![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwex(If you missed the antecedent to all this, it's at https://drwex.dreamwidth.org/1009674.html - Reading it isn't strictly necessary to understanding this entry, but it'll help with context.)
The original questioner clarified that one of their concerns was:
I want to write about this, because I think this is a very hard problem, to which we don't have a good answer. So we (and I mean all of us, not just Arisia) are going on a case-by-case basis, and I think that's the right thing to do, even though I like systems that are predictable and not warty.
It's important first to talk about what "held accountable" means. In Mr Kimmel's case, he was deemed not to be a good choice to be a panelist this year. Being a panelist is a special privilege - there are more applicants for Arisia panel spots than there are spots. It's also a special responsibility because panels are an important part of why people go to Arisia. If panelists aren't doing their jobs to inform, engage, entertain, enlighten, share then they're making the whole convention experience less.
Additionally, although no panelist represents Arisia, the kinds of people that the Convention puts on panels says a lot about the convention. Elsewhere I've been talking about what "Arisia culture" means and arguing that a large part of that is formed by things like "this is how we do things" and "we don't do that here". So when Arisia puts someone on panels they are permitting that person's behavior to be calculated in the approved culture. Every Arisian must follow the Code of Conduct (https://www.arisia.org/Code-of-Conduct) but Staff are particularly called out as being held to a higher standard. Panelists are not staff but their position in the front of the room places them under heightened scrutiny.
The question, then, is about how far to extend the bounds of that scrutiny and why do we extend it? I've tried several ways to produce scales and dimensions to guide "how far" and principles to talk about why. Each one has collapsed under actual examples. Let's walk through this a bit:
People should be able to say what they want on their personal Facebook pages and the like, surely. Except, if someone is posting racist texts, homophobic jokes, or trash-talking women then why shouldn't we take this as evidence that this person would not be a good panelist at Arisia?
It's not a question of whether you are 'allowed' to say those things. Of course you are. The question is, what should Arisia say when someone asks, "Why are you allowing this person to be on your panels when they post this racist stuff?" Saying, "well, it's their personal page so we don't care" doesn't cut it. We do care because we're trying to (re)build a better community.
Well, sure, but there's got to be a limit somewhere. You wouldn't worry about what YouTube videos someone liked? That seems petty and trivial.
Yeah, it does. Right up to the point where you find out someone is consistently thumbs-up rating Daily Stormer videos and Alex Jones conspiracy stuff. At what point does that become a reflection on their character and a thing you want to take into consideration when you ask if this person should be part of our community?
I believe that we should respond to actions that occur outside Arisia's formal walls. I don't think it's possible for us to fulfill a mission of prioritizing the safety of the community by closing our eyes to things and saying "Well, that happened somewhere else so it's not our concern." At a minimum, that permits an offender to move from space to space with no consequence since their offensive behavior would happen "out of sight" of the community's Code or norms.
I also believe that not holding people accountable has costs. If we tolerate misbehavior elsewhere then we drive away people who are uncomfortable with that misbehavior. It's a reasonable question to ask whether, if a person misbehaved in a non-Arisia space, would they repeat that in Arisia space? A cautious person might see that as an unacceptable risk and therefore be driven away.
It's worth noting here that we're most often talking about disadvantaged people. People who are threatened by violent behavior, transgressive speech, and hostile attitudes are much more likely to be people who are already marginalized by society. That means they have less power to respond, and less opportunity to have a voice. By holding people accountable for ideas communicated in a non-Arisia forum, Arisia is acting to strengthen those with a weaker hand. That, too, loops back to this idea of "how we do things" and the culture we're (re)building. We're saying that, just like Staff, people with privilege and power are going to be held to higher standards. Is that "fair"? No, but neither is an unequal society in which I get a free pass for stuff just because I'm a cis white male. Any community standard is by definition "unfair" to someone; the myth of tolerance is that it's equally good for everyone. It's not. Tolerance acts within the privilege structures and, if you're not careful, it reinforces inequality.
