Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff: Feb 2016 You Can Do It Edition

Response to

Trolling (as distinct from harassment, which confusingly is often called that) is a silencing tactic. It works by crowding out good-faith communication, and by making good-faith communicators waste enormous amounts of time and energy engaging with a person who isn’t actually listening. It works because the total energy that trolls have available to them for trolling is greater than the total energy that good-faith people have available for response. Trolling is Gresham’s Law of communication, if you will.

My view is somewhat similar, I think. I define trolling based on what people call trolls, and that has drifted about a bit over the years. To me trolling seems to be “the perception of a social disruption felt as deliberate and for the purposes of disruption”. That covers the trolls that you are talking about and people who are actually earnest but either their manner or topic is causing a disruption.

There are people called trolls who do ask questions in good faith, but they are a smaller percentage of the total. Think genuine communists that might want to have a discussion at an academic level with a typical USA conservative republican. Or conversely a person with pretty crappy views on sex and gender to honestly does not know that their views are crappy in a space like this. The disruption exists and the internet gives people reasons to doubt their sincerity, but I still think they should be part of the definition.

I tend to work with a troll, actually pretend they are serious in order to understand how they do what they do. If a troll is there by deliberate and deceptive means then it tends to come out in the interaction, It ends up showing what they are and that is good practice for learning how attack, defense, deception and obfuscation works online. But I have the stamina for that for reasons that in part have to do with privilege. I can do it because I can choose to put up with it most of the time and that should be taken into account in any potential website. Should there be rules for troll engagement/practice? Rules for when a troll is to be ejected? I think so.

Anything that can be done to make this equation more balanced is inherently a social justice focused activity because it prevents soft voices from being crowded out by bad-faith communication. If you teach people to recognise trolling and enable them to respond to it in a brief and dismissive manner rather than expending enormous energy on it, then you have empowered their voices.

The brief and dismissive rejection will be something to cover and [group/individual level troll tactics] will have to be a subject. [Elevating the voiceless and marginalized] will have to be its own subject too. So will [sustained troll engagement]. I will start listing these and will post the list (If anyone has a topic I would like to see them!)

The power of such a method is that, unlike many other things which are supposed to empower minority voices, it can’t easily be turned around and used to uphold the status quo because disempowered voices are saying things that are genuinely heartfelt and have not been said before, and thus will not fall within a dictionary of common troll tactics.

Yes. The rules and structure of the website will have to be designed with empowerment and elevation of marginalized people in mind. It should be kept in mind that trolls will consider this a “difficulty factor” though. They will simply switch tactics, and even try to develop new ones. for example in such an environment I can see trolls trying to pose as marginalized individuals more often

Therefore:
– It needs to be written in accessible language (that is, not by wordy white cis male people like ourselves.

)

I will need to get information from a lot of people for this one. I personally have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to this one so more than one person, and people from different groups should have input here. Frankly I’m hoping that each post introducing each topic becomes a synthesis of what I experience and what others experience where my views on the topic get modified by the perspectives and experiences of others.

– It needs to have wide categories rather than narrow ones, so people can easily remember them.

Is the partial list I provided a good place to start?

– It needs to be written in a funny manner, so people will read it, recommend it and remember it.

I’m working on it. Otherwise yes, I agree.

– It needs to ridicule trolls, so that people feel embarrassed to be seen to be making the arguments contained within it.

This will be covered in the humor section, and I will try to make it a continual focus. Many people don’t understand just how rooted in dominance/superiority humor is. Humor is a weapon that needs careful aiming.

– ETA: It needs to be apolitical insofar as is possible, so as not to alienate people who agree with 90% of it but not the remainder. For example, I am a pacifist, but I would try to avoid mentioning violence negatively within such a context so as to avoid making the resource inaccessible to underprivileged people who do not have the luxury of pacifism.

I hope that what I have here and on my draft list of topics so is consistent with what you have in mind. I’m going to try to pull basic principles applicable to general human behaviors out of this as much as possible and while I will need to use groups as examples, I want it to be applicable to any group as much as possible. Anything on the order of violence, dominance, superiority and similar I will make an effort to phrase in apolitical ways.

@Mish

What a beauty!

The way I embed a photo here is to post it to one of my Tumblr blogs, right click on it to copy the image address, and then paste to the commenting box.

Some dramatics from Tumblr:

:large

Looks like the GomerGuppies are starting to feel neglected.

@Skiriki

Bastendorf is responding to everyone who is mocking his screed with, “I told you, it was just a dream. I was just sharing my dream.” Uh huh. Riiiiiiiiiight.

Random annoyance of the day: After promising to have a female playable character in Far Cry 5 and the trailer with a badass huntress in it… All lies. No female playable character and the huntress got downgraded to a terrified damsel who doesn’t hunt and only really exists to show the male player main character her boobs. Fucking slap in the face.

Seriously, they could invent three entire languages but couldn’t give us the option to play as half the human race? Eat a gallon drum of dicks, Ubisoft.

@LindsayIrene – thanks much for the photo-posting tip. There’s apparently a thing that WordPress bloggers can do to enable pics in comment threads, but possibly more trouble than it’s worth, David?
@Kupo – the complete lack of interest is normally something my cats do, too. I was pleased that my sacrifice of a t-shirt was appreciated. Re commercial cat toys, the one good toy I’ve found is the Cat It ‘rollerball’ thingie. Mine spend ages playing with them 🙂
Apologies for posting here a bit late – I’m technically back at work now …..

Thought you guys might be interested. I was having a little discussion on the topic: Why aren’t artists’ models considered co-creators?

@ Katz

That’s a really interesting thought. I’ve got a mate who’s both a model and a photographer (nearly 25 now so obviously needs a fallback career!). I’ll see what she has to say.

On a related legal note, in law (unless the shoot is commissioned) the creative rights belong solely to the photographer. There’s been an interesting case where an ape accidentally took a ‘selfie’. Still arguing about who owns the copyright there.

@Mish

Is that the ball track? My cats usually don’t care about those but I’ve only tried the boring circular ones. One of my cats loves their massage center, and I actually have a couple of the light-up balls for the track because they sometimes like light-up balls.

@ Katz

My model/photographer friend had this to say about the credit thing:

Usually the model doesn’t come up with the concept or have any creative input besides the performance on the day. Often, the model is a replaceable participant… You just need a body, it doesn’t have to be a specific body. The artist isn’t so easily replaced, especially when they’ve spent years honing their craft, when a model’s career is too short for this even to be possible, unless you’re talking about life models, but that doesn’t take much skill.

It’s not always the case, but more often than not, I’d say.

I have another batch of Katz’ delicious chicken recipe marinating away in the fridge, alongside a batch of potatoes and onions.

I’m going to pop them in the oven in about ten minutes, and then in an hour, I’ll have a yummy dinner.

The girl cat doesn’t like treats

http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/6-21-2015/ax6j8Y.gif

Are you sure she’s really a cat and not an alien body snatcher pretending to be a cat?

I was going to post about how there’s been yet another mass shooting. But maybe I’ll just stick to cats.

Poor kitty. Missing out on treats. Dracarys ate her dinner really fast tonight (and every night). It didn’t make her puke but it did make her get the hiccups. Kitty hiccups are kind of adorable.