on the internet) then they have the right to completely control what is said there, and that includes deleting content and banning contributors. Which is not to say that this isn't sometimes a bad thing for them to do if they are inconsistent or overly harsh, but they still have that right to dictate both the general nature and specifics of what is and is not said.

If you want to say something they don't like, say it somewhere else.

On the other side: if you are in charge of a space (the comments to your blog, say), while in principle you have the right to run it how you like people will be justifiably annoyed if you act inconsistently or (in their opinion) overly harshly.

For further discussion on the specific issues involved with blog comments, you might like to read my post POLL: When is it ok to edit a blog post?.

This post was written as part of my General principles of internet communication.