I believe very strongly in the freedom to speak. I believe equally strongly that words have meaning and people must be understood in light of the speech they chose to make. Mr Kimmel has every right to his words; what he doesn't get is the freedom to speak and then have the world go on pretending he didn't speak.
**deep breath; we're about to cross from territory I'm pretty confident about into freakin' quicksand**
All this is right and good and yet it still doesn't give me reliable principles to work from because three things are built into this framework that require me to treat cases individually.
First, it assumes that people neatly divide into groups we'd call "well-behaved" and "transgressive". Much work has been done in relation to individuals who are clearly and repeatedly transgressive. "Missing stair" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair) terminology and its use are a great example of how we have often failed to deal with repeated boundary-pushing, context-skipping, and personally entangled problem individuals. But identifying a true missing stair isn't an easy task and I can't give you a good hard-and-fast rule for saying whether or not someone is a missing stair. At best, I know it when I see it.
More often, though, people who transgress aren't missing stairs or worse. They're people who made errors. Maybe they got drunk and didn't take 'no' for an answer. Maybe they didn't understand that absence of a "no" isn't a "yes". Maybe they're part of a relationship that was deeply fucked up and both people really need to get away from each other and do some work on themselves. Remember that our core goal is to prioritize community safety. Once a person is understood not to be a repeat transgressor it's reasonable to ask what risk they pose to that safety. People like this no longer fall into neat categories; they're individuals who have to be evaluated on individual bases.
Second, everything I said above assumes a perfection of judgment that just doesn't exist in the real world. We absolutely do our best to try and suss out what actually happened. "He said/she said" isn't just a dialectic, it's a reality. Often what happens is between two people behind closed doors or out of sight of others. Deliberate offenders often take great pains to cover their tracks, gaslight, and create plausible deniability. But normal people also don't go around thinking "what's my alibi for this?" As a result, people get caught in situations where they see things one way and another person sees it another way.
To work through this we rely on principles (e.g. believe the accuser because false accusations are exceedingly rare) and we use as much supplementary information as we can. But we're wrong some of the time. If we don't operate on a case-by-case basis there's no room for admitting and correcting our own errors. As humans, we overreact sometimes. We're terrible at estimating risk - it's why humans are afraid to fly and fine with the murder machines we call 'cars'. We're also walking piles of biases. Expecting perfect judgment is ridiculous.
Third, nothing in the principles talks about time, or the reality that people change. We need not only to say "this person should have understood that absence of no is not yes" but also "that's a thing they did in the past and they seem to understand it now." We, both as society in the small and in the large, are utterly fumbling over this one. We have big examples (Louis CK, Kevin Spacey) of people who seem to think they can just go away for a bit and then come back as if nothing ever happened. We have examples of people who are given one or two or three year breaks from Arisia and then come back and behave well. But if you think I (or really anyone else) can tell when a person has changed enough that they do not pose a risk to that overarching community safety... well, share your methods please.
Personally I'm a proponent of "ban the box" (http://bantheboxcampaign.org/). The notion that someone's past transgressions should follow them around for the rest of their lives is abhorrent to me. Arisia bans people forever, sometimes. I think some of those decisions are right. I don't know how to reconcile these two beliefs. Somewhere along the line, for the vast majority of people who've transgressed, there needs to be a re-evaluation of whether keeping that transgressor away still promotes the overall community safety. When should that happen and how remains a case-by-case thing for me.
I wish there was a neat answer, an ending or moral I could put here to wrap all this up nicely. There isn't one. This is a big hard problem and Arisia's instance of it is only a microcosm of the serious challenges our society is wrestling with. But it's my microcosm and a thing I continue to care about, deeply. For myself, I have a lot more reading and thinking to do. In about three weeks we're going to have a convention and after that convention there will be a stack of IRs that get handed to the Eboard and we're going to have to figure out how to apply our principles ... on a case by case basis.
Wish me luck.
The original questioner clarified that one of their concerns was:
"it didn't seem fair for somebody to be held accountable by Arisia for ideas communicated on a non-Arisia forum."
