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Barbelith's "Universal Declaration of Member Rights"?

00:19 / 31.08.06

Yes, I agree - maybe there needs to be a big discussion on the conflict between the Right to freedom of speech, and the Right to freedom from being offended/intimidated/harrassed. Unless a line has been drawn already, or has evolved already - that may be a delicate thing that further rules and discussion could upset.

I'm not seeing this as a UN-type declaration any more. Maybe we only need three statements, left deliberately vague. Let's say one Right, one Responsibility, and one procedure for when it all goes wrong (which since the current method is kinda trial-by-peers, could be expressed as a responsibility):

1. Right to freely express/discuss ideas and opinions.

2. Responsibility to be considered, measured and thoughtful
OR
2. Responsibility to not be stupid, offensive, rash or crass (cause I like those words).

3?. Responsibility to hold other members to account on no.2
(in a balanced and objective fashion / commensurate with the ethos of the board)
OR
3?. Outline of procedures for dealing with shit
(approaches on an incident (within thread) / approaches on persistence (taken to P&H) )

Maybe no. 2 should include something about taking due consideration of the internet's difficulty in communicating tone and hidden meaning.

00:39 / 31.08.06

That's because even though most of us are clear about what constitutes stupid offensive shit, currently we do not have a direct example of what that is and so we cannot refer to it when we wish to ban someone.

If we were to define it then a lot of our problems would go away. If we were to make a basic list of stupid offensive shit then we would, as the saying goes, have a leg to stand on.

Shall we make a list?

I think as an exercise it might be interesting.

17:56 / 04.11.06

Shall we make a list?
I think as an exercise it might be interesting.

it could be.
it might open a big fat can of whup-worms all over the board, though. i mean,to list somethig you have write it.
we can often get round that with asterisking, but maybe not always.
then there's a dicussion needed around scale, context and magnitude that would necessitate examples, itself inspiring back and forth as we figured out how they made us feel.
if we can manage to keep all that happy i guess we might get something we could use.

then once we have a list, i reckon we will be sure to have missed something. if we have we might start adding things to it as we go, to make sure no transgression is unfairly given special treatment.
i feel we could quickly end upon animal farm, painting the barn door everytime we need to ban someone for an unlisted behaviour.

i'm not against the idea.
i do think it could end in tears, though.
curently i feel it would.

Jenna Elfman's Hollywood Haus
(prev. West Baltimore Hausing Project)

00:27 / 05.11.06

It's a bad idea, it was a bad idea when proposed n years ago, it's a bad idea now, this thread has only been bumped because I posted to it by mistake, and we should really just let it go, I think.

HCE
(prev. brb)

00:36 / 05.11.06

But. But in Animal Farm, the idea was not to paint new rules to make it easier to get rid of people when new or worse forms of asshattery emerged. The idea was to repaint the existing, perfectly fine rules, so that blatant exceptions could be made for the asshattery of the pigs, or to punish behaviors that weren't actually harmful.

If we ended up on Animal Farm, we'd be re-writing the rules to keep existing members from being banned for making anti-semitic remarks or changing their usernames to sensitive fuckface, for example. Do you really see that happening? It's hard enough already to get anybody banned; I don't really see any effort to make it even harder being successful.

Maybe I'm misremembering the story?