"...but "no to", is IMO ridiculous."
OK Tim, but you are about the last person I would ever expect to be involved in a 'notoorabout' in the first place. As with most things, however, if the idea is flawed or injust in someway, I will be happy to drop it, once I am convinced.
Here is why I consider it a good rule:
On a L/R confrontation thread like this, we meet all kinds of people. Some people are simply testing the soundness of their position, some are looking to enrich their knowledge base, some are standing up for what they believe in, some enjoy yanking your chain in a friendly joust, some people get off on needling particular people on the other side of a partisan line… especially if it’s a person easily provoked.
Many people feel very close to the issues they debate and simply cannot separate their feelings about the issue from themselves. Many issues are value laden or in some other way attached personally to someone's identity. In some cases, once emotionally entwined with an issue, people become emotionally averse to some poster's personality who represents the opposing view. Most of you join a thread like this with full awareness of those dynamics, but given the goal represented in the header we expect things to remain within reasonable limits. What are those reasonable limits? I am convinced that there is a broad area of reasonable limitedness when it comes to oppositional discourse like this, but that we each have individual limits of our own.
The 'no to' portion of the notoorabout rule did not come out of the blue. It came when we saw persons who had been pushed to their individual limits by a particularly persistent poster, and had no recourse except to leave, or continue to allow self to be subject of this sort of harassment.
There have been confrontations on SI that resulted in severe personality conflicts. Surely you have witnessed that yourself. If someone gets exasperated by confrontations with another person, it is a good move by them to request a cease fire of the 'notoorabout' kind. And it is a good thing for us to support it. In many places, if someone tells you not to call them anymore, it becomes a crime of harassment to continue calling them. The usual response from the person being told to stop, is to ask what is wrong with calling, which is really just a way to provoke the person into yet another argument. We don't expect people in the three-D world to disconnect from the phone service or move to a different community so they don't get calls from that person any more (partly because we know it doesn't work, and partly because it encourages that type of unreasonable aggression). I see no reason in the world for someone I am hosting on a thread to subjected to this type of thing in text format.
A 'no to' does not restrict anyone from posting ideas, thoughts, opinions, or information in anyway, since we can always post to the thread or to another poster who may be interested.
The 'no to' is intended for serious and usually obvious circumstances that involve two people where at least one of them has come to the end of a rope and wants to be left alone by the other. If I didn't get it, I would probably ask the person in PM what the big deal is before notifying the other poster that I intend to enforce the rule. It's not something I intend to play games with, or allow others to use as a debate gambit. If a poster, for example, requested that another poster leave her alone certain days of the month or something just to test the rule, I'd ignore it. If someone wants to be left alone by most or all the posters on the other side of L/R I'd probably invite them to go to one of those more specifically L or R threads and ignore the request. I actually can't imagine the current posters we have comming anywhere near that dynamic but who knows. Extremists tend to get the boot for other reasons before it would come to that.
What is it about that, you find so ridiculous? |
