[pp.int.general] Moderation as a means for constructive debate?

[carlo von lynX]

I apologize to Markus and the audience for having fallen into
the trap of taking argumentation beyond certain limits, not
recognizing how awful it may sound in the recipient's ears.
It wasn't meant ad hominem, although the words actually say it
that way.

Moments when I would want to be moderated so that a person who
is going to read the entire list anyway sees the fallacies or
the false tones in the wordings and sends it back with a note
"Could you please reformulate that as your recipient may
interpret it very differently from what you thought..."

Because when the recipient gets it, it is too late. Too late
to say "Oh, sorry, I didn't mean it to sound that way." - Too
late because by then the real blowtorch is turned on and firing 
back.

Escalation happens. Even among people that should know better.

Some think of moderation as some sort of punishment but I 
rather think of it as a big PR department that doesn't just 
work for the paid elected politician at the top but keeps the
entire movement on track for contructive political work.

The Internet fosters misunderstandings and negatively heated
debates. Being the first transnational Internet party we are
affected by this in our foundations. The Internet was supposed
to be our trump (no pun intended) and instead it turned out to
be our Achilles' heel.

If even long time fighters like us still make this mistake of
either formulating things badly or escalating the heat of it,
we should come up with technological means to work this out.
nettime and IPEN use preemptive moderation on all mailing list
postings. Radical, but it works to stop flame wars from
happening.

I think this is a substantial issue for the Pirate movement
to deal with in order to recover from losses and strive. And
the way we talk about each other in public is a correlated
problem.

In a previous forum we once had a feature by which posts
would only appear to the public if one or two other pirates
liked it, keeping the noise private, exposing the signal.

Btw, I'm all for individualism wherever it doesn't harm others.


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