I want to write about this, because I think this is a very hard problem, to which we don't have a good answer. So we (and I mean all of us, not just Arisia) are going on a case-by-case basis, and I think that's the right thing to do, even though I like systems that are predictable and not warty.
It's important first to talk about what "held accountable" means. In Mr Kimmel's case, he was deemed not to be a good choice to be a panelist this year. Being a panelist is a special privilege - there are more applicants for Arisia panel spots than there are spots. It's also a special responsibility because panels are an important part of why people go to Arisia. If panelists aren't doing their jobs to inform, engage, entertain, enlighten, share then they're making the whole convention experience less.
Additionally, although no panelist represents Arisia, the kinds of people that the Convention puts on panels says a lot about the convention. Elsewhere I've been talking about what "Arisia culture" means and arguing that a large part of that is formed by things like "this is how we do things" and "we don't do that here". So when Arisia puts someone on panels they are permitting that person's behavior to be calculated in the approved culture. Every Arisian must follow the Code of Conduct (https://www.arisia.org/Code-of-Conduct) but Staff are particularly called out as being held to a higher standard. Panelists are not staff but their position in the front of the room places them under heightened scrutiny.
The question, then, is about how far to extend the bounds of that scrutiny and why do we extend it? I've tried several ways to produce scales and dimensions to guide "how far" and principles to talk about why. Each one has collapsed under actual examples. Let's walk through this a bit:
People should be able to say what they want on their personal Facebook pages and the like, surely. Except, if someone is posting racist texts, homophobic jokes, or trash-talking women then why shouldn't we take this as evidence that this person would not be a good panelist at Arisia?
It's not a question of whether you are 'allowed' to say those things. Of course you are. The question is, what should Arisia say when someone asks, "Why are you allowing this person to be on your panels when they post this racist stuff?" Saying, "well, it's their personal page so we don't care" doesn't cut it. We do care because we're trying to (re)build a better community.
Well, sure, but there's got to be a limit somewhere. You wouldn't worry about what YouTube videos someone liked? That seems petty and trivial.
Yeah, it does. Right up to the point where you find out someone is consistently thumbs-up rating Daily Stormer videos and Alex Jones conspiracy stuff. At what point does that become a reflection on their character and a thing you want to take into consideration when you ask if this person should be part of our community?
I believe that we should respond to actions that occur outside Arisia's formal walls. I don't think it's possible for us to fulfill a mission of prioritizing the safety of the community by closing our eyes to things and saying "Well, that happened somewhere else so it's not our concern." At a minimum, that permits an offender to move from space to space with no consequence since their offensive behavior would happen "out of sight" of the community's Code or norms.
I also believe that not holding people accountable has costs. If we tolerate misbehavior elsewhere then we drive away people who are uncomfortable with that misbehavior. It's a reasonable question to ask whether, if a person misbehaved in a non-Arisia space, would they repeat that in Arisia space? A cautious person might see that as an unacceptable risk and therefore be driven away.
It's worth noting here that we're most often talking about disadvantaged people. People who are threatened by violent behavior, transgressive speech, and hostile attitudes are much more likely to be people who are already marginalized by society. That means they have less power to respond, and less opportunity to have a voice. By holding people accountable for ideas communicated in a non-Arisia forum, Arisia is acting to strengthen those with a weaker hand. That, too, loops back to this idea of "how we do things" and the culture we're (re)building. We're saying that, just like Staff, people with privilege and power are going to be held to higher standards. Is that "fair"? No, but neither is an unequal society in which I get a free pass for stuff just because I'm a cis white male. Any community standard is by definition "unfair" to someone; the myth of tolerance is that it's equally good for everyone. It's not. Tolerance acts within the privilege structures and, if you're not careful, it reinforces inequality.
I believe very strongly in the freedom to speak. I believe equally strongly that words have meaning and people must be understood in light of the speech they chose to make. Mr Kimmel has every right to his words; what he doesn't get is the freedom to speak and then have the world go on pretending he didn't speak.
