Well, Liberator magazine has gone all New Statesman on us! The magazine for radical liberals has launched a new blog.
I'm pleased to see that the collective will now be able to give their take on events in between issues of their magazine.
I did have a slight facepalm moment when I read their Comments Policy - "Play the ball not the man." For goodness sake, I thought we had all learned about using more inclusive language. My one criticism of Liberator is that it can sometimes be a bit blokey. I'm not sure that they really understand the many ways our culture harms women and restricts their freedom. Maybe I should write something about that for them....
The policy itself sits closer to the Liberal Democrat Voice comments policy (be polite, stay on topic, be who you say you are) than to the almost free-for-all that I allow on here. It basically says be polite,legal, on topic and makes it clear that any comment which breaks those rules will not be published. I hardly ever reject comments. I did junk an anonymous one the other day which named someone in connection with the child abuse scandals, and I didn't publish the one that called me a "f***ing disgusting racist nazi whore" but that's about it. You can see by reading many of the threads on here that I have a fairly high tolerance level and allow more rudeness than I probably should - and even then I get certain of our cybernat friends whinging.
Anyway, despite all that, Liberator is always a great read and I always learn something from it. It is sometimes hamstrung by not being able to respond immediately to things and the blog is a very welcome addition to online debate.
4 comments:
The Liberator policy will be about content, rather than discriminating against individuals. That's the difference.
Will every comment be pre-moderated?
Many thanks, Caron, for your welcome and publicity for the Liberator blog.
You criticise the expression "Play the ball, not the man", but it's a well-known expression (like "May the best man win"). We could have written "Play the ball, not the man or woman", but that's the sort 1980s-vintage PC linguistic contortion I thought we'd moved beyond.
Regarding moderation, we'll play it by ear. For now, there will be some moderation, probably for similar reasons to yours. In particular, what we want to prevent is debate being dominated by the same old handful of juvenile, anonymous, male, right-wing trolls, which (apart from being tedious) creates an intimidating atmosphere and deters participation by normal human beings.
Play the ball not the person would work - it's inclusive. And the reason it jars so much to see what you have at the moment is that it's quite unusual not to have inclusive language on something like that.
I think you are right about the approach to moderation. You do have to have some rules if you want to create a space where all can be comfortable about contributing. Your approach is very similar to that of Lib Dem Voice.
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