Brave New Sphere
 

An observation: This site seems to have become a cyberspace version of the Cyprus experiment mentioned in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World.

In Chapter XVI, John Savage asks the World Controller Mustapha Mond, “Why don’t you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you’re about it?”

Mond laughs and replies, “Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,” and then adds, “a society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be unstable and miserable.” Mond then goes on to describe how the Cyprus experiment proved in actual practice what was obvious theoretically.

O brave new Sphere that has such people in it!

Richard Meyer

Yes, Richard. It is a Brave New Sphere. Perhaps you should also have made the Orwellian connection, since writings and people have a way of suddenly disappearing as if they never existed.

Regards,

Richard

Come sit beside me, I said to myself,
and although it doesn't make sense,
I held my own hand in a small sign of trust,
and together I sat on the fence.


(I talk among myself all the time, Richard!)

Cally

Sphere posts have been getting so convoluted lately (apparently in an effort to hurl insults without naming names), that I often don't know what anyone is talking about, and therefore spend most of my time in the lighthearted section on drills and amusements...

Doubleplusungood, indeed.

Lighthearted? Light verse is serious business. And remember, the Speccie is paying £30 these days. Think what you can do with £30. Well, you can buy four bottles of gin and still have change left for a Kit-Kat

Gin?! I thought you were half-Irish! (No, that was your spouse. I'm sure she has better taste. *wink*)

Actually, I like gin. Fights the malaria that afflicts us here in Wisconsin.

Kevin

Edit: Oh, you have to add tonic for the medicinal effect.

Dear Cally

I suffer from a similar affliction which means I sometimes speak my private thoughts out loud. I am working extra specially hard at the moment to overcome that.

No - it isn't Tourette's syndrome!

But Gail is right. The distance between the said and the unsaid is becoming very great around here.

I am making a great effort not to repeat previous admitted mistakes but I would be very interested to hear Alex's own take on recent events around here.

Janet, as I know personally, is one of the most temperate of people. Rose doesn't take fools gladly but equally does not take offence easily (or at least gives as good as she gets).

Even someone who was maintaining a healthy detachment from all this couldn't fail to notice that something is going rotten.

Moderation==moderation.

Simple equation.

This is a good site fundamentally, and a serious one. I can't think of anywhere I'd rather expose my soft poetical underbelly. But there most definitely IS a problem.

This is Alex's site and he's entitled to run it any which way he chooses so I think it would be simplest if we heard from him.

Philip

PS - post saved in case removed

nevermind.....

just a thanks to Alex for all the years he's let us play here and a hope that we all remember that we're old enough to relearn how to play together.

Come sit beside me, the double-coat TimTam
called as the mug pwoofed a hot-choklit sigh,
so I held out my hands in a small sign of trust,
and we dunked as we mourned times gone by.

Laura

In for a penny in for a pound...

I have the greatest respect for Alex in principle, although he seems like quite a shadowy figure around here.

What I wonder is whether what is going on here has more to do with the individual power trips of certain "moderators" than Alex's original intention.

This was the best place to be. It is now balancing on the cusp. And I'm afraid to say that Ablemuse is a side issue to the 'Sphere not the other way around.

Poetry should excite emotion, passion, debate, contention for goodness' sake. Otherwise this is nothing more than a knitting circle devoted to counting stitches and debating in an oh so refined way the relative merits of substituting a plain stitch for a purl.

When we're not discussing American Idol ad nauseam that is.

Jesus!

And since I'm about to get blocked from the site I'd just like to take the opportunity to ask Michael C to make sure he turns the lights out when he leaves.

To the few friends I've made here (most of whom have now left when I think about it) I say thanks for a good experience.

Philip

Yes, when I've had a few light-hearted, well-reasoned posts deleted already today, just because they're talking about the recent exodus...well, what's the point of me hanging around a site where I can't talk about a pressing issue that affects all of us?

Seriously, it's shameful...and I'm usually the first to jump to the defense of an admin / mod, since it's generally a thankless job.

