emk wrote:James29 wrote:If we end up with a new site, and more control over how things are run, I'm suggesting that we think of the forum as a voluntary private association with a set of specific rules about what behaviors are appropriate. These rules might include things like "No politics and religion" (which is certainly a popular rule in many other private associations). Everybody would have the choice to live within the forum's rules, or to leave. But individual posts that broke those rules could still be removed by the moderators. I don't think this qualifies as "aggression" in the technical libertarian sense of that word, does it? Private associations can and do establish rules, as a (sometimes informal) version of freedom of contract.
As for gender neutral language, I do understand that different groups of native speakers have widely divergent opinions about using "he" to refer to persons of unknown gender. I do indeed believe that your colleagues might cross-out singular "they" as a grammatical error. But in other US circles, the use of generic "he" would seem to be both grammatically odd and also deliberately rude, or even be against written corporate style guides. Do you have any concrete suggestions about how a diverse private association could resolve this question in a way that treated everybody with respect? Is there any common ground here, or is this an irreconcilable difference?
You have a very good understanding of the issue. I think of it as more of a pacifist point of view than a libertarian.
If we want to get technical, rdearman (or whoever owns the site) gets the final say, period. It does not really matter what anyone else wants to do. He can do whatever he wants and that's that. I am fine with him doing whatever he wants because there is no other alternative. That is how the world works. As you point out, that is a different issue than whether or not someone chooses to participate in the discussions on the website under his rules.
To the extent you are seeking guidance on rules rdearman wants to impose on his website, we are having a nice discussion. I had no problems whatsoever with the rules or moderators of the previous website and suggest not doing things much different (the one possible exception I can think of was there was a very useful - but blunt - poster named Cainntear who was banned for some reason. I have no idea why he/she was banned and it could have been for a very good reason, but the absence of Cainntear's posts was quite a loss). I even recall myself making a one sentence post where I simply said who I supported for president and I have no problem with the fact that it was justifiably deleted as political.
Rdearman, through the moderators, can do whatever he wants. I, personally, don't like to see other posters resort to the use of aggression, coercion or guilt if someone disagrees with them on a legitimate point. Your question about whether there is a "concrete suggestion about how a diverse private association could resolve this question [about using a singular "they"]" is an example of exactly what I am talking about. If I, or anyone else, have an honest opinion (or in this situation, a perfectly legitimate use of the English language) that someone else chooses to find "offensive" that is a problem the person has with the English language and not me. If that person chooses to resort to aggression by calling me "uneducated", "discriminatory" and a "micro-aggressor" I don't think the aggressive posts should be deleted, rather, I'm just going to call it for what it is in hopes that an honest dialogue helps make progress on reducing likelihood of well-intentioned people resorting to aggression and coercion when they are confronted by an opinion that is different than their own. Jumping to conclusions about what some other person thinks in their mind is very dangerous... especially when the conclusions are drawn from generalities about what ethnic/cultural group the "offending" individual belongs to.
My suggestion is to not change things much as the previous site worked fine. Be very cautious about deleting/banning posts/posters because you never know what someone else thinks and they have an absolute right to believe what they believe. Before you arrest the person who yelled "fire in a crowded theater" check your assumptions and ask if there was actually a fire.