Vstakan, Thank you so much for your input throughout this whole thread - I’ve found it hugely valuable.
When yesterday morning I woke up to this discussion, I was a bit taken aback - not so much by LXNDR’s decision to make the conversation public (which I fully support) or that he appeared to be so peeved (which I support less, but can understand), but that our earnest efforts had been put in the same frame of reference as Russian style censorship. It struck me as unhelpfully hyperbolic.
As I reflected on it later on, my sympathies for where he was coming from grew as I paused on the fact that on this issue at least, we as individuals have such incredibly different socio-cultural markers to refer to that there’s a lot of room for misinterpreting intention. Vstakan, you really helped me to consolidate that reflection, and alert me to the fact that due to my given conditioning my own sensitivity to the concern of censorship is lower than it might be for others and this is something I wish to take into account going forward.
For me personally, dwelling in my own abstract world of idea construction, I don’t really find it especially useful to think in terms of rights and absolutes, but rather feel that describing things in terms of conventions and negotiations better reflects what we’re actually doing when we attempt to navigate the awfully messy business of interacting with other people. In turn, the difference between the phrases “curtailing freedom of speech” and “curtailing the freedom to be harmful” isn’t really meaningful in my word, it just depends how you want to spin a point. What I do find meaningful, is proper examination of the tangle of problems that lie around particular in/actions and then, when it is necessary to weigh up competing interests in a given circumstance and see what ‘needs’ (yep, by means of subjective judgement) to be prioritised.
In the case in hand, my personal basis for supporting the decision we came to is echoed by Brenna’s comments (although interestingly enough, the details belonging to our private lives didn’t come up at all during the discussion of how to handle the post in question): knowing how grim it is to wade through suicidal ideation and how much of an extra challenge it can be to come across certain material in such desperate mental space, when I advocated for the action we took, what came up on the top of my list of priorities was protecting anyone in that territory from additional misery and I felt it was a matter of such immediacy as to supersede other problems associated with the intervention we made.
On this particular issue I would make the same call again (and I think DaoYaoTao above more or less covered the only other instances in which I’d be comfortable taking similar action). So when I read above your hopeful statement that we’d ‘learned our lesson’ I have to admit to feeling a little trepidatious. But then I read on, and where I feel especially indebted to you, Vstakan, is in your highlighting the shortcomings of the message I sent to LXNDR.
The other mods will, I hope, have a good laugh on this particular point because they know how long I spent trying to write it. It was written through the lens that the initial intervention was made, that it was felt an immediate risk of harm had presented itself and the poster simply had to have this brought to their attention. You’ve excellently shown that this was in fact this was a place to explain things more fully and recognise the that in prioritising one set of interests, another set of interests had to be compromised. Out of curiosity, if as per your last message you now, at least to some extent, see the legitimacy of the action we took, how would you have written the message?
Although, it might readily be agreed that the there have been some unfortunate turns in this business, I actually think it has its really value, too. For me personally, as set out above, but also in terms of a community-wide reflection on moderation. As I noted in a private massage, one thing I found a bit frustrating about the… ‘ferocity’ with which LXNDR approached this matter is that it got in the way of, what I believe is a very valuable point he had to make. I feel the same when he writes:
When I (reluctantly) agreed to be a moderator, I was hoping I could get away with just moderating myself (the devas well know I need to ;-)) and crossing my fingers that everyone else would do the same on account of… y’know that being quite a big thing in the Buddhist training.