I hereby formally disassociate myself from this thread. Please don't hurt me!

I'm shocked at the posts that have disappeared today. I mean, at the fact that they have disappeared, not at their content. I really can't believe it.

Chris

Referees
 

Dunno what started this uproar, but, as Shaun points out, exercising authority for the good of a group is a thankless job. Is moderating here something people take on for any reason other than the good of the group?

Sometimes referees call foot faults or fouls when none has ocurred. They make mistakes. They may even favor one player or team over another. But without them there's no game (ever tried one of the unmoderated poetry boards?) and the game benefits the players a lot more than the refs.

See, the thing that I believe is bothering people more than anything is the utter abolition of any PUBLIC comments on the issue. Alex writes:

So we're encouraged to put our deepest, heartfelt works out there in the open for public consumption and discussion...but we're not allowed to publicly discuss the workings of the forums themselves? Something is wrong with that, and it's what's causing all these threads and posts to pop up after the original incident was swept conveniently under the rug.

Max, it's for the benefit of the players, until the players start quitting because of it. First Mark and Paul, then Janet, Rose, Quincy, Marybeth, & I forget who else, because the threads have been deleted. If the all stars start retiring because of the officials, it's the fans, the league, and the game that suffers, not the ones blowing the whistles.

I would have been fairly unmoved by all the departures had the threads in which they were announced and explained been allowed to stand. Their removal is a severer indictment of the administration than any accusations they contained. How many other such threads once existed, which I never saw? They speak to my imagination with a combined eloquence far more powerful than any one of them could have mustered on its own.

Chris

I agree, Chris....and, granted I am just a daily lurker, not a contributor, but when posts are quickly removed by mods, I would think writers, particularly the fine writers here, would be outraged by anyone being censored. If writers do not stand up to defend freedom of speech, who will?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7iXcKKpdx0

Pat

Chris,

Players quitting doesn't change the dynamic I speak of. The game (you're right) suffers, but the sport is still not organized for the benefit of the refs.

People I respect are very upset about whatever it is that's happened here, and I'm willing to believe that the moderator(s) was/were wrong, but:

That Eratosphere refuses to let itself be used for public criticism of its volunteer moderators seems to me reasonable, maybe necessary.

Max

But Max, it goes well beyond that. I started a thread yesterday to announce that I had reactivated another board that I once started. In my announcement, I did not offer any reasons or refer, even obliquely, to Eratosphere or its moderators. I did not even encourage people to visit my board. It was just one bland, boring sentence making a simple factual statement that could have offended no one. But the thread was promptly removed without any notice to me or explanation. In fact, someone alerted me to the fact that the thread had been deleted or I might not have noticed it myself.

It's kind of scary that moderator powers are being used in this manner. Apart from the injustice of deleting my innocuous and entirely appropriate thread, it creeps me out to wonder how many other threads or posts have been silently made to disappear in this fashion. Even as I type this now, though I am not singling out any particular person or using inappropriate or offensive language, I feel there is at least a fifty-fifty chance that this post will be either disappeared or edited out from under me, and I certainly have no confidence that I will manage to see all the responses before they, too, are silently made to go bye-bye.

I will copy the thread as soon as I post just so there will be a record to circulate in case this disappears, leaving in place only Max's defense of the moderators and creating the false impression that no one disagreed with Max.

My intention is to allow this thread to stand.

And that goes for the posts in it as well, unless they become openly abusive of a named individual.

Perhaps we could all agree to post a new poem before adding comments to this discussion? (I think I'm only half-joking.)

Well that's encouraging.

May I ask, then, if there is any plan to have an open discussion about the events that have led to the recent public exodus of long-time members such as Quincy, Janet, Mark, Paul, Marybeth and myriad others? At this point, the "take it to PM" approach isn't cutting it, I don't think.

Situations like this arise every few months or so on the 'Sphere, which may give the mods a sense that "this too shall pass", but I have an inkling that this particular situation has far more gravity than those previous flare-ups.

