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Social Justice TANK
May. 2nd, 2019 08:49 am I need to be working on getting the sequel to Precinct 13 in order, but it is YET another rainy day and, right now, I don't wanna.
Mason is also home sick. He woke up with a migraine, though I suspect at least some of this is a need for more sleep. It's getting to be the end of the year and he's got a lot of heavy-duty projects all coming due. He's been staying up late to work on them. I don't doubt the migraine, but I think an element of stress may also be involved.
Last night, on my Discord server, there was some drama.
I feel far too old to even be uttering that sentence. Mason loves to tell his friends about his ridiculous parent: "My ima is on Discord. She's in a server for her Tumblr anime RP group." This pronouncement, apparently, can stutter the minds of the youth of today. NO PARENT on earth should be involved in any of those things! Certainly, not all of them at once.
But, not only is it true, but somehow I got roped into being an admin on my Discord server. (For those of you who know nothing of Discord, which frankly, is also me, an admin is basically what it sounds like, the person who has the power to create channels, enforce rules, invite people, kick them out, etc.)
I should preface this with a note: this is NOT a larger server. There are... or rather, were, but I'll get to that in a moment, all of 8 people involved. So, even though Discord is not entirely familiar space to me, I felt comfortable saying "yes," to this role, if only because there is also another admin and a person who is one step down in authority called a mod. So, out of 8 people, we had three with fairly serious authority.
Yet somehow we had a troll.
Not just any old troll, either, but the kind who thinks it's "funny" to post anti-Semitic memes two days after a synagogue shooting. (Not that there is EVER a good time to post that crap, but the timing could not have been less sensitive.)
Alas, because our Discord server did not have posted rules, there was some dithering from my fellow admin and the mod. Can we just kick this guy out? Should we delete the post?
The answers seemed pretty obvious to me, so I assumed (and I think rightly so) that the issue was that no one wanted to be the person to ACTUALLY do the work and confront this bad actor.
I'm 52 years old, a mom, and a veteran of many a writers' group conflict, so I took point. I deleted the post. I PM'd the guy to let him know we'd deleted the post and would be deleting him. He shot back the classic Nazi rhetoric of "learn to take a joke" / "I was just a LITTLE edgy, but FINE I guess this is good-bye," and then he blocked further discussion (because OMG, I would have unloaded on him and I think he knew it.) That was that.
Drama llama ding-dong, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
The biggest hassle, really? The mod and the other admin's post-drama processing. Should we have given him a chance to apologize? My reply, "I'm sorry, but how does one apologize for suggesting killing people is in any way funny?" Also, our private discussion revealed that the others had been PMed by this guy a bunch, in ways that made them uncomfortable. Our other admin wasn't feeling comfortable about "going green" (the indication that you're currently on-line) because they wanted to avoid talking to this troll.
To that, I said, "I don't know how y'all define harassment, but I feel like I'm looking at it."
Because if you're so uncomfortable with the way someone is talking to you that you AVOID going to the place you made (the other admin is the founder of the group) something is wrong. AND IT'S NOT WITH YOU.
I also understand the impulse of "What if this guy is just lonely and attention seeking? Didn't we just send him straight to the Nazis of Reddit?" My reply to that was, "Okay, maybe we did, but don't you think he's already been dipping his toes in that cesspool, because it's not like those kinds of memes roll past MY FEED on the regular? You kind of have to already know some bigots to find bigoted humor funny!" And to post it on such a small group? Especially a group where he'd already participated in a "why do you people always have to make everyone gay?" debate, in which we were far more civil than I think we should should have been. So, frankly, we had ALREADY DONE our due diligence to attempt to "educate" this person. The fact that he would drop an anti-Semitic meme in a queer space already tells *me* that this is not someone who needs a whole lot of second chances.
Anyway.
I actually suspect that the other two were worried about backlash. To be fair to them both, they, as I suggested above, are both queer--though they're definitely both in the more marginalized sections of queer than I am, so I get it. Even Shawn asked me, "Are you using a handle on Discord?" I'm not. I'm using my real name. I would not be hard to find.
But, I've decided that I now know that my t-shirt would read: "Social Justice Main Tank."
