NOTE: I will be dealing with comments a bit differently here on WordPress; see the comments policy link at the top of the page.
Due in part to the recent massive derailing of, and general unpleasantness within, a certain discussion thread here, I will be enforcing my comments policy more stringently, especially when it comes to personal attacks, and off-topic posts that I find tiresome and/or disruptive.Also, I’m introducing short-term bans for people who are breaking the rules but don’t deserve forever bans. Blogger doesn’t let me literally ban people; I just delete their comments. If I’ve “banned” someone and they keep posting, just ignore them. I will delete their comments when I see them.
I’ve updated my comments policy page to reflect this. If you’re new here, read it.
>Ginmar verbally attacks anyone that disagrees with her lashing out with personal attacks and foul language. Maybe it's her PTSD that brings on those antisocial qualities. (2) irritability or outbursts of angerKnowing that she has PTSD makes me have some empathy for her, but it is still right to call her on her bad behavior. I didn't see anyone making excuses for the guy who beat his wife, just an understanding that he may have a disorder. I don't believe anyone said he should get off on the charges (except for the mra's who are expected to say that sort of a thing) people were just speculating on why he would do such a thing. Kind of like when a mother drowns her new born I would speculate that she was suffering from post-partum psychosis. It was not a one off passionate rant. When I posted that although I was wealthy I was not immune to personal pain, having lost a child to cancer etc, she called me a privileged bastard. (I in turn shut down the conversation in a conversation ender way without personally insulting her). I've seen this many times since she's been posting here. Everyone is having a good time mocking the misogynists then Ginmar shows up like the big dog. The site is simply not funny when she's around, in fact it's down right mean. (and that includes her internet friends she brings with her)It takes no guts to call someone a asshole idiot fucking asshole bastard on the internet, and anyone who thinks it does needs to spend more time off the internet.
>AvicennaWell actually not only have I talked to combat PTSD sufferers but my current partner is one. Of quite a few years now. Thats where ginmar was complaining about the condescending bit in your posts I think. Its one thing to talk about them in the abstract and quite another to live with one over time and deal with what they do and how they feel. (Don't know your background but your posts don;t give me any indication that you have long term been intimately involved) And for the record he has never beaten me, physically threatened me although he did get into trouble with the law once in a pub fight where he thought his life was under threat and he reacted as if he was in a combat situation due to his conditioning in the army and his PTSD. He caused a great deal of harm to many people in a short term but the CCTV fortunately was on and when it went to court it showed he was reacting not initiating like the prick in the courtroom scenario – read the criteria again – Violence is not a symptom. If its pre-existing it will be exacerbated thats all. My partner now holds down a job most years although not usually more than a year at time he cracks under pressure an reverts to what will keep him safe which is not always what society thinks is appropriate. But still earns good money, works hard and has managed to maintain a good relationshiop for some time. Things get better each year but he will never stop waking up in the middle of the night, sleepwalking and I expect I will still wake up finding myself being treated for some shocking injury or being warned that the bad guys are approaching and I need to be careful while he is dead asleep and cannot remember the details the next day. Except for the dream where he wipes blood off my face (which is about someone else completely he cared about once) Kave – Are you saying Ginmar has upset your party mocking MRAs – seems shes probly been the victim of some (like your brother maybe?)Scuse me but if you just want to mock MRA people and have real people banished the ok I misunderstood all those posts where you were upset your brother had been sucked in by the MRA movement. I thought you were actually cranky with them. My bad
>Did we seriously just derail the thread about derailing?
>haloinshreds… I speak from personal experience as well, both as a sufferer and as someone who has worked with other sufferers. Not all sufferers have this issue. I did say that it was "more common", not universal.
>HA!I leave your blog for a few days and look what happens Dave!Pay me money to stick around…Or give me a free t-shirt.
>@Sandy Did we seriously just derail the thread about derailing?And it was Magnificent.
>Haloinshreds truly has no sense of irony. But yes, this is an illustration of why David is doing the right thing by moderating more strongly; we apparently can no longer hold a discussion about anything without someone injecting a four-post roadblock about something irrelevant.
