board77

TORN wrote:

Primmy wrote:

I also want to point out that what Ax was saying (with great gusto) was only that he would ask that the discussion be moved, which is any member's right.

Understood, to which I replied "And I will ask what part of the Charter . . . would serve as a basis for such action?", where "action" was intended to refer to "moving to the bike rack", not "asking that it be moved to the bike rack" (although, admittedly, I did type a few more words after that)

Ah.

Well, you see, that's the difficulty—all those additional words!

Attorneys. . . .

If the all the people tired of discussing the same old issues simply ignored them every time they were raised (especially since they are only ever raised by the same people), that would probably be enough to solve the current situation.

I suspect that there would then be so few people left in the discussion that it would not matter whether it was held in the BikeRacks or elsewhere.

What we need is a dead horse forum.

Granted, maybe there were a couple of posts in the moved chunk that could have remained here; but then, on the other hand, there were a couple of earlier posts that could as well have been included, but were left where they are. But, among the moved posts, there were some that even I found offending, although what was said had absolutely nothing to do with me personally.

You know what? I'm totally fed up with that kind of "us vs them" crap those posts included. Unfortunately, as long as I'm a Ranger, I'll have to keep at least half an eye on it - otherwise, I couldn't care less.

tolkienpurist wrote:

If the all the people tired of discussing the same old issues simply ignored them every time they were raised (especially since they are only ever raised by the same people), that would probably be enough to solve the current situation.

I suspect that there would then be so few people left in the discussion that it would not matter whether it was held in the BikeRacks or elsewhere.

ToshoftheWuffingas wrote:

What we need is a dead horse forum.

Exactly. Get the fuck over it already, and try to remember the original topic of this thread. Getting into each other's hair hardly qualifies as "bridge building".

Eru wrote:

I think this is the part of the charter Ax is using:

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To address personal disputes in the Bike Racks forum, and in other forums to post free of disruptions caused by the personal disputes of others.

I do agree we need to be careful about moving posts to the bikeracks. I think it needs to be pretty serious otherwise it will look bad.

Ah . . . thank you, that was helpful. Assuming that this serves as a sufficient basis for such a move, I also agree with Eru's last statement, for it seems that such moves generally result in a "wake" that may be just as disruptive as the posts that are being moved (I must admit that I'm part of this secondary "disruption" this time, but I think its worth saying at least once). I am fully in TP's camp as to the best way to deal with anything this Board has experienced to date, although I'll acknowledge that situations could arise in the future where actual removal is best -- but this is clearly just a personal opinion.

Rowanberry wrote:

Granted, maybe there were a couple of posts in the moved chunk that could have remained here; but then, on the other hand, there were a couple of earlier posts that could as well have been included, but were left where they are. But, among the moved posts, there were some that even I found offending, although what was said had absolutely nothing to do with me personally.

You know what? I'm totally fed up with that kind of "us vs them" crap those posts included. Unfortunately, as long as I'm a Ranger, I'll have to keep at least half an eye on it - otherwise, I couldn't care less.

tolkienpurist wrote:

If the all the people tired of discussing the same old issues simply ignored them every time they were raised (especially since they are only ever raised by the same people), that would probably be enough to solve the current situation.

I suspect that there would then be so few people left in the discussion that it would not matter whether it was held in the BikeRacks or elsewhere.

ToshoftheWuffingas wrote:

What we need is a dead horse forum.

Exactly. Get the fuck over it already, and try to remember the original topic of this thread. Getting into each other's hair hardly qualifies as "bridge building".

To be clear, I'm not critical of your specific decision to break it off or which posts were included or excluded -- I'm trying (although perhaps not altogether successfully) to stay at a policy level view of the issue. Eru has shown me the partial error in my prior analysis.

I don't really have any great point to make as to what would be a better way of handling perceived violations of enforceable rights under the Charter, quite honestly, given the institution-building paradigm that we have elected for ourselves. As I have already said all too often and will endeavor hereafter to cease saying (i.e., these are, hopefully, my parting words on this topic), my view of "better" was a very bare-boned institutional structure, for no matter how much process is built into a society, in the end one has to trust in the discretion of those who are wielding the levers of power at any one time and the commitment of the majority to the abstract principles that are intended to serve as restraints on those who hold the levers. I think that B77 has shown success so far at avoiding such extreme actions as banning posters or deleting their posts, and hopefully it will begin to match these successes in other areas as well.

