[blogpower] my personal james highamish view

The field of sailing is quite esoteric and something like Hawaiian outrigger canoes is as esoteric as it gets. There was once a site, let’s pretend it was about that topic and it was well presented, had lots of good info and had regular guest posting on everyone’s favourite craft.

There was also a forum section where you had to register to comment and there’d be so many requests like: “What foil should I use for my underwater rudder?” [posted by Darren] to which an expert in the field of foils would reply: “Darren, you might like to try the E3016, which was designed for the purpose you’ve just described.” [Tom Speer]

And so on.

But into every idyllic world must come the dirt and first one then another undesirable entered and their combative style turned people off. Now it was: “What foil should I use for my underwater rudder?” and the reply would be: “Darren you’re a small minded twerp. Only an idiot would ask such a question.” To which Darren would reply: “Oh yeah, Greaseball [his commenter nickname], well you’re just a complete moron,” to which Greaseball would reply and Bullrutter would get into the abuse.

And so on. I just yawned and quietly clicked out of the site. Forever.

Therein lies our problem. Someone on our roll makes a deeply offensive remark to most members and we’re in shock. One of us tries to put a nice construction on it: “I’m not sure that’s an appropriate comment. Haven’t you ever seen…” and so on. The first immediately replies: “Thanks for supporting me and our views.”

Whoa! Stop. Who’s supporting what? No one’s supporting anything our pitbull friend said. We’re trying to keep decency and mutual respect going here. So one of our members writes: “Sorry but I can no longer be part of an organization which condones these views.” Another hears about it and begins soul-searching and so on.

Despite its broad scope and undoubted power, Blogpower is a very brittle collection. It’s not robust. In short, it’s finely balanced and is slowly growing on mutual trust, respect and tolerance. Into this comes one pitbull opinion and suddenly the fabric is torn. We have new bloggers and old and the new ones are delicate and easily put off. They came to us for mutual support and for new horizons and find themselves confronted with offensiveness.

This raises all my hackles, all my defensive instincts, particularly for our ladies [call that sexist if you like]. I, personally, will not put up with anyone being offensive to my blogfriends [you can say what you like to me personally – I couldn’t care less] and to lose even one of these friends is more catastrophic than to lose my blog.

So, what to do with our strongly libertarian philosophy, our Voltaire Maxim? If we insist on this maxim, we lose the most valuable friends as they quietly ‘click out’ forever. Their right so to do. They have no desire to get into a bunfight.

So we lose everything we’ve worked for and in the process reinforced the realpolitik that it takes a community to build a sandcastle and only one foot to destroy it.