A LANDFILL

Wheat, you keep shitting on insularity happening in our internet communities, which is all well and good and the actual existence of such I'm not going to disagree with. Where you're being grossly naive is thinking that any kind of Hawkspace, affiliated/hosted on Eagle Time or not, is not going to go through its own process of "deathspiralling" into insularity.

It could perhaps be avoided in a communication medium that is exclusively about ideas, not people and their personalities and emotions and other inconvenient things, but Eagle Time/#eagletime is very indubitably people, to the point there is inevitable mistrust/lack of immediate unconditional benefit-of-the-doubt/trust when a new person nobody's really vetted joins in and acts like a people (the "who's this asshole" effect. This is a recurring intrusive thought of mine and one I have to confront and stamp down constantly). Ideas are piss-easy to broadcast, dissect, refute and revise. People are not, and in a discussion of ideas about how people should be or might already be or were at some prior point, you're basically obligated to suffix everything with a shrug and a "but nwuh-uh."

Heck, if we want to make threatening-sounding but ultimately-impotent statements, insularity's basically the only reason I didn't send you packing to another forum!

Contention the second: This talk about biting people's faces off if they descend into sarcasm because they can't step up to the debate plate with you means you are just as bad as you've accused me of being. You will choose to shove people out of the discussion because according to your stated ideals, it's all about whether you can elocute to a particular standard. I feel like you falsely dismiss my cultural/girl-upbringing-mandated/cognitive objections that stop me from hitting that standard, instead assuming I'm not trying hard enough. This fucks me personally up in a quiet but persistent way.*

What is your endgoal with these people you drive off? Are you ok with a potential scenario where Loather (who I found in private discussion an intelligent lady who can be a good listener even when told their argument had bad grounds) goes down some kind of Darkest Timelonether route into a staunchly anti-intellectualist thorn in the side of not just you, but the kind of people I assume you’d prefer to engage with? I know you’ve given me shit in the past for not upholding my own ideal of never giving up educating people on how to be better/more accommodating; although I guess for the purposes of making you a new subforum it’s now turned on its head into contributions to a shitty culture of over-conscientiousness? Does the prospect of repulsing/repelling people with your objectevangelising bother you? Who are you trying to convince here, where anyone you hurt is going to have a bunch of friends who are going to be pissed you hurt a friend of theirs?

Because, if you’re ok with labelling some people here, in what we should all be hoping and aiming to make Hawkspace’s first and ugliest (hopefully by a very long shot) “serious group discussion”, as “unfit to continue engaging, it’s now safe to forcibly remove you from the debatespace”, that is just as shitty as me making a snap-decision and berating someone (issuing a “don’t do XXXX”) instead of using the slip as an opportunity to have a group examination/discussion of, I dunno, policing of bodies and appearances and why we might do that without thinking**. Like it or not, Hawkspace is “your” thing as much as Eagle Time is perceived by this community to be “mine”. You’re setting a standard that you think is good. When I’m not tying up my own hands, I try set a standard I think is good. If you think Eagle Timers’ preconceptions are not going to jive with your standard for Hawkspace (you’re drawing from the wrong well), please, by all means, go bore somewhere else and find a more receptive audience for your forumnular ideals. Insularity of Hawkspace/Hawkspace Mach2 is an inevitability provided its users care about each other as individuals and people; I can only hope you’ll be as vehemently critical of it when it’s a culture that suits you and all of your needs. If you’ve got some kind of game plan from the get-go about how to prevent insularity from happening (it doesn’t need to be corrective measures, you already stated you’ve given up on trying to change Eagle Time’s), I’d love to hear it.




*I'm a perfectionist, and not even a particularly useful one. I got through high school being The Smart One, and was devastated by a 51% final grade on a university paper because I’d busted a nut studying harder than I’d ever studied (after lackluster midterm results). I still don’t like to admit I’m not good at things (instead engineering my environment through procrastination etc so I can claim that my peak could be reached under the Right Circumstances). So, when I admit I’m shit at debating, I’ve thought really hard about it and I mean it. The implication, implicit even, that I can Debate Like Wheat just by trying harder, and when you dismiss or disrespect me or think less of me (compared to old, “open-minded” me) because right now I “won’t”, it’s like trying to avoid screaming at my parents that I hate them all over again. I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want anyone on this forum to hate you, because hatred is fucking useless and everyone, you and I both, are simultaneously founts of sage advice and utter horsecrock.

** and if you think that even that meta-discussion is not a thing worth having, I’d like to attest to how unpleasant it is to live in a world where a woman’s body/appearance is a topic anyone is free to contribute on. It’s pervasive and shitty and I will acknowledge again that I did not air that concern in a useful or constructive way. Whimbrel I think could attest to my getting snappy over something “obvious” after that incident (Uluru being the original name of Ayers rock), realising that was not constructive, and apologising for it.