2021-02-16 00:42:10

A few points I want to raise here. This is going to get controversial, fair warning. I suspect most of you will find things in this post to agree with, but a bunch of you are going to get your fur ruffled a bit. I will endeavour to be even-handed, but the nature of the topic at hand is touchy.

Okay, so first off, the original idea is a nice thought, but it's not feasible for several reasons.
1. The technical side, which has already been addressed. It's a lot bigger of a deal to actually migrate closed topics to an entirely different forum or platform.
2. The practical side. Who, exactly, decides which topics are too dramatic to remain on the forum? Anyone who takes on this responsibility is going to be accused of reframing the narrative. I've already seen this, to some extent, but it would get worse. You folks are often very kind to us when we do things that make us look human (my apology thread, among others, is a great example of this, and probably better than I deserved), but the instant that we, as a staff team, do something which in some way limits free speech, all hell breaks loose. Put frankly, we already take enough undeserved ass-kickings to want to invite this. Also? There are threads which are still not closed but which got plenty dramatic. Go back and dig through some of the coronavirus threads, just as one simple example. Do we close those and migrate them, or do they stand as a representation of differing opinions and argument and, in some cases, simple human meanness? And if we do let them stay because we chose not to close them in the past, doesn't that kind of defeat the entire purpose?
3. The philosophical side. The nature of any community is that you're going to get people who disagree. Sometimes it's civil, sometimes it's not. But always, it represents a reasonable microcosm of the larger community. If I came to a new forum for a hobby I possess, and found that 98.9% of it was civil, with very little drama, I'd immediately get suspicious and wonder if this small slice of the community was being honest and/or representing things fairly. It would creep me out, make me suspicious and would, in fact, probably drive me away eventually. Don't get me wrong. I don't want fights and bloodbaths and stuff, but I do want authenticity. And sometimes, authenticity is messy. There's no getting around that. In addition, while there are threads which end up being nothing more than a lot of folks bickering, there are also threads which start out badly and then end up showing how people can find common ground even in the midst of bitter disagreement. It would be morally disingenuous to start arbitrarily removing our worst elements from public view. Besides, when you have a problematic element, the proper thing to do is to confront it and hopefully triumph over it. You don't just shove it under a rug and hope nobody notices.

My overall verdict here: a neat idea, and I am not discounting why you're saying it, but it's just not workable, on multiple levels.

Okay, here comes the actual controversy.

I've seen tons of people, in dozens of posts and threads, claim that they hate being misrepresented by certain members of the community. They dislike it when snap judgments are made about them, judgments which often ignore who and what they are in favour of a stereotype, a bad experience or pure unfounded supposition.
Welcome to real life. Marginalized groups (LGBT, women, non-white, disabled, poor) get this all. the. time. You are not unique or alone or special purely because you feel this way. For every blind person saying it annoys them when another blind person blows across their mic or acts entitled, I bet you there is at least one woman who hate it when men assume they know nothing. One non-native English speaker who hates it when they notice other people treating them as if they're stupid because their English is heavily accented and broken. One person of colour who hates it when yet another white person makes a snap judgment about them due to their skin colour. One poor person who hates it when yet another entitled pro-capitalist boomer tells them that poor people are only impoverished because they're lazy.
Human beings are champions at making stupid, unfair snap judgments about one another. It's not fair, it shouldn't happen, but it does happen. Pretending that it's worst in the blind community is hypocritical and selfish. While we absolutely do get bad press for the less socially inept or more entitled among us, I daresay that some of the blowback faced by other marginalized communities - and oftentimes for no credible reason at all - is far, far worse. So for every one of you who gets upset about ambassadorship (and yes, this includes me sometimes, by the way), I think some pause for reflection is due here.
Tl.dr: judgers gonna judge. Our job is not to stop that behaviour, since we can't possibly do so. Our job also doesn't consist of excising the least savoury elements of our community. Our job is simply to do our best to demonstrate that we, individually, don't represent those same problems. If we do this, and if we respond to our less ideal shortcomings as a community with some of the grace Nocturnis alluded to, then we will prove, to a majority of people anyway, that just like them, we are not primarily represented by our worst members or actions.
I'll really nail the coffin shut, shall I? Some sighted folks are judgy and shortsighted (pardon the pun) about blindness. Okay, I can't and won't argue that. But there seems to be a prevailing opinion that this actually represents most of the sighted community, and it doesn't. Ignorance is waning. Tolerance and a willingness to learn are rising. Rather than just panicking and flipping out about how badly we're going to be seen by this group, perhaps it's time to accept the double standard implicit in that stance. Most sighted people are not that ignorant or willfully opposed to us, so perhaps if we are afraid to be judged for our least popular elements, we should stop judging the sighted on behalf of their own weakest showing.

One last point, and it's sort of a side trip.

Nocturnus spoke of grace, of outcomes, of sameness. I agree with him, for the most part, but I want to amplify his message a bit.
It's not helpful, past about the age of three or four, to treat everyone as exactly the same. It's important to reward effort and to encourage self-improvement, but not every action is created equal. People are equal, in that they should, by default, receive the same considerations for things as their peers do. But nobody exists in a vacuum. If you prove that you can't move fast enough to play shortstop, while another team member has those tools, then you should rightly be judged inadequate and moved somewhere else on the diamond. If you can't carry a tune in a bucket, and you get into a karaoke contest with someone else who sings on key, you shouldn't get the same recognition for this. Merits matter. You should be recognized for trying, especially if you did even worse the last time, but you also shouldn't win. What should not happen, however, is for people to make up criteria by which to judge you, criteria over which you have no control and which don't have any basis in fact. This is where shit like racism, sexism, classism and ableism come from, and I trust we can all agree that those things represent some of humanity's worst behaviour as a whole.
For me, this also extends to things like opinions. You don't get a medal just for showing up, particularly if by doing so, you're spewing nonsense. This is why I call stuff out when I see it. I can fully recognize someone's right to equal treatment overall, while simultaneously kicking the hell out of an opinion they've voiced. Equal treatment does not actually mean that everyone gets treated the same way, all the time, for all things and in all ways. It means that everyone should have an equal seat at the table until such time as they have forfeited it somehow. If you're a trusted public official who gets caught embezzling, you should be fired. If you're a health official endorsing lunatic conspiracy theories, same deal. If you're a blind person making ridiculous claims about the sighted world that you can't back up, ditto. And it goes on this way. All that having been said, I believe we still have work to do, as a species, even on a basic level, since basic human rights are still being contested for no good reason, and I am absolutely not okay with that.

Okay, let me know what you folks think of this. And sorry for yet another wall. Did you miss me? lol

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2021-02-16 01:10:08

I often think about how other minorities have a population 5 times as big as us and they face just as bad, if not worse, discrimination than we do. So numbers don’t matter. Whether you are the first blind person, or the 25th Latino, or the 69,420th woman someone has met. We need to stop letting numbers cloud our logic and judgment.