**deep breath; we're about to cross from territory I'm pretty confident about into freakin' quicksand**
All this is right and good and yet it still doesn't give me reliable principles to work from because three things are built into this framework that require me to treat cases individually.
First, it assumes that people neatly divide into groups we'd call "well-behaved" and "transgressive". Much work has been done in relation to individuals who are clearly and repeatedly transgressive. "Missing stair" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair) terminology and its use are a great example of how we have often failed to deal with repeated boundary-pushing, context-skipping, and personally entangled problem individuals. But identifying a true missing stair isn't an easy task and I can't give you a good hard-and-fast rule for saying whether or not someone is a missing stair. At best, I know it when I see it.
More often, though, people who transgress aren't missing stairs or worse. They're people who made errors. Maybe they got drunk and didn't take 'no' for an answer. Maybe they didn't understand that absence of a "no" isn't a "yes". Maybe they're part of a relationship that was deeply fucked up and both people really need to get away from each other and do some work on themselves. Remember that our core goal is to prioritize community safety. Once a person is understood not to be a repeat transgressor it's reasonable to ask what risk they pose to that safety. People like this no longer fall into neat categories; they're individuals who have to be evaluated on individual bases.
Second, everything I said above assumes a perfection of judgment that just doesn't exist in the real world. We absolutely do our best to try and suss out what actually happened. "He said/she said" isn't just a dialectic, it's a reality. Often what happens is between two people behind closed doors or out of sight of others. Deliberate offenders often take great pains to cover their tracks, gaslight, and create plausible deniability. But normal people also don't go around thinking "what's my alibi for this?" As a result, people get caught in situations where they see things one way and another person sees it another way.
To work through this we rely on principles (e.g. believe the accuser because false accusations are exceedingly rare) and we use as much supplementary information as we can. But we're wrong some of the time. If we don't operate on a case-by-case basis there's no room for admitting and correcting our own errors. As humans, we overreact sometimes. We're terrible at estimating risk - it's why humans are afraid to fly and fine with the murder machines we call 'cars'. We're also walking piles of biases. Expecting perfect judgment is ridiculous.
Third, nothing in the principles talks about time, or the reality that people change. We need not only to say "this person should have understood that absence of no is not yes" but also "that's a thing they did in the past and they seem to understand it now." We, both as society in the small and in the large, are utterly fumbling over this one. We have big examples (Louis CK, Kevin Spacey) of people who seem to think they can just go away for a bit and then come back as if nothing ever happened. We have examples of people who are given one or two or three year breaks from Arisia and then come back and behave well. But if you think I (or really anyone else) can tell when a person has changed enough that they do not pose a risk to that overarching community safety... well, share your methods please.
Personally I'm a proponent of "ban the box" (http://bantheboxcampaign.org/). The notion that someone's past transgressions should follow them around for the rest of their lives is abhorrent to me. Arisia bans people forever, sometimes. I think some of those decisions are right. I don't know how to reconcile these two beliefs. Somewhere along the line, for the vast majority of people who've transgressed, there needs to be a re-evaluation of whether keeping that transgressor away still promotes the overall community safety. When should that happen and how remains a case-by-case thing for me.
I wish there was a neat answer, an ending or moral I could put here to wrap all this up nicely. There isn't one. This is a big hard problem and Arisia's instance of it is only a microcosm of the serious challenges our society is wrestling with. But it's my microcosm and a thing I continue to care about, deeply. For myself, I have a lot more reading and thinking to do. In about three weeks we're going to have a convention and after that convention there will be a stack of IRs that get handed to the Eboard and we're going to have to figure out how to apply our principles ... on a case by case basis.
Wish me luck.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:26 am (UTC)My list is not empty, and having witnessed the level of discourse in that particular thread I feel justified in adding Mr. Kimmel to said list. (Doubly irrelevant this year since I'm taking this Arisia off, of course.)
As for the question of when/whether someone has improved: if they are doubling down on the problematic discourse or behavior, they clearly aren't yet ready to come back. Sadly, this is only a negative indicator....