Although I had a different vision, I accept that it was not shared by most others. In the end, I stick around because I like most of the people here quite a lot, not because an elaborate cocoon has been woven around me to protect me from those slings and arrows that might happen to come my way.

Okay, I've rewritten this about 5 times already, and it could probably use another 5 re-writes, but I think it's time to let this puppy go . . .

truehobbit wrote:

wilko, I know Jny can speak for herself much better, but I should like to point out that you are responding to a post which she has already qualified in a later post, in which she regretted her harshness.

She thinks she may have been too harsh, but she actually offered no retraction or clarification of her points (indeed, she said nothing directly to me at all, except that I was misunderstanding her in some way). It was her points that I had issues with, much more so than her tone.

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"Not bringing the board down" is not the same as "contributing" .

I'm sorry, but I think in your own definition of "contribute" it is.

Ah , I thought you meant "bringing the board down" in the sense of "bring down the government!", not "get people down". In that case, you're right.

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If you contribute something which makes the board better, then stopping doing that, makes it worse.

Not necessarily, it may leave it unchanged.

No, the opposite of "better" is "worse".
If the circuit is closed, and this corresponds to the electricity going through, then if it is opened, this can't correspond to "unchanged", it will correspond to the opposite.

I know that the opposite of better is worse , I was pointing out that there may be a state inbetween. To extend your analogy, the opposite of current flowing one way in the circuit could be current flowing the opposite (wrong) way. An open switch is the inbetween state. In the context of positive board contributions, "not posting" is not necssarily the opposite of "posting positively", I would say "posting negatively" could be too.

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I used myself as example: if I stopped posting, I would be affected, my friends would (hopefully) be affected - but there would be enough people who wouldn't even notice.

"Enough" for what?

Enough for an outsider to say "the board wasn't affected".

It's difficult for outsiders to notice the absence of something though. I wouldn't necessarily trust them ( ). And how does one "notice" what might have been, if only someone had been there?

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at what point do you normally decide to leave off?
As I said previously, personally I don't find this discussion unsettling, and the fact that a big discussion has arisen from a quite minor point you raised in an aside-fashion shows that people are interested in discussing this, so I really appreciate you coming back to the discussion, but I also notice that this is quite unusual for you, even in messageboard discussions.

You think ? I guess I normally "decide to leave off" when there is nothing left I feel is worth discussing, I don't set time limits

Axordil wrote:

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Who here was even offering any ADDITIONAL criticism on that point?

I choose my words poorly. What I should have said was, "anyone still offering criticism related to the narrow point." And everything I've seen is still related to the fact that a couple of people got offended when we actually acted in a fashion desgined NOT to offend them, and how somehow this is OUR collective fault for not being sufficiently nice to folks some of us were still pissed at SIX FUCKING MONTHS AGO.

"Everything" you've seen has been related to that? I guess you just missed all my posts in this thread then .

TolkienPurist: If the all the people tired of discussing the same old issues simply ignored them every time they were raised (especially since they are only ever raised by the same people), that would probably be enough to solve the current situation.

I've been trying to do my part.

Jean-Paul Sartre would be proud of this board.

Tosh,

Your just being existential now.

A fish.

Wilko--

Everything that is criticism.

Your discussion with Hobby is not. In fact, it's quite interesting, and I have no problems with it.


edit to add:

I am no longer angry at anyone here. I got it out of my system, and a few things helped me to put stuff in perspective. This doesn't mean I've change my mind on any of my positions, nor does it mean that I will not attempt to preserve a festive atmosphere when it comes to the upcoming August celebration through any legitimate means possible.

It just means it's not personal. People disagree over things.

Two small issues and one big one:

One: Small issue *******

About three pages ago I made the following statement:

However ... I don't want a whole new crew of malcontents to show up one week before Grand Opening and decide that this thread is where they can cuss at us ... Are my fears unfounded?

It has come to my attention that some person(s) wondered who I was talking about and concluded that I was talking about Alys.

I was not talking about Alys, but I seem not to be wholly believed, and won’t be until I say who I was talking about. So, in the interests of preventing one more misunderstanding, what I had in mind was the following.

