I’ve had a number of emails from people who were troubled by our most unladylike commenter.

There are some who think I should moderate all comments, and there are some who think I should delete what was said.

I won’t be deleting it because the conversation that flowed from it was for the most part well thought out and well articulated.

And as of now my only intention for moderating comments will be when I open things up for anonymous comments, and then I will be mostly moderating things to keep agency names from showing up. For those who may be new here, I try to keep agency names off of the blog because the CCAA does not like for the agencies to release information before the CCAA officially releases it, and I don’t want to get an agency into trouble for releasing information that they may know about before the CCAA is ready to make an official announcement.

I think that most discussion is a good thing. Even when we may disagree on something. How many of you have participated in a regulated debate? There are rules to debating - you debate the issue and you do not put the person down. And, if you try to quote medical facts then you really should know what you are talking about or you will make yourself look (at best) uninformed and at worst a bigoted, narrow-minded, idiot. So, when we have disagreements, if you try to think of it in the form of a debate then feel free to (nicely) debate the issue. No personal attacks, check your facts, state your case, and listen to what is being said on both sides. And don’t try to hide an attack inside of some “fact” that you’ve made up. Not all fat people eat pizza, and not all fat people have medical problems. Some of you who have spoken out, go back and read your statements and replace “fat” with a racial word… maybe “black”, or “Asian” or “Jewish”, and see how it sounds. It is never okay to group people together by stereotypes. Please, please, please, figure this out before your child is old enough to understand what you are saying. It doesn’t matter what stereotype you have a problem with, at some point your child will get that there are people who put her into a stereotype and she will have to work through her own feelings about that… do you really want to answer to her why you think that your issues with certain classes of people based on stereotypes is okay?

Which brings me to my next point. While discussion about most things can be a good thing, there are some things that are probably best left alone, aren’t there? I’d like to think that most adults stopped thinking that fat jokes were funny in kindergarten, but there are apparently still people who must make themselves feel better by hurting others. There are only a few stereotypes that it is still socially acceptable to look down on, and unfortunately being fat is one of those - but just because it is socially acceptable, it is still not right. It was socially acceptable to look down on black people 50 years ago, but that still didn’t keep it from being a very very wrong thing to do.

As of right now it is apparently still okay to be overweight, possibly even very overweight, and still adopt from China. We are seeing that there is apparently a line you can cross where you may be denied, and we think that line may be 300 pounds, but we aren’t sure. But the CCAA gets to decide that, and we probably won’t get a say in it. We Americans are used to there almost always being a higher authority we can go to when we feel that something isn’t right. But when we adopt from China this is not the case. The CCAA has the final word.

Now, if we could just get them to tell us what the “final word” is actually going to be. Right?

But, back to my point. My moderating philosophy is to not take a heavy hand unless I have to. I try to have as little in the way of rules as possible, and I will try to always let the discussions go where they go, as long as everyone is being nice, and as long as it’s not a discussion that has no possible resolution - like the religious discussions would be, as no one will ever change anyone’s mind about their spirituality on a discussion board, and the discussion itself will only create discord and hard feelings. I think that bigoted conversation probably falls into that as well. So we have another thing that there is probably no point in debating - bigots are not going to change their mind based on something said on a discussion board. If someone thinks that all fat people are going to die before they are 58 then showing them an 80 year old happy fat person just makes them feel that this is the exception that proves the rule. If someone thinks that all fat people just sit around eating pizza all of the time then do you really think that they are going to bother listening to a rational discussion of why this is a ludicrous statement?

As for my philosophy on banning people. When someone shows that they have no intention of following the board rules then they will be banned, but only after someone has been asked to not do something and they do it anyway. We all have enough stress without there being someone here adding to it just for kicks.

Another request that I had was if I could maybe try to keep the rumor threads and the discussion threads separate. And I do try to do that on our anonymous posting days, but it’s not something that I really feel we can do on most other days. However, I will be keeping this request in mind as I go forward with better ways that we can open up discussion.

I know I’ve rambled a bit with this post, and I’m sorry about that, but for some reason I’m having a hard time expressing all of my thoughts on this. I’ve waited a few days to try to let the thoughts all come together, but they aren’t. So this is the best I can do with it right now.

I feel very fortunate that we have such a great group of people that choose to be a part of the little community we seem to be forming here. I think that there were some very unkind and innacurate things that were said, and I think that most everyone responded appropriately and then moved on. Which is what I now intend to do.. move onto the next subject.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 11:19 amand is filed under Administravia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.