>I do not think ginmar's comments on the other thread were a derail(I will join in the ironic derailing now 😉 ) . The issue of PTSD had been brought up by someone else in regards to the incident, ginmar responded and disagreed. The statements made about PTSD and crime and mental illness and crime in general were problematic and did deserve response. I for one agree with ginmar on the PTSD issue and I did not think she was the one at issue here until someone else suggested it (I really thought it was THASF's long and mangled attempts at philosophy). Does ginmar say contentious (or even rude) things sometimes? Yes, but she is generally on topic and the personal attacks she makes are on the milder side for these comment threads.
>I agree with DSC. THASF was derailing much more than ginmar.
>To clarify: I was bothered both by THASF's endless derailing comments on his pet philosophical issues, etc and by ginmar's nasty personal attacks on and misrepresentations of several commenters here. This post is a fair warning of sorts that I will shut that sort of thing down more quickly and aggressively in the future. Neither commenter has been banned. They're both welcome to post, so long as they don't repeat their more obnoxious behavior in the thread in question.
>I will also modestly suggest WordPress. You really do need to address the commenting problems (it's taken several tries for me to post this).I don't think locking long threads, as someone suggested, is a good solution–not so much because of the possibility of long threads not being obnoxiously derailed as because locking a thread tends to cause the argument to spill out into surrounding threads that might be having good conversations.
>Yeah, I think THASF and ginmar were both out of line. As soon as THASF starting talking about voluntary self-sterilization for people with genetic diseases I decided there was no way I would ever engage him on this forum. I have a genetic disease. It's making me utterly miserable at the moment and you know what? I still plan on someday having kids because there is more to my gene pool than hereditary spherocytosis and damn it, I am more than my diagnosis. And ginmar clearly has some anger problems.
>The issues that inspired the post were transparent to people who follow the blog; how is it a derail to discuss them?
>I hate to derail an already derailed thread but hey, all the cool kids are doing it, so…My father is a Vietnam combat veteran with severe PTSD and traumatic brain injury. He was horribly abusive to my mother – they were together for fifteen years before she finally divorced him and ran for her life, leaving me and my brother behind. She eventually got us back when we were teens. My dad fought for custody because he knew it would hurt her not because he was a more fit parent (he wasn't), and to this day still in his mind has her figured for a "bad mother" despite my objections that she was actually an excellent mother and that most of their supposed mutual problems stemmed from HIM being fucked up for forty years.I also have a great uncle who is a combat veteran from WW2 – he never married or had relationships with women that I know of; he was missing a limb and I suppose presumed that having a missing limb and PTSD made him an unfit candidate for marriage. He has been single and childless his whole life; he's one of my favorite people ever.So, I have lived with combat PTSD veterans most of my life.I can say, definitively, that the organized, directed, deliberate abuse of domestic violence is absolutely and unequivocably NOT linked to PTSD.Many people with PTSD manage to figure out how not to deliberately hurt, maim, or kill their partners. Many people who perpetuate domestic violence do not have any history of trauma let alone PTSD.If you want to understand the dynamics of an abuser's mind, the best resource I've seen is Lundy Bancroft's book "Why Does He Do That." I have seen plenty of DV – and none of it was because of a startle reaction, the result of feeling in danger, the result of flashbacks, or having been generally irritable or angry.Domestic abusers abuse beause of an overwhelming need to be in control, and an overwhelming bordering-on-sociopathic sense of narcissism and entitlement. Gonzalez is a shining example – notice how he wasn't in any danger, no one startled him, and his attack was sistained, directed, and premeditated. A well-deserved shot in his wallet to pay for his own damned kids isn't a PTSD trigger and anyone who says so has a screw loose.Anyway, my two cents as a person who has observed PTSD my entire life. BTW my dad went on to remarry when I was fifteen – he chose a woman who would absolutely not tolerate his shit, and he has never laid a hand on her despite still having PTSD.(Three different accounts, two different computers, and about 80 tries to post this)
>It was not a one off passionate rant. When I posted that although I was wealthy I was not immune to personal pain, having lost a child to cancer etc, she called me a privileged bastard.You are. Don't try to lay that on ginmar. When confronted about your unexamined class privilege you proceeded to accuse people of class envy. In that sense, you're not much better than MRAs, except with regard to class rather than gender.
