On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 11:03 AM, Sarah Stierch sarah.stierch@gmail.com wrote:
After reviewing the Arbcom case, I don't even know who got the idea that any of the contributing editors are feminist, per se. No one even mentions the word, except once, when describing a subject that was "slandered" in the gamer gate article(s).
Hi Sarah, I think the point is that editors who were defending the rights and privacy of the women involved in Gamergate are being sanctioned because (I assume) they did it in some sense inappropriately, perhaps too aggressively, I don't know. (I don't know the details.)
In that sense it looks like a repeat of the gender gap task force decision. In the latter, those trying to stop disruption were sanctioned even harder than those causing it.
The message those cases send is that, if you're trying to protect women's interests, you have to creep around and not stick your neck out. The Chelsea Manning case had similar problems, and Sceptre recently expressed the same concern about the Sexology case.
Another aspect of this is that we've been undermining admins for years so that they (we) are reluctant to act at an early stage to nip things in the bud. As Tony Sidaway wrote: "The administrator corps must be coaxed out of their inappropriate and destructive timidity." I was glad to see the ArbCom's proposed decision thank the admins who have worked on this.
Sarah
I think the lesson it sends is that a righteous cause is not a defense against accusations of disruption, nor a license to violate other policies. I'm sure that among the restricted people are those with positions I'd support along with many others, but that doesn't put their behavior above reproach. Tony Sidaway was hardly the paragon of a calm and thoughtful administrator - insightful as he often was, there was a reason he was fired as a clerk and barred from simply requesting his bit back.