Comment Policies and Abusive Comments

I read a lot of blogs written for and about women. They receive a lot of bullying and abusive comments. I've been thinking recently about what the authors/moderators should do with bullying and abusive comments left in the comment space.

Here is a recent example of a post that got a lot of negative response. Cratesandribbons.com posts about the famous LIFE magazine picture of a sailor and a nurse kissing in Time Square after Japan surrendered at the end of WWII. The author points out the nurse (who was actually a dental assistant)indicated in the interview the kiss was non-consensual and the picture therefore is a snapshot of a sexual assault (though the dental assistant does not consider it a sexual assault herself, she makes it clear it was against her will) 

I find the discussion on the following blog post interesting.
I found that link in the site policies section of captainawkward.com
And I also find this post about comment moderation to have been made with good intentions, but before such a thing became necessary, a bit naive. The author has since apparently taken to moderating, at least a bit.
My favorite discussion of comments is ongoing on Alas, a blog

It really got me thinking about what the purpose for a comment space is, which of course varies from blog to blog. For many feminist blogs, it is at cross purposes to allow bullying and abusive comments to remain, because the point of the blog and comment space is to foster discussion and problem solving about the problems engendered by the patriarchy. Bullies do not contribute to this.

If they bring up a "point" that the intended audience would like to address, this can perhaps be done by making it into a separate post. This strips the abusive commenter of his/her agency and redirects the conversation in way in which the author and the intended audience have control.

Friday

As I sit at my desk, staring down at my feet, trying to motivate myself to push past the despair to reply to some of my 97 unanswered emails, I notice that I am wearing the same shoes, tights, and skirt that I wore to my uncle's funeral, and I think to myself, "this skirt has seen the worst parts of life over and over," and I fervently wish it were Friday.

Star Children

I attended a lecture by Lawrence Kraus the other day at the IHR. It is part of a faculty seminar that is exploring "origins." I'm not sure exactly what he had to add to the origins discussion other than to point out that we are "star children," (which I must say, was moving and poetic--we are all composed from the atoms of long-dead stars) but he did spark interesting discussion about the role of humanities in science. He said that he feels philosophy is pretty useless and should not have much of a role in universities and especially not in science.

Sing a little

Recently I have been thinking about "high stakes" situations in which to theorize about compromise, or agency. It seemed to me that the stakes had to be high on some kind of universal level in order to be worth thinking about or to be impactful in any kind of lasting way. When I read Hull and Katz's "Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling" last semester, I loved the idea that digital story telling could perhaps help a marginalized young person (which to an extent is all young people, whose needs and skills are never valued, only 'crafted') to craft a sense of agency for themselves. But I worried that it would be only that: a sense of agency. One of my concerns perhaps was that the stakes of "succeeding" at DUSTY were too low.

Congestion

I just read this interesting post from BikePortland.org (via my favorite brother) about how turning off traffic lights in one small town in England actually decreased travel time and made everyone stop acting like bunch of toddlers with driver licenses.

I've actually seen something like this before and never stopped to think about it. When the power goes out on a light, people approach the light slowly, cautiously. They take turns, being very careful to make sure the next person in line is the next person to go. It's amazing. Drivers do this without getting together and talking about it or voting on it or even being told to. They just do it.