--- In [email protected], Bronte Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Bronte wrote: > > I agree with Edg on this one. Rick, if > you start to discriminate between "blatant, abrasive personal > attacks" and milder personal insults, you really do step into the > role of a judge. People are likely to get upset with you, comparing > their remark, which you ruled against, to someone else's remark, > which they feel was worse but which you allowed. Perhaps for this to > work it has to be entirely clear-cut: personal derogatory remarks of > any kind not being acceptable. > > Judy wrote: > > How is this any different from the no-negativity > rule you found so oppressive in the TMO, Bronte? > > > I think it's quite different, Judy. I'm thinking of an analogy being when our founding fathers met in forums, discussing whether to break away from England or not, whether England had the colonies' good intentions at heart or not, what democracy would look like, all sorts of good stuff. Those guys battled like crazy in those little meetings. But they were always civil. Plenty of negative voices! But they were directed at ideas and proposals and governments, not at the people expressing the ideas, making the proposals or supporting the policies. I'm sure some of them hated each other -- and anger was part of it -- but their insistence on not getting personal in the meetings keep the discussion headed in a productive direction instead of getting bogged down in petty animosities.
Do you have a reference for this? Was a transcript made of the meetings? > In the TMO, no such debate or discussion is allowed. We were told to accept the brilliance of our leaders without questioning. MMH told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and anyone who questioned that was considered a traitor. We were not only not permitted to speak negatively about each other, we could not speak a negative position on the TM dogmas. We were not free to THINK independently and have it be known, without losing our membership in the group (and therefore our passport to enlightenment!). We could not SPEAK critically of anything we were told without losing such passport and membership. > > Isn't that fundamentally different from a model for FFL where people can think whatever they like, speak whatever they like, as long as they don't aim a verbal missile at another person? Different in one way, the same in another way. The part that's the same is the "as long as they don't..." part. In the TMO, you were free to think independently as long as you didn't express your thoughts. The new rule here is just a subset of that rule. The real problem with trying to make it "absolutely clear-cut" is that a great deal of the time it is NOT absolutely clear-cut, not by a long shot. Human interaction simply can't be fit into a rigid box like that. I don't believe for a second that if we had transcripts of the founders' meetings, we wouldn't see any number of speeches that expressed strong personal hostility toward others, not just toward their ideas. You can easily be "civil" and still put people down mercilessly if you have some skill with words. In any case, this is a social forum as well as one for discussing ideas. The founders' meetings didn't have any kind of social function; they were all focused on accomplishing a major task. In contrast, everyone here has their own reasons for participating. Long-running social functions are always a mixture of niceness and nastiness, fun and fights. You can't get a bunch of people this size together and expect that they're all going to like each other. If you insist all negativity be suppressed, the social aspect becomes unbalanced and artificial, at least in part because the negativity can never really be eliminated, it will just come out sideways. > People can go on hating each other and fighting among themselves on their own turf if they like. No lack of freedom there. They're going to go on hating each other on *this* turf as well. What you want them to do is to pretend that they don't. That's just going to make them figure out ways to express their hatred in ways that aren't overt enough to be sanctioned. > But if attack is agreed on as acceptable in this public place, not only do the people who were aimed at get hurt here, so do the "innocent bystanders." No, I'm sorry, unless they involve themselves in somebody else's fight, the innocent bystanders are perfectly safe. > When you can't open 5 posts on FFL without 3 of them being poisonous, most people give up trying to find something useful. It's depressing for a lot of folks to have to watch other folks sniping at each other. They certainly don't want to participate in such discussions, so they leave. Well, but that's their *choice*. They don't have the right to demand that a long-established forum be censored to suit their particular delicacy of feeling. If watching other folks sniping depresses you, DON'T WATCH. Either skip past those posts or find a forum that suits you better.
