May. 18, 2012 at 8:12am with 6 notes

I read Shakesville, and their “Question of the Day” yesterday was about the zombie apocalypse….I saw it and wanted to scream, “YOU TOO?!” Like, of all places, OF ALL PLACES, the blog that prides itself on being aware of the hurdles everyone has to clear in life, and how some folks have a fuck of a lot more hurdles than others. I think it’s self-evident that an apocalypse of any kind quite literally leaves disabled people out in the cold to die. The fact that so many people treat this as a fun mental exercise is bullshit…Almost instantly I had the Wrath of Mod down on me for “commenting in bad faith.” I told her it was her right to remove the link, and also, implicitly, to ease the fuck up, because she was making me extremely anxious.

That’s where I left it last night, and incidentally, I didn’t sleep last night. I can’t explain why getting called to the principal’s office in the confines of one little blog would do such a number on me. It’s at least partially because I’ve seen good people making good points completely obliterated over there. The mods pull out the “bad faith” clause and you had better run for the hills. If you stand your ground, you can go fuck yourself…

This morning I saw, to no surprise, that the same mod clung to her bad-faith accusation, and then finished up with, “This derail is over,” which is the part that really chapped my ass. You may not like how I’ve expressed my sentiments, but that doesn’t make it a derail. A derail is when someone intentionally comes into a blog post that discusses X and says, “YES BUT WHAT ABOUT Y,” when Y is off-topic. I came into a post asking “how will you survive the apocalypse?” saying, “I won’t, and I hate this topic because of it.” That’s not a derail, no matter how you might look at it…

Then I went back to the original post and made my point entirely using “I” language, soft-pedaling my rage and frustration till it was just a soft little “no thank you.” Till it lost all the righteous anger that I’m entitled to. Still, there’s no way it can bring down the banhammer unless the mods have really and truly gone off the fucking deep end.

And now that I’m done with that, I can make myself a solemn vow to never comment over there again except in extreme circumstances. Their commenting policy takes “draconian” to a new level. It’s like even Draco is leaning back, peering at the monolith of rules and saying, “Damn, folks, well done.”

I get that in the fight to preserve a safe space for other commenters, you can’t take the Wild West approach (a.k.a. the YouTube approach). But all the truly out-there bans (and near-bans) I’ve seen at Shakesville haven’t been about keeping the space safe for the other commenters; they’ve been about treating the blog authors with kid gloves. And I don’t get that. You have no responsibility to receive abuse as an author, but genuinely felt criticism … you’re putting yourself and your opinions out there, and you should welcome that criticism. You can’t yell “bad faith!” every time someone expresses it.

Red Lily

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