Commenter Executions

Looks like he's just avoiding you and going about his merry way, pissing in every room of the house as usual.

And now he's gone!

Recently,I’ve had an email conversation or two with the honchos at Jewcy regarding comments policies, banning and related matters. Since my concerns are grounded mainly in notions of community, it makes more sense to bring them to the netizenry rather than just having private conversations with our overlords. 

 A shorttime ago, Jewcy changed its comments policy such that unregistered users may no longer post their thoughts. I happen to think that this represents a wrong turn-why not let a hundred flowers bloom, even if this allows for a stinkweed or two? Alert readers may recall my earlier, unregistered comments, each a miracle of wit and analysis, bringing to the conceptually thirsting reader the sweet nectar of my insights. How many immiserated Jewcy users will be denied the riches of how many new Ismails, now that maverick non-joiners are forbidden a voice?

 But reasonable people may disagree, and I’ve heard coherent arguments for requiring registration. What bothers me is that no one, reasonable or not, has had the opportunity to discuss this change-it just appeared one day, without notice or rationale, and this seems to me to violate crucial elements of the idea of community that I suspect most Jewcers embrace; transparency, participation, a genuine interest on the part of ruling cabal to know the minds of us users.What we lost by not hearing what I’m sure would have been a thoughtful and impassioned discussion is not balanced by potentially being spared the dull or blockheaded stupidities of this troll or that.

 Which brings me to Rob. It’s not clear to me why this nuisance was banned. I urge readers to have a look at Jewcy’s comments policy, last revised 9 months ago and still, I’m told, a work in progress. As it stands, the policy proscribes,“…comments (that) are blatantly racist, sexist or homophobic…(as well as)…anything personally defamatory or insulting…”, in addition to spamming, sock puppetry and endless cut and pastes. My own inclination would be to make the criteria stricter-i.e., to make it harder to be banned. I’m thinking out and out libel,pornography (unless funny or truly hot)- but constructions like “personallydefamatory or insulting” give me the willies. Shall we decaffeinate Hemingway v. Stein? Hellman v. McCarthy? Vidal v. Capote? Defamations and insults galore,and we are the better for them.

 So how did Rob violate the policy? (and I shouldn’t have to say this, but Rob’s emissions here have been absolute anathema to me on many grounds-he’s dull,repetitive, humorless, a political caveman; I’ve had better conversations with my dog, and she’s a particularly dull instance of her breed. By the way, was that insulting? Defamatory? Should I be banned?). Michael cites Rob’s jejune misapprehensions about neo-conservatism, his humorlessness, his stylistic infelicities. But these failings would disqualify several busloads of contributors (sorry, Jewcy commenters, but you know who you are.) Michael also cites Rob’s confusing someone else’s comment with his (Michael’s) and lacking the grace to acknowledge his mistake when so informed. So he’s an insecure lout, which shouldn’t be an actionable offense. But the clincher seems to have been Rob’s remark to Tara, which I cite in its entirety:

 HeyTara

Where were you when this site was showing Larry Flint's porno on Palin?

Spare me your sisterhood BS. Your a phony.

 Now I suspect that Michael is a fine guy to work for, but perhaps his chivalry and paternal protectiveness towards his colleagues were more responsible than the content of Rob’s ungrammatical little bark for his outrage. Really, do those lines, desperate and shriveled as they may show their author to be, warrant banishment? Answer:nope. To construe these impotent and splenetic yips as violations of the comments policy requires such a stretch as to make the trials of Procrustes seem like a Pilates class.

 Look,if you’re searching for evidence of Rob’s noisomeness, you have only to note that he’s been friended by the right-Zionist harpy Karol Sheinen. (Uh oh. Defamatory? Insulting?). This is a mark of infamy far more damning than his silly bleats of pique.

 The whole affair has an unpalatable, ad hoc timbre, and I’m afraid I catch a whiff of the popular kids ganging up on the social misfit. Having been a pudgy and bookish maladroit before the Miracle of Adolescence gifted me with the sleek and well-contoured form I (and others) enjoyed in my prime, maybe I’m especially sensitive to this dynamic, but I say that Jewcy”s ruling class is acting like a feral pack of Heathers. 

