Banning

crossposted from DK. Comments might be of interest.

Banning

Yes, this is another great opportunity to express your opinions. What do you think about banning?

I’ll admit I kinda have some issues about banning, having suffered some social ostracizing myself over the decades.

It sucks. And generally the outliers get it the worst, because we are the most confusing.

And the older we are, the longer we’ve been dealing with being confusing, and the more we’ve been ostracized, the more generally cranky we tend to have become.

So it goes round and round, and down and down.

I don’t think I’d like to have a job that involved banning people. I think it would make me crazy. And I’m already crazy.

It is one of the worst possible things you can do to someone who has become identified with a community, banning them.

Making them non-persons. Pretending they don’t exist any more.

Attacking people for even bringing them up, the banned people.

The Omelas people.

The ones in the cage.

Fortunately, the banned can go to other blogs. But it’s generally considered by people on other blogs, that this is the hub for “progressive” blogging, whatever that means anymore.

This is the winnowing place. It’s like a gated city, in a way, with the roaming volunteer cops and all these caveats, these linguistic covenants.

I’m not writing this post to tell any of you what to do. Au contraire. I’m writing it about what I observe people here doing. About what I’ve experienced.

And also, just to ask y’all, where you think this should go, all this banning and fighting about language and going around trolling for trolls (because yes, that’s exactly what happens here).

There are some big conflicts here. One is about war escalation.

The IGTNT people rock, imho. Since we’re in the wars, it’s good and kind to comfort the bereaved. I’ve been really impressed by how the people who work those posts handle doing so. Bigtime.

But I stop there with it. We have to stop warring. We have to stop letting the corporations run our politicians and then our politicians running us. We have to stop letting them set us against each other.

That’s part of why I refer to the IGTNT people here, because they get it. They get how to deal with conflict and pain and anger.

They understand it viscerally. And yeah; you can say they are glorifying the Army or something that, but that’s not really what’s going on there.

I don’t even hang out in the IGTNT essays. But I know what they’re doing. Because there is only one thing to honestly do, when confronting the bereaved, and unnecessary death, and kids getting killed.

Only one thing to do. Have your heart broken, that’s the only thing to do.

So, how about we figure out how to stop all this warring? On all these levels.

We cannot win unless we stop fighting.

Happy Solstice, everybody.

love,

Miep