Arisia Thoughts

[writerkit]

I dislike Discord as a place for serious conversations and I am deeply annoyed with the Arisia Discord server as a whole at the moment. But do feel free to discuss in the comments and link this around, just be aware you will not be able to leave comments on this journal unless you have a Dreamwidth account. (If you're one of the many people who have no idea who I am, I've been around since the mid-2000s although after the thing with Crystal Huff I defected to Mystery Hunt for several years. For the last three Arisias I've been a panelist, mostly on heavier social-issues panels--this past year my roster included the AI art panel, problematic creators, and intersectionality. And a couple of unplanned evening shifts on coat check.)

This was kicked off by someone in the Discord complaining about being made to feel unwelcome for their political opinions and the resulting discussion causing someone else to leave the server (and presumably the Arisia community, being as they were new and had already expressed concern on that point).

So here's my grand insight: the very first choice is that there needs to be a decision, at base, about what discussion will be permitted. Because people who say things like "I should be able to say that it's possible to be racist against white people at the con" as the first thing they bring up, as their main sticking point for a science fiction convention... those people are not interested in having meaningful discussion; those people are interested in beating back progress. Or even if they can be brought around, the place and people to do that are not convention management staff in a public Discord server. 

My stance is that there are some positions that we don't argue with, that as soon as you bring them up you just get kicked from the server, because the mere fact of permitting the discussion is itself saying that it's something that can be argued. (For those familiar with the Nazi bar line, it applies to some things besides Actual Neo-Nazis.) You can have the young, progressive people we want to bring in, or you can have the people who think that being allowed to argue dog-whistling points is their main thing, which is a group that consists mainly of people who were ejected from the community for good reason.

(If anyone's about to bring up my free speech absolutism, that's about government censorship. Arisia is not a government. Private communities have the right to kick out whoever they want as long as they're not discriminating against protected classes.)

Where exactly the line is drawn can be a point of discussion. But there needs to be a line and there needs to be swift action upon it, and convention management needs to be a hell of a lot faster to kick people out for expressing a certain set of opinions than they are now. Like, as soon as someone says "I'm being persecuted for my political opinions" they need to be pushed to define which political opinions, and if it's one of the dog-whistle invalidate-groups-of-people opinions, they need to get told that expressing that opinion again will get them kicked from the server and that needs to be followed through on.

And when those people say "we're not welcome here anymore" in dramatic fashion, the response should not be arguing or trying to talk them around or trying to convince them they're wrong. It should be "Yes, you're right, you're not. We don't want people like you. Go found your own con if you want to wallow in your bitterness."

Which brings us to the other reason I'm posting this here: I suspect if I'd said all that in the channel, I would have been spoken to by the mods because we don't run around telling people they're not welcome.

Which is why I have some doubts about Arisia's ability to rise from the ashes. I don't want to have these doubts. I want to believe Arisia can grow and draw in a new crowd. The fact is, that's going to require kicking out some people who've been around a long time and not being apologetic about it and not permitting them to argue the point and not being shy about publicly saying that they were kicked and why they were kicked. And I don't think anyone in Arisia leadership has the fortitude to do that even it means the survival of the con--or even the willingness to consider the fact that it does mean the survival of the con.

(That's my serious answer. My flip answer to the people who complain about no one wanting to accept their political discourse is "skill issue." I have been managing to run around disagreeing with a number of things that are considered Correct Progressive Positions while continuing to not just be welcome but get put on social issues panels. Learn to discourse respectfully and without invalidating the humanity of the people you're talking to/about like an adult.)