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:29 pm (UTC)Y'know in all the years I've been doing Arisia panels I've never used the "don't want to be on a panel with" thing. It's just never crossed my mind.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:40 pm (UTC)I agree that we (Arisia, because I am part of the team that owns this now) have done many things that abused and reduced trust. Part of the reason I'm writing these long-winded Arisia entries is to give some insight into how the current leadership are wrangling with things. Our apology to the community (https://corp.arisia.org/Apology-2018-11-23) I think addresses this issue directly.
I didn't intend for this two-parter to be about incident reports, though people have declared that Mr Kimmel's writing rose to a level they felt worth reporting. I want to address the questions of whether, how, and why Arisia looks at things that happen outside the convention walls.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 07:07 am (UTC)Editorial: Should this be "2 of 2"? I skimmed and saw "1 of 2" and thought my feed was screwed up. :)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:01 pm (UTC)Being a panelist is a special privilege - there are more applicants for Arisia panel spots than there are spots. It's also a special responsibility because panels are an important part of why people go to Arisia. If panelists aren't doing their jobs to inform, engage, entertain, enlighten, share then they're making the whole convention experience less.
Being a panelist is a privilege. Much more of a privilege than just attending the con. Arisia has to be selective about whom to choose to be panelists. Effectively there is competition among potential panelists.
You're fretting about the case of Mr. Kimmel with the framing of justice and punishment. Look at it instead with the framing of an HR person with a stack of resumes that exceeds the number of open reqs. If something unsavory surfaces regarding an otherwise-strong candidate, do the HR person and hiring manager wring their hands and say "dear me, is it just to hold this person responsible for everything?" I think, not usually. Not unless they really really wanted to hire that candidate in particular, such as if the candidate is the hiring manager's old buddy from way back.
Are the pro-Kimmel people who criticize the decision to not put Kimmel on panels favoring him because he's a member of the old boy's club of SMOFdom?
How about consciously seeking some younger, less white, less male voices to give their perspectives on films at Arisia? I'd like to hear some less white and less male opinions on what films to watch.
Look at it this way: Arisia has to "hire" the best panelists to attract the "audience" it wants to attract. The grumpy old white people are dying off and becoming less relevant. Arisia should be trying to attract younger, more diverse consumers of cons. Of the many talented people who want to be panelists at Arisia, which ones will appeal to the people whom we want to be repeat customers? I think it's fair to take in data from social media to inform those decisions.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 03:49 pm (UTC)Are the pro-Kimmel people who criticize the decision to not put Kimmel on panels favoring him because he's a member of the old boy's club of SMOFdom?
I don't entirely know. I have heard two arguments in favor of Mr Kimmel's continued participation: one is that he is a major participant in several annual panels (e.g. Movie Year in Review) that are always SRO and highly rated by the audience. The argument goes that removing a panelist whose behavior on years of past panels has been well-received is an error in judgment.
I tend to disagree with that argument, but I can see why people make it.
The second, more prevalent argument I read, is the one I addressed - that it's none of Arisia's business what people say outside Arisia space. Our Code of Conduct talks about behavior in Arisia-run spaces and so it is unfair (the argument goes) to apply those rules elsewhere. I disagree very strongly with this second argument and wanted to elaborate my thinking.
Arisia should be trying to attract younger, more diverse consumers of cons. Of the many talented people who want to be panelists at Arisia, which ones will appeal to the people whom we want to be repeat customers?
