Posts by giovanni tiso
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Sacha,
Practical request: can you please link to a forum that you reckon does a good job with that.
Not a current generalist forum, no, not in English at least. One can find excellent and highly accessible writing outside of socialist discussion forums (Scott Hamilton at Reading the Maps and Dougal McNeill at Neu Hauf-Way Hoose are foremost in New Zealand in my books) but no model of what I'm thinking of. Of course there aren't very many open communities a-la PAS to begin with, which is rather the problem. However Usenet had some class-literate politically focussed groups back in the day, and it really shouldn't be an impossible thing to countenance. So long as the lack of that dimension on PAS is even perceived as a problem, and I'm not at all sure that it is.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Sacha,
And I have asked a couple of simple questions to help shed light on what Giovanni expects which he seems to have ignored
Eh what? Ask them again, will you, I didn't wilfully ignore anything. It's been reasonably hard to keep up.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm not being grumpy - although I can't say I enjoyed the treatment I got by Damian and Emma on this thread, and I really don't revel in the stuff as much as people might think that I do - but I have been an unproductive member of the community for at least the last year. I always lead the discussion in a variation of the same dead end, and can't stop it from happening again the following time. It's... unfortunate.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
Gio's been holding forth recently (here and in other venues) about what a ghastly concept it is and I've tried to take it on the chin.
Respectfully, you may possibly have formed a somewhat exaggerated impression of the extent in which the things I say or write outside of here are about you or Public Address. But feel free to inform Damian that he can come out from under the blankets, I'm not taking part in further threads on PAS. As soon as people stop calling me out I'll stop popping up in this one, promise.
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I want the permalink to this comment etched on my tombstone. Ta.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm glad you finally got from "I'm entitled to be difficult" to "I’m sorry if I appeared difficult".
That's a hard one to untangle. I think that on occasion it's both okay and fitting to be difficult. Simply because otherwise we never get to go the the places where we are made uncomfortable, or we challenge each other, and if keep not going there we harden boundaries and reinforce our biases. That said, I'm sorry if I was needlessly difficult. And if I didn't get my point across, which is a problem I've had on PAS for at least a year, to my constant regret and occasional puzzlement.
But Usenet's a public square. The Trade Me forums are a public square. Yahoo.co.nz is a public square. They're frequently horrible. I began discussing on Usenet in 1993, but withdrew, like a lot of the the people here, because I got sick of it. Not-turning-into-Usenet is a motivation.
Some usenet groups at their best might have been a public square, briefly, in the sense that I mean - which is the diametric opposite of a TradeMe forum - of places of civic (and not just civil) discourse. I think PAS at its best can be that and that it doesn't involve rejecting moderation. But yes there would be trade-offs I imagine, and it's really up to you as much as as to the community where it goes. The wholly convivial and collaborative model works magnificently in the Capture posts and threads, where you have reaped the results of years of work growing the community - I wouldn't dream of faulting you there. I think when it comes to politics, in the broad sense, the discussions have become very limited/limiting, and it may be where the model works less well.
If I recall rightly (don't make me go and look) I said that while it might not have been your intention, the appearance was that you were picking fights.
Emma tore into me, as is her prerogrative, but I still think the analogy with sexual orientation is fairly valid. If PAS were insensitive to it to the extent that (in my view) it is insensitive to socioeconomic privilege, its vocabulary and its nuances, I submit that people who came up against that barrier time and time again would also easily give the impression of picking fights.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
I am not trying to police the discussion of class. I’d be delighted if someone wrote a post about it and other people discussed the post, or if this discussion continued.
For me the issue is not about writing one post or having one discussion about class. It's being able to include that perspective in the discussions in which it is relevant without generating olympic levels of puzzlement or making people sad. Which has either become harder to do on PAS, or perhaps it's just that I've become more aware of it or less able to handle it, or all of these things. At any rate I find it very frustrating and when one is frustrated (because obviously I care about the place, 7,000+ comments say I'm not exactly here to sneer at the towels) then one is also more likely to act like a dick, perhaps. If so, I'll cop that.
I did feel completely frustrated by trying to discuss it with you. I thought that he did state an admirable political purpose in his maiden speech, and others pointed out his longstanding and sincere engagement with disability issues.
I'm sorry if I appeared difficult. I certainly wasn't trying to shift the goalposts. To me the fact that I couldn't locate Robertson's political compass was and remains a problem. Like I said, I found him quite slippery on disability issues. His maiden speech in Parliament praised a leadership of the party that did absolutely nothing for beneficiaries or disabled people and that midway through a nine year stint in government abandoned even the pretence of wanting to close the income and equity gaps, concentrating all its efforts into making life better for the middle class. Then his name became associated with the Parker camp, and sorry, but Parker? Really? There was a rumour that his defection to Shearer was in fact what scuttled the Parker bid, but I think the question in the context of the topic of this blog was relevant. Throughout the leadership contest there had been, to reiterate, almost no attempt at all to define the political differences between Cunliffe and Shearer. So maybe we could try with one of ours, Robertson. But it seems that even by raising the issue I was painting him as "a hollow man". Really I don't think I was being that offensive. And maybe the discussion was so uncomfortable for reasons that weren't entirely down to me.
As a veteran of usenet, I know only too well how gut-wrenchingly unpleasant it is to raise these sort of meta-issues, but in my defence every time I try to leave the conversation somebody addresses me directly and so I feel like I would make matters worse by not responding.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
Could you possibly just talk about it instead of complaining about how you're not allowed to talk about it and trying to bait Damian?
Actually, I have and so have others, but don't let that divert you from the far more important topic of saintly Damian's hurt feelings.
No one is stopping you.
That's fantastically rich. Anyhow, signing off now - you all have a pleasant break.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Bees reach consensus by headbutting dissenters
So do Sardinians. True story.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Damian Christie,
...you found something else to misinterpret, and diss rather than discuss.
If the second paragraph of your last comments is open to interpretations other than the one I've given, I'd honestly like to hear them.