Ban the ban
Aug. 7th, 2009 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIn A sneer on the face of a judge last week I railed against the obnoxious "zap the weakest link" social structure replicated in reality shows like Big Brother. That very day, after the post went up, a banned Big Brother contestant named Sree Dasari slashed his wrists. The newspaper coverage focused on whether people with "underlying mental health issues" should be screened out. Few commentators seemed willing to draw what seems like one fairly obvious conclusion: that there is something cruel and undesirable in the Big Brother format itself, and the politics it implies.
Because it was an example closer to hand -- a medium "we" control -- I added a paragraph to the sneering judges piece about a Big-Brother-like Suggest Ban feature added to a bulletin board: "ILX, a bulletin board I used to frequent, added a "Suggest Ban" button a couple of years ago, allowing users to vote other users "out of the house", hence declaring people with unpopular opinions "the weakest link" and waving them "goodbye". It gets used to boot out anyone with a mildly divergent take. That isn't exactly pluralism, now, is it, boys? In good societies, surely everyone has something to contribute? And just what are the implications of this "eliminate the weakest link" idea for immigration, for dealing with the homeless and the socially excluded, for integrating the talentless?"
I've just learned that Bimble, a contributor to that board, shot himself a few days ago. He had recently been SB'd -- temporarily banned. According to people close to Bimble (a manic, enthusiastic, gender-reassigned post-punk fan living in Seattle), the ban did contribute to his decision to take his own life. In the thread about this, though, although many posters wished they'd been more attentive to Bimble personally, nobody suggest-banned the practice of suggest-banning.
Now, I can understand why. Yes, such a suggestion -- on an RIP thread -- would have brought an angry swarm of posters and moderators telling the person who made it not to politicize a recent death, and even suggest-banning him for suggest-banning suggest-ban. It would probably be pointed out that Bimble had underlying mental health issues, that there were other factors involved, that it's un-useful to point a finger of blame in the days following the suicide of a deeply disturbed person, that bipolar depression episodes can be triggered by anything, that you can't set the rules of a whole community by the mental state of its weakest member. All true, all true. But you can and should look at whether there's anything structural you can do to prevent similar things happening -- to similarly weak people -- in future. I think the "let's suggest-ban suggest-banning" conversation is one that particular online community needs to have at some point over the coming weeks. And I think a "political" response is not out of order here. The politics of exclusion are deeply relevant to cases like Bimble's and Dasari's.
There's an article about BBC motoring show Top Gear in today's Guardian which touches on the same issue, but shows the risks on the other side of the equation. Top Gear's obnoxious, provocatively right-wing presenter Jeremy Clarkson, testing an Audi and a comparison car whose make isn't revealed, calls the second vehicle "the perfect car for anyone whose business is selling pegs and heather". A pie and a key is laid out on the car's bonnet, and the humourous theme of the piece becomes that this is a car for "pikeys" -- slang for gypsies.
The language Guardian commentator Jodie Matthews uses is similar to the language in my paragraph about ILX. "In good societies... everyone has something to contribute," I said. Jodie says that using the term pikey "fails to value the contribution that Gypsies and Travellers make to British culture. It implies that various and diverse groups of people can be easily and lazily labelled, and that with this label comes particular behaviour. It makes some individuals feel like outsiders."
There's a problem here, though: the euphemism treadmill. The term "gypsy" -- used as if it were unproblematical throughout the Guardian article -- is itself considered as offensive a term, by some people, as "pikey". More recent PC usages for the same micro-population ("traveling people" and "Roma people") are either too vague or not widely-enough adopted to be clear. And the inclusiveness language that Matthews (and I) adopt is particularly bland: "everyone has a contribution to make" is a pretty wishy-washy sentiment to trade for the rather pleasurable (if stereotypical) specificity of the phrase "people who sell pegs and heather". I'm not sure that people who say "everyone has a contribution to make" necessarily like and know Roma people better than people who talk about "selling pegs and heather".
What alarms me most about Matthews' piece -- though I'm obviously siding with her against the obnoxious Clarkson and his right wing populism -- is this bit. Clarkson's appeal to nudge-nudge, wink-wink racism, says Matthews, "has been a strategy of racist discourse since at least the 19th century. It was effectively employed by George Smith of Coalville in his anti-Gypsy campaigns of the 1870s, and even by those who sought to romanticise Gypsies in the late 1800s."
While I agree that the vilification and the exoticisation of outgroups often does involve the same stereotyping, I don't think you can cluster them both as undesirable. To be romanticised is beneficial to a people, a community, a nation. It does wonders for your tourist takings, for instance, and generally lures people to educate themselves further about your specific differences. An anti-racism that attacks positive affect as vigorously as negative affect seems to me utterly misguided -- motivated, perhaps, by the fear of difference it's not too hard to tease out of statements like "everyone has a contribution to make". If the soft right consigns difference -- with a few affectionate racist jokes -- to a place where its stigma is at least visible (if damned to the "natural" predations of Social Darwinism), the soft left fudges it in an abstract fog of equality of opportunity, which is finally nothing more than the opportunity to be the same as everyone else.