 I retain the romanticized notions of Jewish culture that I think I may have alluded to before in some comment or other; the almost fetishistic embrace of dispute, a suspicion of hierarchies, a commitment to democratic participation,an ear for the smallest voice (note: an attachment to right-wing Zionism tends to mitigate these virtues. Bad for the Jews…and for us all). As an example,my favorite narrative from the Catholic school canon was the story of the barely-pubescent Jesus, more wiseass pisher than Deity, flummoxing the rabbis with his command of halachic nuance and his argumentative wizardry. To my delight and amazement, the graybeards didn’t scold or ostracize the little upstart; on the contrary, they marveled at his erudition. Very ironic that this tale was offered in a school where the tiniest particle of dissent would get you pasted in the face by a dessicated Irish spinster in medieval drag. Guess the moral was that you could question your betters as long as you were Hashem's kid, but otherwise...

 So maybe I labor under a narrow or caricatured or optimistic idea of Jewish culture, but I don’t expect this sort of thing-disembodied authority,pronouncements from on high, no discussion- from the folks running this site.

 Or have you guys secretly started taking Communion?

 

I completely agree with Ismail!

I haven't shared any pearls of my wisdom lately partially because I can't be bothered to sign in - but mostly its because I want to be anonymous sometimes (most of the time). 

Which honchos should we direct our emails to?

 

 

 

 

Ismail, your return to the fray -- even to protest the cause of your prolonged absence from it -- is quite welcome, though again, I can't help but wonder why you feel that the simple act of registering, even anonymously, has hindered your participation.

Everything you say about our prior comments policy, and Rob's failure to meet the letter (if not the spirit) of our somewhat dated grounds for dismissal, is true. However, rules are made to be tweaked and blotted out, particularly in light of tedious exploiters of them. 

Rob had added nothing substantive or worthwhile to the conversation, as you freely admit. Unlike yourself (or Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer, for that matter), he chose not to embellish anything resembling an argument with the occasional piece of invective, but rather made harrassing and browbeating the Jewcy staff and other contributors his entire reason for being. He also frequently derailed comment threads and I daresay discouraged others from joining in. This brings me to my next point: 

Thousands of flowers may still bloom at Jewcy, but that's no excuse for letting the stinkweed suffocate them before they have a chance. Before there was the Internet there were letters to the editor, all of which were vetted before publication. We're not that choosy, but nor are we as undiscriminating as, say, the playpen of Comment is Free.

You and Hadar re-appeared without too much trouble (I like the new avatar, by the way). What's stopping you now? 

 

Although there may not be a halakhic resolution between Michael's concerns and Ismail's, there's quite likely an empiric one.

If the number of "quality" comments (and, one supposes, commenters) increases in Rob's absence relative to when he was here, then the banishment served its purpose.

If not, then Ismail's argument may be vindicated.

As it stands, the blog post (which is quite funny - the picture alone is worth gold) has been up for 6 days, and I've not seen evidence of booming commenter traffic and blooming flowers. This might be a function of pre-existing low levels of audience participation (which, as Ismail reminds us, may have resulted from the registration requirements). But this possible source of confusion in the experiment seems too risky to chance, at least at such an early stage in Jewcy's new format.  

I can't say I miss Rob. And I can't say I'm unsympathetic to the implementation of methods for encouraging intelligent comment, however punitive and arbitrary in the eyes of the commentariat. But I'm reminded of how substantively blunt yet stylistically blathering my own posts were, until Ismail blinded me with the brilliance of, if not his arguments, his own insults. Some might see this as a form of punishment which is unlikely to have much if any redemptive effect on the Robs of the world. But I certainly had a lot of fun in the process.

But then again, we can't all be like me, either.   ;-) 

Surely there must be a rabbinic precedent for how to deliberate Ismail's concerns in a way that might seem less Catholic and more catholic.

I suspect banning commenters and forcing everyone to register doesn't preclude smart comments. This post, which is about the foregoing, has generated a few already...

I don't want to belabor this issue, since it's clear that the poobahs of Jewcy have made up their minds and it is, after all, their store. I would note, though, that my main concern-that the decision to change the comments policy was taken without notice to or consultation with Jewcy's users-remains unacknowledged and unaddressed.

Even the Grey Lady's dotty spinster auntie, The Boston Globe (my hometown paper) alerts its readers when it decides to re-format its comics page or run Wednesday's recipes on Monday. This is simple courtesy.

By the way, I like Comment Is Free quite a bit. I trust myself to winnow the substantive from the empty, and if the reasoned analyses of the sober were not studded with the splenetic eruptions of malcontents, I'd feel poorer.

But I don't think you need to worry about succumbing to anarchy if you allowed an open commentariat. The Guardian has a couple more readers than Jewcy, at least for now, so there's no immediate danger of Jewcy's being overrun by hordes of Robs, as you suggest CIF has been.