The New "Read THIS before Posting" thread

MacAllister

'Twas but a dream of thee
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I'm going to steal shamelessly from AW's EvilRooster, posted elseWeb, because it's a near-perfect summation of what we all try to do here in P&CE:
I think that if we love a thing, we should talk about the joys of having that thing, rather than the evils of its absence. Likewise, I don't think we need to spend time and energy on Those Bad People Who Aren't Us (and who are often mythical or misinterpreted for the purposes of the narrative). I'd rather we use that bandwidth to talk more about what defines Us, or about the good thing we're advocating, instead.

It doesn't have to be a pendulum. Things don't have to be balanced, any more than both sides of the political narrative have to be true.

1. Speak carefully: say only what you mean to say. Say it as clearly as possible, with as few references, elisions and dogwhistles as possible.

2. Preserve nuance: assume that your interlocuters have spoken carefully, too. Try not to elide or oversimplify their positions in your responses. And strawmen are Right Out.

3. Discourage demands to be spoonfed: It is everyone's responsibility, in these difficult conversations, to pull intellectual weight for themselves. But how often do we get people who want the difficult concepts to be handed to them in bite-sized chunks, each of which which they can either accept or reject? It's an attempt to transfer the responsibility for doing the work of understanding away from every participant in the conversation to everyone but the person demanding to be spoonfed. I can't count how often I've seen one person suck all of the energy out of the conversation that way.

This is not to say that there isn't a place for people who don't understand some of the terms of art and foundational concepts we've hammered out to work through these problems. Nor is it to say that we will all agree about either the concepts or the terminology in the conversation. We aren't all operating from a shared understanding or a common mental model. There's always work to do when sub-communities overlap, finding where our maps agree and differ. Figuring out how to talk to each other.

But a mutual struggle for understanding, or someone genuinely looking for resources to broaden their own understanding, is one thing. The impulse to make a conversation all about one's self, rather than the quest for common ground, is quite another.

Discouraging demands for spoonfeeding is a way of refusing to feed that hunger for attention.

The only thing I might add is this: Post in Good Faith. Don't play rhetorical games or try to set traps. Likewise, Assume Goodwill on the part of your fellow posters. Cite your Sources: no matter how strongly you believe something to be true, it doesn't carry the same weight as actual evidence, cited and linked.

Thank you all for taking part, here. I'm fiercely proud of this place, even though it's making me go prematurely gray.
 
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