I think that's similar to the point I made in my candidate position posting, where I talked about building the Arisia that we want to pass on to our kids. Yours, like mine, can inherit something you and I will be proud to pass on to them, and I'd like to be part of making that happen.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 03:12 pm (UTC)For example, I work as an adjunct professor. I was initially hired out of a pool of candidates who as a starting point had all been on equal footing. It's not a one-time hire. I have to reapply to teach each semester, and the exact courseload could theoretically vary from semester to semester. But at the same time, now that I've been hired once, I'm "in". I have taught a specific course once, which strongly qualifies me to teach it again, and searching for new candidates is a lot of work. As long as I keep showing up and don't do anything egregious, there's a good chance that I can keep teaching this course for as long as I want to.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 04:46 pm (UTC)Now that I'm sixty years old, I've lived through lots of change, and I've seen the "right" words for things change over and over again. I've seen what's "obviously" the correct behavior change from one thing to another. I don't want to say that older people should be given a free pass to talk shit or to fail to live up to current norms. I do want to say that older people may transgress through ignorance rather than malice, and I'd want education to be the first step for anyone who seems to be confused rather than mean-spirited. (I'm not talking about Mr. Kimmel here, just thinking about older folks in general.)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 03:54 pm (UTC)We all mess up. We get angry, we do mean things, we make bad decisions. Some kinds of messing up are small things that everyone moves on from, others can land you in prison, and of course there's a whole range of stuff in between.
Whether or not we are aware of having messed up at the time that we do it, a big part of how we learn what "counts" is by experiencing the consequences. In _Engineering for a Safer World_ (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world), Nancy Leveson writes about various facets of how sociotechnical systems contribute to (often catastrophic) accidents. She notes a pattern of investigations into why big accidents occurred concluding that the problem was some low-level employee not adhering to safety standards. But that in reality almost no one adheres to safety standards 100% of the time. Instead, people make mistakes and bend the rules and whether or not these broken rules produce negative outcomes determine how seriously those rules are taken, moving forward. Sometimes this decision is actually just fine. Sometimes it lays the systemic groundwork for a catastrophic outcome. Sometimes hindsight is 20-20.
If you go through 30+ years of adult life behaving in ways that hurt people and you do not experience any personal catastrophes, and maybe don't even hear the voices of the people you hurt, life moves on, and you (and others with similar backgrounds and patterns of behavior) continue to thrive, I can imagine how easy it might be for a person to trick themselves into thinking that the hurt they inflicted must not have been so very bad.
What is happening right now, with increasingly widespread examination of privilege, rape culture, the #metoo movement, and so on, is a big learning process as the feedback loops following certain behaviors are undergoing rapid change. You do something a thousand times with no enduring consequences, and then the thousand-and-first time something that you'd taken for granted gets taken away. A response of "where did *that* come from?" is natural. In the case of Mr. Kimmel and many others who have been in the spotlight recently, it is not good, healthy, compassionate, or enlightened but insofar as we respond to conditioning, it is still natural. The flip side of this is that what is happening now, in 2018-2019, might be just the first stages of a long learning/relearning process. We don't know how this will play out.
Another part of the learning process is the reactions of bystanders, who of course have made their own mistakes in the past. Maybe I see someone from my social circles do something she has done a thousand times before with no ill consequences and then, in the changed cultural environment, they are suddenly be stripped of a status-marker for the exact same behavior, and questions arise about what *other* rules might be changing. It can be scary.
So, I very much hear where you're coming from. It's not so much that it's hard for old dogs to learn new tricks as that it is hard to unlearn old behaviors that we've been trained to perceive as okay.
Hopefully in the years and decades ahead we can make the conversation, and the ebb and flow of consequences for behaviors, productive enough that we can all learn to be better.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 04:11 pm (UTC)I worked with Ms Leveson at a job many lifetimes ago and had utterly lost track of what she's been up to since. I think I'll go get that book.
I also think that using a systems engineering thought framework for Code of Conduct and Incident Reporting activities might give some interesting new insights. Thanks for that.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 04:34 pm (UTC)Really cool that you've worked with her. I've only taken a look at the first few chapters of the book, but from what I've read she seems like one of the most clear-headed thinkers I've encountered.
The book is available for free online from MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world). It's a real tome, though, so I can see the value in having a hard copy to flip through if you can find one.
Engineering a Safer World
Date: 2019-01-04 02:58 pm (UTC)http://psas.scripts.mit.edu/home/2019-stamp-workshop/
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 11:55 pm (UTC)I'm currently going through chemotherapy for breast cancer, and it makes me so tired that I can only keep my eyes open for a couple of hours a day. Sadly, that means that I don't have the spoons to give you the kind of thoughtful reply you deserve, but I wanted you to know that I did read and appreciate what you said.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-04 12:01 am (UTC)Your words are greatly appreciated.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-04 12:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 04:06 pm (UTC)Now that I'm sixty years old, I've lived through lots of change, and I've seen the "right" words for things change over and over again.