I saw a particular incident unfold on TORC early in the year, in the Talk forum. The posters involved were unfamiliar to me and I do not now recall their names. A thread devolved into a catty discussion of B77, and all of the discussion concerned things these posters had heard about us by email. (I did file a complaint with the mods about this, btw. It happened before the bannings.)

In the light of this post by Oreo, which was one of the first posts he made here ...

”During that awful time I was being fed a line of crap from some people that stretched a mile long... It was all complete bullshit that I took (at the time) as canon law. I felt compelled to react and protect a notion that was built on lies and deceit. “

... I have some free-floating concern that we continue to be targets of an email/PM/YM/YIM disinformation campaign and that unexpected people might appear at an inopportune time to disrupt our board, believing, as Oreo did, that they are doing the world a favor.

Alys has consistently said that she will not post here and I never thought that she or her friends would be the ones to do this.

Two: Small issue *******

The following did not happen in this thread, but it is related to this and, again, in the interests of preventing another misunderstanding I would like to clarify something.

On July 22 I posted the following in Ax’s Symposium thread on Freedom and Dignity: http://www.phpbber.com/phpbb/viewtopic. ... d77#105198

Quoting Ethel
Dindraug, provide a link to where you were slandered at TORC.

Ethel, this is not a reasonable request on a board where everything that pongs a bit is deleted by mods who run about totally unsupervised. The absence of 'proof' in this case would not prove anything.

What you have been doing here really hurts me.

This, on the other hand, should be enough for Din to drop the issue, at least until tempers cool. And if the issue is taken up again, it has to be between Din and Alys and Angel. NOT US.

It has come to my attention that some person(s) interpreted this as an accusation that Alys had deliberately gone into old TORC threads and deleted anything she might have said to Din in order to make herself look good. I am understood to have accused Alys of a “cover up.”

This was not at all what I meant, not by implication, not with a wink ... it took me completely by surprise to see this interpretation. I referred only to the principle of the request. If a slanderous comment had been made on TORC, it would have been a violation of the TOS and likely edited out by any passing mod. What constitutes a comment worthy of deletion is up to the individual mods - no one supervises this unless it is questioned - and some mods are more sensitive than others, so that even if we could see that something had been edited we would have no way of knowing how severe it had been.

In my opinion Ethel requested something of Din that could not be satisfied in principle, and she did make this request four times before I expressed my opinion about it.

My comment was not intended to be a hint to Din as to how he might defend himself nor as an accusation against Alys. It was intended purely as an observation about the feasibility of what Ethel was asking.

Three: Big issue *******

I have been critical of the direction this thread has taken, and I’ve been wanting to post something here about the direction in which we should think about bridge-building (from my own wholly individual perspective, which should not be confused with the perspective of God). But, you know, there’s 24 hours in the day and I can’t sit here for all of them. I wish very much that I had spent time doing this instead of attempting to satisfy Wilko’s demand that we vivisect my posts in the Bike Racks.

When you build a bridge the first thing you do is take a true measurement of the distance to be spanned, and then you look for a solid place to build the first support on both sides.

Your goal is to identify the strongest ground, not the weakest. The weakest is only relevant insofar as it is not the strongest and can therefore be rejected as a good place to start build.

Since ~page 7, much of this thread had been devoted to an analysis of our flaws and weaknesses ... what sorts of things might TORCers find offensive and how can we eliminate them. In my opinion this only serves to point out the places where we may never be able to build a bridge, and that should not be the purpose of the thread in my opinion.

If there are truly individuals on TORC who need to hear “I’m sorry for leaving when I was told to get lost,” then what that says to me is that the ground those people are standing on is too weak for me to attach a bridge to it. It does not say to me that I need to find ground as weak as theirs so that we are equally disadvantaged by our respective personality defects.

What are the questions we should be asking? Where is our strong ground? Where, on our side of the span, can we safely anchor the bridge?

Well, I think there are many places, but for now I want to mention just one thing, for you to consider how we might offer this to those who felt excluded before.

• Members here really get an opportunity to develop themselves and their ideas and to shape every aspect of this board.

I hope that Imp won’t mind me using her as an example, but I remember that when I first joined she was already here and expressed on a few occasions uncertainty about her feelings of ‘belonging’ here. Since then Imp has not only served on the Charter committee but took a whole important Article (ToE) and directed its creation all by herself, from discussion to ballot to vote. How could she not now feel herself to be a shaper of this board, every bit as important as the original members? She is a key member of our community, and this belonging transcends ... no, it runs deeper than any transitory issue that gets discussed.