Clearly, my job is to put up the shield and march forward to draw the fire so the rest of the team can do their work.
Mason is also home sick. He woke up with a migraine, though I suspect at least some of this is a need for more sleep. It's getting to be the end of the year and he's got a lot of heavy-duty projects all coming due. He's been staying up late to work on them. I don't doubt the migraine, but I think an element of stress may also be involved.
Last night, on my Discord server, there was some drama.
I feel far too old to even be uttering that sentence. Mason loves to tell his friends about his ridiculous parent: "My ima is on Discord. She's in a server for her Tumblr anime RP group." This pronouncement, apparently, can stutter the minds of the youth of today. NO PARENT on earth should be involved in any of those things! Certainly, not all of them at once.
But, not only is it true, but somehow I got roped into being an admin on my Discord server. (For those of you who know nothing of Discord, which frankly, is also me, an admin is basically what it sounds like, the person who has the power to create channels, enforce rules, invite people, kick them out, etc.)
I should preface this with a note: this is NOT a larger server. There are... or rather, were, but I'll get to that in a moment, all of 8 people involved. So, even though Discord is not entirely familiar space to me, I felt comfortable saying "yes," to this role, if only because there is also another admin and a person who is one step down in authority called a mod. So, out of 8 people, we had three with fairly serious authority.
Yet somehow we had a troll.
Not just any old troll, either, but the kind who thinks it's "funny" to post anti-Semitic memes two days after a synagogue shooting. (Not that there is EVER a good time to post that crap, but the timing could not have been less sensitive.)
Alas, because our Discord server did not have posted rules, there was some dithering from my fellow admin and the mod. Can we just kick this guy out? Should we delete the post?
The answers seemed pretty obvious to me, so I assumed (and I think rightly so) that the issue was that no one wanted to be the person to ACTUALLY do the work and confront this bad actor.
I'm 52 years old, a mom, and a veteran of many a writers' group conflict, so I took point. I deleted the post. I PM'd the guy to let him know we'd deleted the post and would be deleting him. He shot back the classic Nazi rhetoric of "learn to take a joke" / "I was just a LITTLE edgy, but FINE I guess this is good-bye," and then he blocked further discussion (because OMG, I would have unloaded on him and I think he knew it.) That was that.
Drama llama ding-dong, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
The biggest hassle, really? The mod and the other admin's post-drama processing. Should we have given him a chance to apologize? My reply, "I'm sorry, but how does one apologize for suggesting killing people is in any way funny?" Also, our private discussion revealed that the others had been PMed by this guy a bunch, in ways that made them uncomfortable. Our other admin wasn't feeling comfortable about "going green" (the indication that you're currently on-line) because they wanted to avoid talking to this troll.
To that, I said, "I don't know how y'all define harassment, but I feel like I'm looking at it."
Because if you're so uncomfortable with the way someone is talking to you that you AVOID going to the place you made (the other admin is the founder of the group) something is wrong. AND IT'S NOT WITH YOU.
I also understand the impulse of "What if this guy is just lonely and attention seeking? Didn't we just send him straight to the Nazis of Reddit?" My reply to that was, "Okay, maybe we did, but don't you think he's already been dipping his toes in that cesspool, because it's not like those kinds of memes roll past MY FEED on the regular? You kind of have to already know some bigots to find bigoted humor funny!" And to post it on such a small group? Especially a group where he'd already participated in a "why do you people always have to make everyone gay?" debate, in which we were far more civil than I think we should should have been. So, frankly, we had ALREADY DONE our due diligence to attempt to "educate" this person. The fact that he would drop an anti-Semitic meme in a queer space already tells *me* that this is not someone who needs a whole lot of second chances.
Anyway.
I actually suspect that the other two were worried about backlash. To be fair to them both, they, as I suggested above, are both queer--though they're definitely both in the more marginalized sections of queer than I am, so I get it. Even Shawn asked me, "Are you using a handle on Discord?" I'm not. I'm using my real name. I would not be hard to find.
But, I've decided that I now know that my t-shirt would read: "Social Justice Main Tank."
Clearly, my job is to put up the shield and march forward to draw the fire so the rest of the team can do their work.