Because it was an example closer to hand -- a medium "we" control -- I added a paragraph to the sneering judges piece about a Big-Brother-like Suggest Ban feature added to a bulletin board: "ILX, a bulletin board I used to frequent, added a "Suggest Ban" button a couple of years ago, allowing users to vote other users "out of the house", hence declaring people with unpopular opinions "the weakest link" and waving them "goodbye". It gets used to boot out anyone with a mildly divergent take. That isn't exactly pluralism, now, is it, boys? In good societies, surely everyone has something to contribute? And just what are the implications of this "eliminate the weakest link" idea for immigration, for dealing with the homeless and the socially excluded, for integrating the talentless?"
I've just learned that Bimble, a contributor to that board, shot himself a few days ago. He had recently been SB'd -- temporarily banned. According to people close to Bimble (a manic, enthusiastic, gender-reassigned post-punk fan living in Seattle), the ban did contribute to his decision to take his own life. In the thread about this, though, although many posters wished they'd been more attentive to Bimble personally, nobody suggest-banned the practice of suggest-banning.
Now, I can understand why. Yes, such a suggestion -- on an RIP thread -- would have brought an angry swarm of posters and moderators telling the person who made it not to politicize a recent death, and even suggest-banning him for suggest-banning suggest-ban. It would probably be pointed out that Bimble had underlying mental health issues, that there were other factors involved, that it's un-useful to point a finger of blame in the days following the suicide of a deeply disturbed person, that bipolar depression episodes can be triggered by anything, that you can't set the rules of a whole community by the mental state of its weakest member. All true, all true. But you can and should look at whether there's anything structural you can do to prevent similar things happening -- to similarly weak people -- in future. I think the "let's suggest-ban suggest-banning" conversation is one that particular online community needs to have at some point over the coming weeks. And I think a "political" response is not out of order here. The politics of exclusion are deeply relevant to cases like Bimble's and Dasari's.
There's an article about BBC motoring show Top Gear in today's Guardian which touches on the same issue, but shows the risks on the other side of the equation. Top Gear's obnoxious, provocatively right-wing presenter Jeremy Clarkson, testing an Audi and a comparison car whose make isn't revealed, calls the second vehicle "the perfect car for anyone whose business is selling pegs and heather". A pie and a key is laid out on the car's bonnet, and the humourous theme of the piece becomes that this is a car for "pikeys" -- slang for gypsies.The language Guardian commentator Jodie Matthews uses is similar to the language in my paragraph about ILX. "In good societies... everyone has something to contribute," I said. Jodie says that using the term pikey "fails to value the contribution that Gypsies and Travellers make to British culture. It implies that various and diverse groups of people can be easily and lazily labelled, and that with this label comes particular behaviour. It makes some individuals feel like outsiders."
There's a problem here, though: the euphemism treadmill. The term "gypsy" -- used as if it were unproblematical throughout the Guardian article -- is itself considered as offensive a term, by some people, as "pikey". More recent PC usages for the same micro-population ("traveling people" and "Roma people") are either too vague or not widely-enough adopted to be clear. And the inclusiveness language that Matthews (and I) adopt is particularly bland: "everyone has a contribution to make" is a pretty wishy-washy sentiment to trade for the rather pleasurable (if stereotypical) specificity of the phrase "people who sell pegs and heather". I'm not sure that people who say "everyone has a contribution to make" necessarily like and know Roma people better than people who talk about "selling pegs and heather".
What alarms me most about Matthews' piece -- though I'm obviously siding with her against the obnoxious Clarkson and his right wing populism -- is this bit. Clarkson's appeal to nudge-nudge, wink-wink racism, says Matthews, "has been a strategy of racist discourse since at least the 19th century. It was effectively employed by George Smith of Coalville in his anti-Gypsy campaigns of the 1870s, and even by those who sought to romanticise Gypsies in the late 1800s."
While I agree that the vilification and the exoticisation of outgroups often does involve the same stereotyping, I don't think you can cluster them both as undesirable. To be romanticised is beneficial to a people, a community, a nation. It does wonders for your tourist takings, for instance, and generally lures people to educate themselves further about your specific differences. An anti-racism that attacks positive affect as vigorously as negative affect seems to me utterly misguided -- motivated, perhaps, by the fear of difference it's not too hard to tease out of statements like "everyone has a contribution to make". If the soft right consigns difference -- with a few affectionate racist jokes -- to a place where its stigma is at least visible (if damned to the "natural" predations of Social Darwinism), the soft left fudges it in an abstract fog of equality of opportunity, which is finally nothing more than the opportunity to be the same as everyone else.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 10:46 am (UTC)You can't work towards having the right to difference until you've fully achieved the right to be the same. I'm not completely sure women have managed complete equality yet, and gays certainly haven't, so it'll be a long while before Roma do.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 10:57 am (UTC)Could you say more about that, McGazz? How does it work out in the real world?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 11:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 11:39 am (UTC)And, from the thread I link above:
"He sent me a couple of e-mails towards the end of July. Evidently he was banned from ILX at the time?"
