Nero Wolfe said something along the lines of, “We are taking risks every time we push words at each other.” 
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I remember that well, and yes, the aplolgy appeared sincere. Unfortunately, they seemed unable to learn from that and promptly went on another tear. Some are probably best to just not be here.
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I saw that thread, and would be mistrustful of amends that person made.
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…and this is why I never side with bullies. Not just b/c what bullies have done to me, but what they do to others. People must learn to see past the tips of their noses or whatevers and develop some fucking compassion and empathy. No one person is the center of the fucking universe, but many act as if they sure as hell think they are.
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I am not saying that it is unacceptable. I am just trying to understand the parameters in terms of what to do in cases involving kerfluffles. I have been assuming good faith in kerfluffles, but that does not seem to be working.
Same here. It’s just getting so hard for me to figure out who the bullies are. I don’t want to believe that there are bullies among our regular users, and so I guess I put my head in the sand and assumed that these kerfluffles must be due to some kind of misunderstanding. I think that I have been naive about this whole thing, and that is a form of privilege as well.
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Yeah, again, something the marginalized folks in here have been trying to get across to you and others this entire thread. Like…these disagreements, like the Michelle Obama thing that appears to have started this specific conversation…this is not our first rodeo. That’s why so many of us didn’t assume the comment was made in good faith. We’ve been there, done that, and have the scars to show for it. Now, I’m not saying always assume bad faith. But when you see a comment or post that you’ve seen 20 times before, and all 20 times it was made in bad faith, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume the new one is also being made in bad faith, even if it’s coming from someone you don’t know. Or someone you do know.
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The marginalized will show you, if the bullies aren’t obvious enough for you to tell.
There is a big difference between being intense and being a bully, but pushing words at each other in digital fashion makes for even more risks b/c intonation and facial expressions are lacking.
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Thank you. It took me a while, but that point has finally gotten through to me. I have been a slow learner, I know, but I know now to approach a kerfluffle with the idea that the person on the receiving end probably did do something to deserve it.
With that in mind, I think that the best course of action is to flag the post that sparked the kerfluffle.
It has become difficult for me to identify microagressions and bullying after 18 years in Japan (microagressions and bullying of course exist in Japan, but they materialize in different ways), so I will pay closer attention to how people who know these things are reacting and make my flag decisions accordingly.
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Huh?
I hope you mean that good faith wasn’t working, but now you’ll give it a chance?
It really is.
Bingo. I think that right there is a huge key to why the naively privilged have so much trouble in all this. Something the marginalized said just doesn’t make sense, so supposedly it like, “doesn’t make sense.”
Moving toward an understanding that it doesn’t make sense yet to you, because you’re privileged, gets covered in the classroom down the hall, where “Allyship 101” is going on.
A slow learner is nonetheless still learning.
–Virginia Woolf (probably)
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Oh, I meant that I was assuming good faith on the part of the targets of the kerfluffle, and I will no longer be so quick to give them the benefit of the doubt.
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True. But after that person tapered off, people wrrr continuing to poke on and rage the person. 
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As i pointed out above, these are not conversations in real time. Unless we are prepared to put a “you may only reply to this post for x minutes” limit, you will get people responding over a long period. We have mutants in a very spread out number of time zones, and not everybody sees the posts at the same time. This does not mean there is a cabal or somesuch, just how BBS conversations work.
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For whom? Marginalized people are speaking up, saying they have one foot out the door because of how they are being treated here. This discussion was kicked off by non-marginalized peole complaining about being picked on by marginalized people.
It’s been posited that the non-marginalized people accept the brunt of that - and that should be reasonable.
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I just got flagged for trying again!!!
Seriously this is disgusting and I have lost faith in this community.
I’m really done. Idk I’m done.
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Bad faith flagging is a serious issue here. There are some who have weaponized flagging to silence folks that dare to disagree with them, and it is most certainly not the othered folks doing it.
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Another way to look at that is to have a broader view of who the targets of a kerfuffle are.
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That’s not an the place having an immune system- it has an autoimmune disorder.
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Not only is it not the “othered” folks doing it, after a certain amount of time , bad faith flags simply don’t work. If you’re getting flagged, and your message getting hidden, it’s getting hidden because people with high enough “Good flag” scores have tagged it and then it’s been chosen to stay hidden. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or anything, lord knows I’ve seen plenty of these, but it does mean that it might be time to take a break from the thread or the board or think about if it lines up with the guidelines.
Every one of my flagged and hidden posts have crossed a conduct line, even if the crossing was very, very subtle and small. (And even if the crossing of the conduct line wasn’t even intentional or I wasn’t aware of it until it was pointed out)
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