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 ...
â€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.â€
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.â€
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.