At not quite forty, I've seen this too. On the other hand, I'm not aware of any cases of people having power stripped away or other tangible consequences for a transgression as minor as using the "wrong" words for things, assuming that their intentions are otherwise good and sincere.
I don't particularly enjoy having my language corrected when my intentions were good, but there's a big difference between hearing "hey you shouldn't say that" and having the words[1] you use be the basis for rejecting a job application, or even an application to serve as a panelist at Arisia.
If there *are* cases of this happening, I'm interested to hear about them.
------------------------
[1] EDIT: what I really mean is "the vocabulary you use". "Words" is a broader category. There are also clear cases where vocabulary is intentionally selected as a dog-whistle, which I think is a different thing.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 04:47 pm (UTC)If someone is a red-pill MRA certifiable a**hole, or a vocal fascist in any medium, or a transphobe who keeps doubling down on their arguments and misgendering people, and it comes to the attention of Arisia leadership, they are perfectly justified in punting the person from panels, leadership roles, or whatever other events they choose. That's the bright line.
For less-bright lines -- individual incidents, mistakes, temporary insanity, thoughtlessness, etc., -- that's why we have humans and not machines in charge of this process. I like the "check for patterns" behavior. That's more likely to identify and punish bad actors than people who were randomly thoughtless. The humans who are currently in charge clearly have the right priorities and are working to make things better.
Good luck!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-01 08:23 pm (UTC)Thank you for writing these
Date: 2019-01-01 08:02 pm (UTC)Re: Thank you for writing these
Date: 2019-01-01 08:20 pm (UTC)might be of use to you. It's like "Code of Conduct" 101 and 102 stuff.
Re: Thank you for writing these
Date: 2019-01-01 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 10:13 pm (UTC)To me -- because I'm armchair quarterbacking -- this seems very straightforward to me. But aside from not being in the hot seat, I'm willing to waste your time writing this :) because I think I do have a valid point: perspective. I'm not in the thick of things; I'm pretty distant. I only started going to Arisia, nrr, 3, 4 years ago?
So yes, if someone says dumb stuff, bang, consequences follow them. Not only do I see no issue with this, I see big issues with not following this.
Fairly recently, I've stopped focusing on "what is fair for the person being accused?" and instead focusing on "what is fair for the next person who looks just like the person who was harrassed?". Now I'm not down in the weeds of this particular case, but rather, what I want the community to be like. Which, incidentally, means arguments like "freeze peach" carries nada weight with me: buddy, we're not the gov't, we're not the State-sanctioned implementers of Force. We're a goddamn club of nerds. Guess what: you're outta here, bub.
But yeah: I don't care what old White guys think who are screaming "but I'm super popular!" or "but I've done so much for the convention!". Nope, not even a little interested. I'm interested in what, say, the high school person who is musing about coming to their first Arisia is thinking and weighing. And this gets doubled for every demographic we don't have in common, because well, those people's lived experiences are very difficult for me to imagine. Since I basically have all the privileges, I (strongly) feel it behooves me to focus on that next hypothetical person when addressing the current incident.
Of course, that's very easy to say when my little nerd club doesn't even have 20 people in it, soooo yeeeaaaah, reality check for me, please. :)
This is where I circle back to: thank you for not only being willing to step up as VP, but for also writing about your thought process.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 11:00 pm (UTC)And on and on. Popular speech - that is, the speech of generally white cis het men - is usually not in need of protection. Freedom of speech is crucial for exactly that unpopular speech that marginalized people need to speak. I believe that if we let up on that, the immediate result will be to shove people further down, into closets, and out of a public arena where they might garner support for their (take your pick) radical, queer, communist, socialist, ideas.
I think, also, that free speech does not mean a free ride. As I said, you can't both speak and then expect the world to go on as if you had not spoken.