The topic of comment moderation has come up in a recent comment thread and we here at the Barn have been having moonlit sessions to discuss how we feel about the comments we have gathered so far.
The consensus we have arrived at is that the take-down of comments can be instructive to some readers of the blog (and we want to make clear that we are engaging trolls to further our agenda, and not to feed them). Until the volume of troll-type comments becomes overwhelming, we will continue to let certain distasteful comments stand (with take-downs from us, natch), with a few exceptions that may or may not receive 'special' treatment from us. Namely:
(1)Victim-blaming will not be tolerated,This is a blog, not a free-for-all. Don't come to us whining about your right to free speech if your comment is deleted for the above, or other reasons. Hateful and/or demeaning speech is not entitled to expression on this platform.
(2) There are no circumstances under which exploitation/oppression of any form is OK. Not even when it's done to a majority group. Do not try and explain why *this* time is different,
(3) If you're here to tell us that we live in a post-feminist/racist/ablist/enter-oppression-here world, you will suffer the wrath of a deleted comment and the collective hooves, nails, beaks and teeth of all the animals here at the Barn,
(4) Mansplaining stuff to our poor femininny minds, especially to suggest that our emotions are either misplaced, or should be quelled, will not be well received.
We basically recognise and respect that all contributors of the Barn have their personal threshold of tolerance and refined rules of engagement. Ultimately, the individual writer has every right to exercise executive power to respond and/or moderate how ever zie deems fit for hir respective posts.
Please let us know in comments how you feel about this stand and what you would like us to do differently (if there are things you would like us to do differently). We aim to make this an enjoyable place where sparkling discussions can occur and consciousnesses can be raised, and you, dear readers and commenters, are the only way through which we can achieve that. So your input truly is valuable to us.
Posts
Linked under 'Media'. Good points. Btw, even in the absence of notification here - due to time constraints - your posts of relevance will still be linked. Thanks Barnyard.
ReplyDeleteI totally support this and any other action along the same lines you choose to take. Once again, thanks for being a bastion of good sense.
ReplyDelete"Many women choose to remain single because they do not see the need or the urgency to get married."
ReplyDeleteMy take on this is that these women have forgotten that procreation is the only guarantee of survival of the human species. Just ask about the Dodo bird. To shirk this sacred duty, is to give up on life. As for the "urgency", are they not aware of the biological clock? But it's better that these women don't marry, don't have children - they will only make life miserable for the husband and the children of this world, and destroy happiness on earth.
Chloe Ask -
ReplyDeleteIgnoring the hyperbolic conflation of mother and wife (there're a lot of single mothers, unmarried parents, and surrogates around, TYVM), or conflation of "happiness on earth" with the personal quality of life of husbands and children without the scant indication of an interest in the happiness of women concerned (because women's happiness only depends on the happiness of their biological associates, right?), or suggestion that the fate of humanity lies solely in the hands of women (have you ever heard of, for example, the world-wide war on girls?), I highly doubt "these women" are unaware of the biological potential of their piping.
Instead, I like to believe that they don't care very much that the continuation of humanity is necessarily their responsibility--my parents certainly didn't give birth to me to avert the fate of the fucking Dodo, and I like to believe that people who have the means to choose their biological destiny, be it in procreation or not, are happier people. That happier people make for better parents, aunties, uncles, neighbours, teachers, friends, and colleagues for kids.
It's well and good that you take it upon your important, grand self to perpetuate your species by being a birthing machine--and what a unique snowflake you are to have unfortunately graced our page, born from what I thought was the fictional dystopia of "A Handmaid's Tale"--but please don't tell us (men, women and in-between) what we should or shouldn't do with our reproductive organs. Here on the farm, we're not forced to mate to maintain livestock, and we'll like to keep it that way.
When we all die off, we'll happily commiserate with our dodo friends over the impossibility of human evolution to weed out the rare specimens of stupid, internet trolls.
BDP
Also, your comment belongs at A Nation of WTF, not here.
ReplyDeleteContinue to be irrelevant here for bye-bye-comments.
BDP