Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Dear EnMasse: Fuck Off

Note: My response to the harpercons' voter suppression sleaze is going to occupy my work in the 3-d world. It is too important for the scatter-shot ranting and overall uselessness that is blogging.

POST

I left a message at my old discussion board EnMasse. Discussion boards had been a big part of my political development and I thought I should make a definitive statement about my exiting from the last one I was participating at. I said I was leaving because there didn't seem to be any point to staying at a place where the options were to 1) Agree with everyone that capitalism, patriarchy, war, ecocide, etc., were bad, and 2) Disagree on something, whereupon you would be attacked, insulted and misinterpreted by clueless dolts like "Agent Smith."

I suppose that if you want to INSIST on seeing things that aren't there, you could have seen my statement about my leaving and the reasons for it as being a cry for sympathy and support. But there's a novel concept going around. READ WHAT THE WRITER ACTUALLY SAYS!

Of course I was interested in whatever responses my statement received. So, yeah, I looked. I'm pretty much done with the board though, so I'm not replying there. Two posters have gotten it into their heads that I'm asking for the board to play sad violins over my leaving. And, given all the tragedies in the world today, perhaps I'm asking too much for something as trivial as my decision to withdraw from the board.

Jesus fucking Christ. This is why I decided to have my own blog. I can vent however I want without some fucking moderator popping in and asking everyone to tone it down. I can simply delete posts that insist on completely missing the point or attacking arguments that weren't made.

Perhaps it was a cry for sympathy. It wasn't, but maybe it could be seen that way. But you know what? It's a pretty serious charge to say that I was comparing my sufferings at the hands of "Agent Smith" and the asshole "RonB" to the sufferings of the Afghans at the hands of NATO imperialists. And before you unload on me for having done so, perhaps look to see whether I did, in fact, do so.

It also stands to reason that no one on EnMasse can now tell anyone about their weekend plans or any such trivialities, forever more, because what do their silly North American lives have to do with the Third World War between capitalism and humanity?

The whole point that I was trying to make in the last thread that I participated in and which I alluded to in my final post was that we have to learn to disagree like adults. We shouldn't turn on long-time comrades and insult them the same way we do right-wing trolls, just because we disagree. Unfortunately, neither the participants, nor the moderators were able to grasp this elementary point, rendering the whole project utterly futile.

Just to be clear. This post here is, like my post at EnMasse, NOT a cry for anyone to break out the sad violins over my agony. This is me taking advantage of my blog to vent about how EnMasse compunded error upon error with regards to my statements. If you've read this far, you obviously had some time to kill. Well, you killed it. And it is what it is.Link

4 comments:

900ft Jesus said...

you make some good points. We criticize the right for such practices and can hardly keep up that criticism if we engage in those tactics ourselves. Even more important, from my point of view is that shutting down decent debate tends to close us off to considering other POVs or of even understanding other arguments – which weakens our ability to debate. It also discourages us from examining our own beliefs, something we should do regularly as we learn and change in a world that’s constantly changing.

thwap said...

900ft Jesus,

Thanks for that. This was entirely self-indulgent, but that's what blogging is almost all about, and there was something real at the heart of it all.

I didn't so leave just because I got pissed-off. There's a couple of posters there who piss me off frequently. It was the sad way a disagreement descended into vituperation between should-be allies.

And it never let up. It never corrected itself.

I'm prepared to agonize to try to mend fences and work together in my real life, but posting at that dying board seemed like an obligation some days and I just couldn't see the point of it after that.

susansmith said...

Thwap, just read your post. as I was reading this old blog post, it brought a smile and many nods. Thanks for articulating what I sometimes think when "participating" on chat boards with people who I think are somewhat on the same team. We don't have to agree, not everything needs or should be an argument, and being nasty is so not worth it in the virtual world. take care, J

thwap said...

Thanks Jan.

It looks like the board has gone down. I put a lot of work into some of those arguments/posts. I'd hate to think they're lost forever.