With this post, I am breaking three of my personal rules I have for this blog. The first is that I do not call out commenters in the post as I think it is unfair to use the larger megaphone of the front page to make a point.
The second rule is that in dealing with this fight in the comments, rather than explain and then take action as I would normally do, I'm taking a hockey referee approach. A hockey ref only moves in to deal with the fight after the two players are on the ice and they can essentially lie on them. Why? Because you don’t want to hold one while the other person gets to take a free shot. Normally, I wouldn't block and then explain, but I was away from the computer when the fight broke out between bob ‘I’m never going to win any personality contests’ mcmanus and sapient. I asked other front pagers to block the two ip addresses until I could get in front of a computer and write this.
bob mcmanus, if you continue to write things like this
Okay, sapient and the little girls, all frightened and quivery, all putting on the calm reasoned more in sorrow bullshit, are asking you to protect them from the Big Bad Bob
and this
If you think you deserve power and responsibility, then get the shit done. Failure and performative victimhood does not get my empathy or respect…..Generic fucking “you" there as usual, no wait, I meant you JanieM, not Russell, you and that insane repulsive LGM crew, who have just enraged me again
you are going to be banned.
There are a number of points I could make concerning your arguments and rhetoric, but as this is a larger megaphone, I'll simply say that you have been blocked for a week. If you come back and continue to make the comment section inhospitable for women with misogynist comments, you will be permanently banned. There is a hair trigger here. If you engage in some tortured reasoning about how the women are not ‘tough’ enough to handle your commentary, you’ll get booted. If you talk about how I'm acting like a knight on a white horse and claim I can't admit the contradiction of this action and allowing free discourse, you'll get banned. Not because I don't see a contradiction, it's because by your actions, you have no standing to make that argument.
sapient was blocked as well, under the hockey referee approach. That block has been removed, however, it would have been better if a letter had been sent to the kitty rather than arguing for a ban in the comments. I realize that the assumption is that everyone sees what goes on in the comments, but sometimes, things go by too quickly. So making a claim that X deserves banning requires that people have seen X. If you really think something deserves that, I think you should take the extra time to report it directly rather than toss it in the comments.
The third rule I am breaking is that I am also closing the comments to the post preemptively, because I'd prefer not to have an immediate post-mortem on all this. This is not because I can't handle questioning, it is because I don't have time to reply thoughtfully to any questions that may arise. My general rule is that I don't want to stop anyone talking about anything. However, closing the comments is a way of signalling that I think it would be best if the other commenters not dissect what has happened here, though that is a suggestion rather than an order.
I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
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