By "some people" I assume youre not making some kind of prejudicial comment about anyone who might see the issue differently. And Im sure any objective reader would consider your use of "heartless" "relativism" and "intellectual lazyness" and "corrupt morality" as personal attacks, so I'll just ignore them. I understand how good people can lose their cool. And any point of view expressed with such articulation as yours should never be considered "flaming," (certainly not a blockable offense) even if it does have some of the above in it. I dont understand how any distinction of "intrinsic/inherited" can be definitive enough to make for blocking people.

While I empathize with your desire to not want to be treated with personal hostility on Wikipedia, it has be said that there is no premptive remedy for that problem. Work it out like everybody does, and if you get wikitired and wikistressed, take a wikibreak. At least we have a dispute resolution process. First off, Im not sure that list can qualify as a "hit list," as the reaction to that list seems to have been appropriately jovial ("how do I get on the list?" etc). Granted its on the borderline, but wheras the weighing of evidence requires some balance, indefinite bans are an absolutist remedy without any. Others have correctly noted that such might even encourage sockpuppetism. Its a close call, no doubt, and only the absolutist nature of the superprocedural block is really at issue. Please try to understand my objectivity here.

For little background, the development of the formal DR process arose only after (very, very, very) much long-term tug and pull between prominent members of the community --as the lack of any formal process was increasingly viewed as being a failure in terms of principle and shown in practice to be unresponsive to WP's exponential growth. There were a few notable cases wherein conflicts regarding both issues and personality became larger flame wars, and mere chatter on the lists proved insufficient to either do the basic work of making an accurate case for corrective measures, or for finding any nuanced remedy. Before a certain point, any banning was an extremely rare-case issue provided for only extremely disruptive trolls --meaning only those making overt and uncontroversially improper edits. The notion that trollism should be redefined to include not just overt behaviour but subvert behaviour as well is controversial enough to merit discussion before applying to a ban. IAC, banning was once an extreme rarity. No more apparently.

When I first got into some edit wars, I admittedly was quick to react to certain offensive personal attacks, and topical debate of course shifted the issues into the realm of personal attacks. But despite the flaming, reason eventually prevailed, and those conflicts surpisingly enough helped to shape the formation of the now familiar formal process that was (up to the time of their institution) missing. So I dont care how overworked the understaffed Arbcom is, or how so much someone doesnt ever again want to run into people lacking in some areas of basic civility and decency. The dispute resolution process is something to be promoted, supported, expanded, and upheld --not something to be treated like a dying elephant and relegated back to the good-ol-days of unilateral decrees. I'm disappointed that many good people fail to have this basic trust in the culture Wikipedia has developed, but I attribute that to the natural unawareness of DR history, coming from those not present through that formative period. And while Im at it, anyone seriously citing IAR in the context of a discussion regarding a preemptive permanent block is to me just an example of how out of touch some people are. The notion that we need to enforce anti-troll measures with the same extreme prejudice that those mentioned promote is of course one glaring contradiction, from the point of view of my "so-called moral high ground of un-"principled" relativism."

SV

--- El C el.ceeh@gmail.com wrote:

Greetings, WikiEN-l,

My point then (and so it remains now) was centred on what I termed intrinsic/irreversible properties, the distinction between the inherent and inherited. The latter says: you may be sub-human now, but you can convert to what I believe in and then be human, just-like-me. The former says: you will *always* be sub-human, as an intrinsic trait that cannot be reversed, you can't be just-like-me, ever.

There is an alarming tendency on the part of some participants in this thread, I find; I will go further, a seemingly heartless and ugly current, whose basis is intellectual lazyness at best, and an utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt mindset at worse. The so-called moral high ground of un-"principled" relativism. But before I'm banned from the list on account of flaming (which I nonetheless am taking pains to direct with a measure of moderation, though ambiguities will not save me), I'll pause for a personal example from Wikipedia:

About two months ago or so I encountered an abusive editor who refused to speak to me because, as he told me, and then all of WP:AN in a notice he authored, that he does not, as a matter of principle, speaks to homosexuals (at the event, I never made privy to him whether I was even male or female to begin with, I was only reverting, warning, and eventually banning him for homophobic hate speech on [[Iran]] -- the user was defending the Islamic regime's policy on homosexuality and a certain infamous execution of underage homosexuals in a very prolific fashion, but I digress).

The user explained that he considers homosexuals, and later he added, also Jews, to be lower than animals or something to that effect, etc., noting how he would "love to rid the world of gays and Jews."

Now, there was a certain vocal user, an established user, a user with thousands of edits, who insisted that my actions were contrary to policy and that I should have attempted to resolve my *differences* with that abusive user (well, his proxies, since at that point he was propogating his hate speech via block evasion) through the dispute resolution process. This is what I'm talking about, and of course this exchange led to a whole lotta (wiki and otherwise) love!

Anyway, I do not look forward to the (further ensuing?) agenda-driven(?), moral abstractions about preemptive banning and how SlimVirgin's ban amounted to nothing but that; insinuations on her purported 'selectiveness,' and on how terribly unfair this whole ordeal was to this neo-Nazi and his (surprise-sururpise, who would have guessed it) accompanying *hit list* (ah, yes, but this hit list, unlike some others that I, myself, had been subjected to on Wikipedia, did take place offsite, though I would still argue, within the realm of the known universe). Someone get the poor fellow a worthy and so-called 'righteous' advocate(?). And most of all, I am not looking forward to the flames, but I sure do expect them after having said all that (which nevertheless, isn't actually so much). Alas, I do confess to being mildly curious in seeing how subtle and/or decisive they get...

*Though*, you can always shower me with love, instead. It is within your power and even the realm of possibility. Please shower me with your love. Let it shine, shine, shine. Let it shine.

Love, El_C _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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