Posts by Emma Hart
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i wonder if like me, on PA some other women just can't be arsed getting into a heated discussion
Zita was saying, with the ADA mailing list, that having a bit of conflict going gets the level of activity up. Gets people talking. I remember the same philosophy being used at Realms of Insanity, which was a Chch-based BBS back in the early nineties.
It doesn't work for us. We have too many people of the type who are just completely turned off by yelling, and walk away. We lose more than we gain, but I can see how it works in some other forums.
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it seems they have a better sense of social tone.
That's an interesting idea.
I do remember dealing with one particular situation last year where we had a writer (female, as it happened) who was making people uncomfortable with her comments. Not only were the (female) staff aware that people were uncomfortable even though no-one said anything to us, but we were also aware (somehow) that she didn't KNOW she was upsetting people. And it was simply that the tone of her comments wasn't right for the site, it wasn't 'appropriate'. Didn't fit our unspoken gestalt.
We had a quiet word to her, she apologised, and then people started sneaking up and quietly thanking us for dealing with it.
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Without meaning to sound wanky, that's an issue on PA System. It's a common reason people give for not participating -- they're a bit intimidated by what's already there.
That intimidation is quite a difficult thing to get round, especially if you're running the site and you're thinking, good grief, just jump in, no-one's going to eat you.
I do feel that the Spotlight forums should mitigate that somewhat, lower the participation threshhold, because who doesn't have a story about something?
But trying to work out why your lurkers aren't crossing the line and joining in is enormously frustrating. By definition, you've got no feedback from them, so it's difficult to work out what they want, if anything - sometimes they're quite happy to just be lurking.
I do think it does have its good side, though, in that it also intimdates or mitigates some of the, for want of a less offensive word, dickheads.
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and the live blogging makes for brilliant reading
Doesn't it, though? I'm impressed with that - people were talking really fast.
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"denialadilators"?
Why does that sound so rude?
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I mean, I don't think it would have been such a huge deal for Catholics - and it did seem to be, at the time - if they'd all thought it was just a... suggestion.
There's a lovely book by David Lodge called The British Museum is Falling Down, which deals with a Catholic couple waiting for the Humanae Vitae to be issued, desperately hoping it will allow them to use some kind of contraception and still be good Catholics. It doesn't appear to be a 'suggestion'.
Lodge's Wikipedia article mentions his Catholicism, btw.
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He sort of has, back when he was leader, at the time Labour had a recognising Maori spirituality clause in the Local Govt Bill [they later took it out]. Talked about how he had spiritual values but how it was wrong, as well as impractical, to give them the force of law.
You could pray every night and do what God told you, and still not want to legislate that other people do the same. And I may be shallow, but if my MP was doing that, I'd really want to know.
(Actually, I live in Wigram. That could explain a lot.)
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I am a bit worried about letting my boy see dozens of pictures of a starved naked man getting crucified
This may work as some kind of mitigation.
To get mildly back on topic, I think (probably rather bitchily today) that if Bill was prepared to stand up in public and say 'my religion, and my wife's religious views, are no influence on my political life or decision-making', then okay. But if he's not, then surely those things belong in his bio, in that they shape his life in some way. Would we remove any mention of religion from Peter Dunne's?
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Well it does suck that Catholics have got all the good art.
It's the angst that does it.
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From what I can tell, it's Anglicans they're bitter on, not atheists.
This is more than returned, at least if my family is anything to go by.