“I was banned because I disagreed with the editorial line” is always claimed by people who complain about being banned. It seems to be an universal defense mechanism to the trauma of being left out.
The thing is that some folks – very few – just can’t figure out how to disagree without hostility, foul language, DM abuse, sockpuppeting, flaming, sexist or racist remarks, insinuations of corruption, ignoring moderator requests, victim-blaming, or whatever else is explicitly not permitted by the rules.
“You banned me because I disagreed with you” is even more common than the standby, “you are censoring me by not publishing my comments,” and the classic “I’m so disappointed in Boing Boing since it started publishing all this stuff about drugs and police brutality.”
The story I’ve heard is that some time after recording that song, John Lennon went to a radical left newspaper in the UK, The Black Dwarf, and claimed that the record company pushed the Beatles to record that song, over his objections.
Never saw his initial post, and he could very well have deserved the ban hammer. It does seem like publicly shaming the guy doesn’t jive well with the “be cool” and bullying portions of the rules that apply to mere mortals.
That said, I still enjoy the site on a daily basis, and your posts have consistently been awesome, Rob! Would want to hear the same thing if roles were reversed.
Perhaps I’m just old, but “victim blaming” to me seems to be a loaded term. “Victim” implies they did nothing to deserve whatever it is that happened. “Blaming” implies that someone without editorial power feels that they did. So is it that no one ever deserves to have anything bad done to them, or its just bad form to suggest that they might? Help a geezer out here, I’m generationally disadvantaged.
It should be easy. But unfortunately #8 gives mods license to capriciously delete anything, so why bother having the other rules? Just to make their jobs easier? I can respect the deletion of content that violates specific rules. But always being removed from discourse for politely stating unpopular opinions makes the publicly anti-censorship position of the site into something farcical. It’s intellectually dishonest to manicure what appears to be an open discussion so that it fits somebody’s agenda.
Well, its not always clear cut, but essentially it refers to blaming a victim for causing whatever happened to him/her.
Seems like the commenter was suggesting that stealing = death penalty, so even if he had a different opinion than that of the people on the site, he didn’t actually share it, he just resorted to victim blaming as if whatever he believes is self evident.
You were banned because you were writing weird comments about Cory over some trivial grammar issue. That you also ostentatiously went on about how you would get banned just made it funnier to do so.
“I would never be so naive as to think that Cory should be held to any kind of journalistic standard of integrity. However, simple honesty would be a much better New Year’s resolution than this misguided effort to inject an agenda into everything Cory doesn’t happen to like. Cory, I’d like to remind you (before you press the delete button again) that silencing those who are politely critical of your tendency toward sensationalism is also intellectually dishonest. I’d very much appreciate a dialog rather than just being smited again.”
This sort of insinuating familiarity doesn’t do anything to raise the quality of discussion. Not only it is not meaningful disagreement, but its sanctimonious occupation of the adversarial lectern obscures the actual disagreements posted by others. It debases the quality of argument over those disagreements. It’s bitter and self-satisfied hostility, directed at someone you don’t know, and kinda creepy in its personal character, so you got a timeout.
Oh, and you talked about having accounts, plural, which, well, sigh, there go those rules again!
As an ex-mod on a site that has multiple pages of rules, I can totally get behind #8.
Sure, in a ideal world, there is only one law, Wheaton’s Law. But there’s also an endless amount of argumentative lackwits, bush-lawyers and tyre-kickers and #8 would be a great way to deal with them.
The post was anonymous, the criticism was therefore solely focused on the statements being made. That’s not bullying. Whether you think it’s cool or not pretty much comes down to how lacking in self awareness you consider the letter to be. As someone who thinks the answer to that latter point is “a lot”, I take this to be amply cool.
BB’s discussion forum is one of the biggest self-congratulatory circle jerks I’ve encountered. I don’t agree with the banned person’s opinion, but I agree with their sentiment about BB’s forum.
What was the point, then? What did posting the “letter to the editor” achieve? If not to take a swipe at the guy (even anonymously) or score a shallow victory among the BB readership, what exactly did this accomplish?
Both of the possible reasons I mentioned qualify as bullying in my mind. I’m open to other interpretations of what Beschizza’s goal might have been, though.
I can second this. If you don’t have rule 8 or equivalent, a certain type of user will take great pleasure in always acting just inside the rules while derailing every conversation, dragging people back into arguments, and generally making it impossible to have any kind of meaningful discussion.
This seems to be a common line from sour-grapes commenters, like there was this golden age when every single website just posted headphone reviews and never was heard a discouraging word.
No victim blaming is even a rule?! Maybe this is something only an American can understand? Anyway, (generally) you are a ‘victim’ if you did nothing to bring it on yourself, less so if you share some culpability - which seems to be the point his guy was trying to make.