Shaun, at this point there isn't a plan of that kind. There is a vigorous discussion on the Admin board (a more general one, not about any such plan), but it's still going on.

Hi Roger,

Alex is off-line right now, but I don't think he could mind my quoting some of his words for you. Since you say you didn't know that your thread had been removed to Reports on the Admin board until someone else notified you of the fact, you couldn't have seen it, but this is the post that Alex added to your thread before locking, and later removing it:

Since, by reopening "Eratosphere in Exile," you have indeed provided "a platform to promote the direct or indirect bashing or condemnation of the Sphere and its moderators," I don't see why you are dissatisfied with the removal of your thread here. If you want to get the message out to more people, you need merely do so privately, as you did in your mass email circular of yesterday afternoon. I realize, of course, that you may not have the email addresses of everyone here whom you might want to notify, but you can still use the Private Messaging system that Alex has kindly provided along with the Board environment. It will take a little big longer perhaps, but you can send any given PM to as many 10 recipients at a time, so with a little effort you should be able to reach everyone you want.

From there, people can go to your website, and bash away. However, as Alex has requested that people not engage in such activities directly here, on Eratosphere proper, I think it only reasonable to respect his feelings on the matter.

Thank you.

Steve C.

You're right, I never saw Alex's message.

I think that Alex misinterpreted my re-opening of Erato in Exile and assumed that it was intended only as a place where people could gather to bash Erato moderators. That is simply not true.

I did not state my purposes at all, but I will state them now because those who have tried to read my mind have accidentally read their own. I opened up Erato in Exile when Erato was down because I wanted to have a place where I could gather with my Erato friends until the real thing was re-opened. And so, when the real thing re-opened, I closed Erato in Exile.

But over the last few days, some of my friends here with whom I like to gather have announced that they will not be posting here, so I figured Erato in Exile was needed for the same reasons as before. I didn't want to be lacking a forum where I could gather with all the people I liked, and not just some of them.

I also wanted to have a forum where we could continue any discussions that the moderators here did not want us to continue at Erato. To say that I wanted to have a place to "bash" anyone is to suggest that I would seek to control the discussion. But that was never my intention. On the contrary, I understood that there are serious issues about how moderators should conduct themselves in order to make a successful site, and of course there are at least two points of view. Those who felt that the moderators here acted appropriately, and even the moderators themselves, were more than welcome to contribute to the discussion at Exile. I would have preferred the conversation to continue here, but once again, I thought, Erato in Exile was needed as a stand-in for Erato, and once again I hoped it would just be temporary.

So Alex's suppositions about my announcement were simply wrong. From the start, I meant for Erato in Exile to have just one function: to be a temporary replacement for Erato when Erato, for whatever reason (generally technical), was itself not available. And it's no different now.

But I am publicly stating these reasons now for the first time. In my deleted announcement, I only said that Erato in Exile had been reactivated. Everything else attributed to my announcement was pure supposition.

Hi Roger,

Thank you for your explanation.

However, as you know, context counts for a great deal, and I don't feel that it's at all unnatural that Alex should have interpreted your message, given its context, as he did.

In fact, I think he was right on the money. But that's just my opinion.

Steve C.

Would a moderator kindly explain why Alex deleted Roger's thread, besides "interpreting it a certain way." I can understand the need to delete abusive or hostile threads directed at mods or at Alex, but from what has been said here, Roger's thread wasn't like that. If a thread can be deleted for being interpreted "in a certain way," well, where does the line get drawn?

Some things have happened a bit hastily, Andrew, and still are. I don't think we're ready for an enquiry while we're still trying to cope with the present situation. But I assure you the moderators are thinking very hard about all this stuff. We're taking it, and the present experience of members, very seriously. Can't say more for now. Please give us a bit of time.

Andrew, I can only speak for myself, and anything I say here shouldn't necessarily be attributed to Alex. This is how the situation struck me. (I'm working from memory and have not gone back to check the relative timing of actions.)

