And IMO no amount of interesting-ness is worth being bullied. Just encourages them to keep showing up, when what we really want them to do is Go Away. Xopher: I guess my question would be “who cares?” Though I can see why quoting such a person as a third party might be useful, ISTM that it’s a bad idea to listen to them when they actually show up. Serge: I don’t think bullies have any problem with communicating their intentions. I guess what I’m saying is that communication is phenomenological: what matters isn’t how much insight you start with, but how much gets across to your audience.

heresiarch: And someone who can say interesting things but not pronounce them aubibly (or type them legibly, as more fits our medium) can still say interesting things…but who could tell? Maybe someone with really good hearing, or aperosn who is willnig to liek read sum reelly purly riten proeso r sumthin, but a fair number of people will just bounce off.

abi: I think that someone who can say interesting things but not discuss them without being a bully can still say interesting things. heresiarch: I think that habitually expressing oneself in a way that discourages one’s audience from listening is at least as big a barrier to communication as a speech impediment. It’s perfectly possible for someone to have good insights and state them, but behave really badly in discussion. abi: Although that’s catchy, I think it overstates the case. Heresiarch: I think that valuing a bully for his insight is like valuing a mumbler for his rhetoric-it doesn’t much matter what you have to say if you can’t communicate. I’ve screwed up in my life and learned to do better thus will I give others the chance to redeem themselves.Īnd the good bouncers are a fact of this community, to whom we owe the greater part of the pleasure of this site. The wide door is because I’ve been shunned in the past for excessive mouth-footery thus will I not shun others. I have my own opinions: I try to keep a wide door but good bouncers. And that is expressly against the charism of this site. How much can we tolerate people who use bullying tactics (or are bullies)? How much should we give them the space to come back and behave well, and promise ourselves that if they cross the line we’ll deal with them then? Every time we do that, we risk excluding the more fragile members of our community and our conversation. I think this kind of labeling is damaging, and I will not participate.īut there’s no denying that there’s a serious practical matter here. But that process ignores the complex reality that people learn and change that people are misinterpreted and multifaceted, and that even generally bad people can do good things. And it can be like the TSA’s No-Fly List: no appeal, no removal. Fandom, like any group of people, is full of little lists of people whom all right-thinking people must disapprove of, exclude from con panels, and excoriate at every opportunity. The next step after labeling is writing off. Because these labels don’t just sit there in the air. In the abstract, I find myself growing increasingly allergic to the tendency to blur the lines between what people do and what they are. I’m playing about, but there are two serious matters here, one abstract and one practical.

Can someone be both troll and not-troll until they hit the submit button?) (Perhaps there’s some Schrödinger in my pseudo-scientific analogy. Even within the space of a comment thread, they may go back and forth several times. The same person can start a really good conversation and degenerate into spittle-flecked ranting later on. On the other hand, people are more complex than that. And all it takes is one really bad comment to sour the conversation and hurt one’s interlocutors. On the one hand, it is entirely possible, according Bruce Baugh’s theory of the phenomenological internet, to define one’s self as a troll within the space of a single blog comment. This is the classic Heisenbergian tension between knowledge of the moment and knowledge of the trend. The questions before the assembled multitudes: What, if any, is the distinction between a bully and a person who bullies? Can a ever say anything of use to the conversation? Can such a person be redeemed, or should they be written off and excluded from further conversations?

I called time on it with the promise that I’d pull it to the front page. We began a discussion last week on another thread.

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