>Even though he banned me for a day (I was pretty much asking for it), I have to respect Dave for showing good judgment and fairness. He warned the people who should have been warned instead of siding with the 'regulars' against the 'outsiders', and he called ginmar out on her behavior, where a typical white-knight would have made excuses and tried to appease her. Those things already lift this place several notches higher than the typical feminist blog, in my book. So… thumbs up, I guess. Bringeth down the hammer of justice on the wicked, that it shall beateth sense into their heads. 🙂
>It's a derail to talk about the topic that caused the derail because the derail was unwanted and this entire post is about trying to prevent it. In other words, it's a derail because that's not the topic and if we wanted a topic about PTSD, David would post about it. Besides, it's common courtesy to continue the conversation in the thread where it started, so that other people in other places can discuss other things.
>@anthonybsusanWell, I didn't only bring up voluntary sterilization, but in-utero gene therapy and prosthetic augmentation or supplementation of existing organs and systems in the body. In-utero gene therapy is a hypothetical means of fixing genetic disorders while the subject in question is still in their mother's womb. You, for example, would not have been born with a disorder at all had this method been used. Although I'm not too sure of the details, I don't even think that a subject that has had damaged or defective genes replaced in the womb can pass on their parents' illness to their own offspring.You know what? This just gave me an idea for a horror novel. Scientists start using in-utero gene therapy on humans, but they start showing bizarre defects after a few generations… ugh. It's probably already been done. Besides, I hate books that have a "science is bad" Aesop attached to them, especially because of the sheer hypocrisy that entails; like Avatar having a "back to nature" message despite being the poster child for 3D movies and requiring tons of newfangled gear to watch, or like any of the millions of environmentalist/neo-luddite books that relied on the printing press or electronic media to be conveyed to their audience.
>*shrug* I don't agree with your points, cboye, and am not particularly appreciative of the suggestion that people who don't agree with you lack common courtesy rather than, say, having a different perspective. Anyway, if Dave wants the conversation to stop, he can stop it.In the meanwhile, I really am genuinely interested in how Ginmar would ideally like people to respond.
>THASF:It has really, really been done.
>Rachel: You know perfectly well that I didn't mention anything about whether people agreed with me or not. In fact I've expressed no opinion about PTSD except that it's off-topic.I said that it's common courtesy to continue the conversation in the thread where it began.What you and others are trying to do is drag the drag the derailed issue into other threads, like this one, thus smothering attempts to have conversations about something else.
>@Rachel SwirskyThat's the thing about fiction these days. Originality is almost impossible to achieve; at best, you'll manage a passable pastiche of existing themes. You know what I think? I think our species has reached a certain degree of intellectual saturation due to the sheer size of our population.When I try and think of something that somebody has never done that's relatively easy to do on dare, I think "downing a shot of Jagermeister while surfing a ten-foot wave", and then I realize that someone's probably already done it. Everything that you can possibly imagine has already been done. Books about mega-structures suspended in space? Check. Books about incomprehensible alien societies? Check. Books where a dogmatic race of extra-terrestrials wants to wipe out mankind? Check. Books about rogue nanotech or robots gone wrong? Check and check. It's gotten to the point where originality means making like Nigel Tomm and writing a book full of complete and utter nonsense.
>trip said"you are. Don't try to lay that on ginmar. When confronted about your unexamined class privilege you proceeded to accuse people of class envy. In that sense, you're not much better than MRAs, except with regard to class rather than gender."Excuse me? When someone writes a post about how their class did not stop them from receiving one of life's greatest pains, losing a child: the appropriate response is not to call them a privileged bastard etc. Pointing out class envy is a very small response (and half hearted) to a rather hateful comment void of human empathy. How do you KNOW I have unexamined class privilege? Calling someone a bastard etc is not asking about anything, or do you just assume?
>I'm not sure dredging all this up again is going to be helpful for anyone.
>DavidNow this is funny. 😉