We'd had several public objections to the actions of mods. We'd had several stated intentions to withdraw permanently. We'd had a series of rapid-fire posts in dissent from Alex's stated policy of private complaints.

In the context of those objections, Roger's reopening of the Exile board was something I could only see as an invitation to general rebellion by all who dissent. In fact, I had a private communication inviting me to look at that board to see the extent of the objections being voiced there. Whatever Roger's purpose was initially, the Exile board is certainly being used as a place to express those dissenting opinions. I don't dispute the right of those who left to speak their minds there.

Since Alex has been clear about not wanting to allow public attacks to stand on GT, and since--at that moment, in those circumstances--the announcement looked like such a thing, I can understand the closure.

I'll accept Roger's statement if those weren't his intentions.

I see I've cross-posted with Adam, and so I'll stress again that I'm describing only my own personal reading of the situation.

Thanks, Adam and Maryann. I appreciate the prompt response.
I can see that there could have been a misunderstanding and that Alex might have jumped the gun on that one. We all make mistakes, and especially in volatile situations. All kinds of things get said fast and done fast and it's not always the best words and deeds that come out of it.
Andrew

Maryann wrote:

"Whatever Roger's purpose was initially, the Exile board is certainly being used as a place to express those dissenting opinions. I don't dispute the right of those who left to speak their minds there."

And should I take it from this, Maryann, that you do dispute the right of those who haven't left to speak their minds there?

Duncan

Duncan, you should not.

Not that what I say matters much, but I think there should be no deletions of posts
or parts of posts by anyone other than the author, unless there is a plausible
possibility of legal liability for the site. The mods should be able to chide,
admonish, PM, to their hearts' content, lock threads that have become ad hom,
but delete--no. I have always assumed that GT was basically for venting in any
case--there are plenty of other fora at the Sphere for more focussed (and probably
more useful) discussions.

I also wonder why the mods need protection from criticism--should they be more
than, if you'll pardon both my attempt to leaven the discussion with levity and the
reference to Myles na gCopaleen, camping stoves between the sabers?

http://www.peoplesrepublicofcork.com...6&postcount=30

Just my opinion,

Martin

Just a sub-point here, but at one of the pro-audio forums I moderated at a few years ago, our policy was to copy the contents of a message, PM those contents back to the author and explain why it was deleted...which would give the author the opportunity to self-edit, if they felt it necessary.

Obviously deletion should always be the LAST resort of a mod (especially on a poetry site, where ALL of the participants are people highly skilled at expressing themselves in words...), but some sign that a deletion isn't being taken lightly would take a little of the sting out of it.

Well, Steve, since I already stated that this was not the case, and I am the only one who knows for sure, I suppose you are pretty much calling me a liar. I know you didn't actually use the word "liar," but I was censored for things I did not say but which I was "interpreted" as having meant, and there's actually no logical way to interpret your comment except as having called me out as a liar.

But you have nothing to worry about. You are a moderator so you are allowed to call people liars with impunity. Were I to call you a liar, or even to say something that someone could purport to "interpret" as calling you a liar, my comment would be removed, in all likelihood without comment or notice.

By the way, as far as what's being said about this controversy over at Erato in Exile, I don't even know. I threw the "on" switch (for the reasons I stated) and then just let the thing run on its own. For all I know people are criticizing me there! I really should pop in and see if anyone needs to have a ruler taken to their knuckles, but I suppose I would have received complaints by now if any of the children were not getting along well.

I've had two posts deleted here on the Sphere--for other reasons, none of them disreputable, I might add--and that was the practice. I had no complaints as it was all done so nicely. In fact, I sometimes find that I am not always correct.

Kevin,
that's great to hear; the problem is that not everyone has been treated in the
fashion that you describe.

Martin

Posted by Stephen Collington

Given the context I would think this to be more than a little ad hom Stephen.

Jan

Irrelevant.