"I was just pointing out that bimble had got over being temp banned."
"He told chatz last week that he didn't mind being banned for a month and he enjoyed the time off ilx. He did say he didnt know if he would come back straight away. Now sadly we will never know."
"He was deeply upset about having been banned from ILX."
"he was a very stubborn person and refused to tone down his posting, even when he was reasonably asked to do so. i don't want to turn this thread into a thing about what happened on ilx before he was banned..."
weak, weaker, weakest.
Date: 2009-08-07 12:09 pm (UTC)weak, weaker, weakest.
a cursory dig around his blog and ILX legacy would seem to contradict your thoughtless description.
Re: weak, weaker, weakest.
Date: 2009-08-07 12:27 pm (UTC)Do you really think this is the time or the place for unnecessary, ill-informed, potentially staggeringly hurtful musings about a community you're no longer part of?
I can take small comfort from the fact that nobody really cares one iota about your opinions on anything, I guess.
Do us, and yourself, a favour and shut up.
Simon
Re: weak, weaker, weakest.
Date: 2009-08-07 12:39 pm (UTC)Those cries, and Bimble's emotional intensity and obvious neediness, were annoying to people. That's also understandable. Rather than blaming the people who hit the Suggest Ban button, though, I would question the politics of there being an SB button at all. In the parallel world ILX where there is no SB button, people don't have a quick and easy "zap" option. They engage, negotiate, argue, socialise. It seems to me that that contact is what Bimble craved above all.
You know, the politics which opposes itself to Social Darwinism is not a politics in which we pretend weakness and need do not exist. Socialism and Social Darwinism have in common that they agree that weakness and strength and other differences are real. Where they disagree is what they do next: go with the flow, or try to reverse the existing power imbalances.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 12:40 pm (UTC)Yes, it must be disheartening to sign up to a popularity contest then find out you're not that popular. It would only be cruel if you were forced to do it against your will.
Are you really saying that TV commisioning should be a completely inclusive process? That audience enjoyment play no part in scheduling? What about people that are dull or stupid or fixate on loony conspiracy theories? Should they get equal air-time?
At one time an Oxbridge degree and a master of RP were the necesary qualifications to be on tv. Nowadays you just need people to enjoy watching your output.
Yes, I'd rather that C4 put on something a bit more considered but that costs quite a lot of money so this is what we get instead. When nobody watches any more we'll get another show that we like better. This is surely better than a free-for-all on the airwaves or a return to a patrician elite that decides what we watch.
Re: weak, weaker, weakest.
Date: 2009-08-07 12:44 pm (UTC)You've just put your finger on the problem. That's exactly what the community told Bimble. And unfortunately there was a button for it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 12:51 pm (UTC)Audience enjoyment -- as the history of asylums-as-circuses, executions-as-theatre, cock-fighting and bull-bating, or a reading of "Lord of the Flies", reveals -- is pretty cheaply and grimly achieved, though.
This is surely better than a free-for-all on the airwaves or a return to a patrician elite that decides what we watch.
I actually think reality TV is exactly what a patrician elite has decided you will watch.
This article
Date: 2009-08-07 01:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 01:22 pm (UTC)Well, this is one of your key themes, isn't it? And obviously personally important to you as a non-Japanese-speaking nippophile. But I just don't think it stands up. Exotification is a closed circle of justification. It (usually) involves the powerful defining the non-powerful, then telling the non-powerful that the definition is positive. Let's not forget that Uncle Tom in the original novel was supposed to be a positive stereotype of a black man. Just because you think some kind of simplifying characterisation is good and positive doesn't make it so. The world is full of fucked-up rationales of this type. Racists aren't all deliberately malicious, more often than not they think they're doing the right thing. Removing Aboriginal kids from their parents in Australia was thought to be a good thing socially for the kids at the time, but of course it was fucked up.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 01:23 pm (UTC)ahem....
http://www.mediachannel.org/ownership/chart.shtml
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 01:24 pm (UTC)Re: weak, weaker, weakest.
Date: 2009-08-07 01:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 01:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 02:06 pm (UTC)Non-malicious anon comments will make it through no problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 02:13 pm (UTC)Re: weak, weaker, weakest.
Date: 2009-08-07 02:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 02:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 02:26 pm (UTC)I'd be delighted if someone actually addressed my point about the ILX SB button rather than trotting out ad hominem stuff ("this didn't happen", "you do the same", etc).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 02:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-07 03:10 pm (UTC)