I’ve seen the same thing happening with others - posters who were originally reticent because they weren’t confident about their standing (e.g. wondering who might have opposed their invitation) but have since served on committees, led discussions, become Rangers and influenced policy ...

... one thing I noticed with the successive charter committees was that there is not one single member who did not contribute something identifiable, something for which they will be remembered. And that was not 5% of the members serving there, just by the way, it was nearly 20%. And as more and more people become Rangers there will be more and more of us who will be able to point to something on this board and say, “I created that. It’s there because of me.”

Frankly, I marvel that we have been able to evolve this way. It fills me with joy. There are hardly any communities anywhere that accept input from everyone much less seek and appreciate it as we do here. This, in my opinion, is a huge selling point because there is no one on earth who does not want to be heard and appreciated for their input. There is no one who prefers to have their enthusiasm suppressed or their voice silenced or their contribution ignored.

I feel that a boundary has been drawn around our discussion of bridge-building and that it is the wrong boundary. I do not agree to discuss this only in terms of what we might have done wrong in the past, and how to apologize for it, and how to avoid it in the future. These things are not unimportant but they are secondary, in my view, and they also drain our self-esteem and make it harder for us to think positively and proactively.

I very much prefer to discuss this issue in terms of the good things that people will find when they get here, and how those things might be used as tools of healing. I utterly reject any suggestion that we are patting ourselves on the back or being uppity or putting someone else down when we approach the issue this way. There is no group in the world that does not seek to present its best face to the world, and no reason why we should be ashamed of doing it that way too.

Jn

This post has been edited several times to correct url mistakes which I tend to make rather often. Plus one typo and two omitted words.

Ask any engineer,

The only way to build a bridge is to first establish truss (trust) on both sides of the expanse. Until you have that, the bridge will not stand.

In order to gain trust, you must first forgive all that has happened before. Do not forget it, but do not speak of it again. If it is forgiven, it is in the past only to be spoken of if necessary for historical accuracy, not for proof or leverage or desire to remind people.

And it has to happen on all sides, not just one.

At the risk of being repetitive: forgiveness comes only when people let go of the what-ifs and might-have-beens and deal with what is HERE. That's why it's so hard sometimes--it's really a kind of growing up, of abandoning the secret fantasies where everything is OK again, or the darker ones where revenge is taken and the bad guys get theirs.

It's also the only way to stay sane in the long run.

So what bases for trust do already exist at this time? I would like very much to hear from people what they have been successful in building so far, and how they think that success might be expanded.

Jn

A little thing I've learned about forgiveness is that sometimes the actions should come before the fact.

When I know I must forgive someone, for my own health or so we can work together or because people are supposed to forgive people, it has helped me if I behave as if I've forgiven the person—even before I know, in my heart, that I've really done so. What seemed difficult ends up being easy, if my life already reflects forgiveness.

In other words, maybe we should stop waiting to feel as happy and loving toward every single person at TORC as we do toward our friends there, and simply behave as if everyone is welcome here, no matter who they are or where they come from. Some of us already genuinely feel that way. The rest of us can help by behaving as if we do. In time, if I'm any judge, we actually will feel that way, if we're just willing to let go.

One of the b77 traits I am happiest about is our ability to move on from anger to positive action. I know we can do this. We can build the damn bridge.

Fake it 'til you make it, eh, Prim?

My pastor says that ALL the time.

Good advice, friend.


I still think that time is our best ally here. It really struck me when Ax said something about Those Posts in Question being made SIX FREAKIN' MONTHS AGO (I paraphrase ) how far we have come in six months. There was a LOT of pain and anger six months ago, and seemingly impassable chasms between people.

Most of that has quieted down. It really has. And some of this more recent angst derives from the fact that some people really just saw some of these words for the first time a few weeks ago. It hasn't BEEN six freakin' months for them.

Six Freakin' Months from NOW, I feel we will have bridges all over the place, and will be arguing about... I dunno... how to paint them, or something. 'Cause we HAVE to argue about something.

I like the paint they use on the Golden Gate Bridge.

I don't.