Michael @ 7: Seconded. As sad as it is that they are going after this poor bastard, I'd trade him in in a heartbeat for the chance to go after the execs of Halliburton, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Coca-cola, etc. etc. On the whole, the legal protections given to CEOs by corporate law have caused far more trouble than they're worth.

I think she looks like Summer Glau--teensy little nose, super pouty lips, and round, round face. The eyes are just Eyyyaughh! though.

I agree with the "unrealistic 'ideal' proportions that have become fairly standard" comment. All of those features I just mentioned are, in a less extreme variation, classic sex appeal. In a cartoon, of course they're exaggerated even more, but they're still somewhat compelling.

All this makes me think about how positive and comforting the confirmation message is. People need some confirmation in their lives. "Yeah, I just posted to BoingBoing. Alright!"

ZippySpinCycle @ 7: My thoughts exactly. "Wow, when I performed this experiment on myself I got exactly the results I was expecting!" Confirmation bias much?

cajunfj40 @ 25:

That all said, I find some graffiti attractive and have entertained the thought of securely parking a stripped (no glass, trim or other removeable/breakeable bits), pure-white basecoat painted motor vehicle body in a neighborhood that is often "tagged" and leaving a box of good spraypaint inside. Remove tags and re-park as needed until desired "urban camouflage" has been applied, then properly prep, seal and clearcoat the result. Aside from the legality of parking a "nonoperative motor vehicle" and/or "distributing spraypaint to minors" I think it would produce interesting results.

Wow, that's a great idea. I can't believe some really lazy art major hasn't done it yet. =) (Poking fun at lazy art majors, not your [cool] idea.)

Dawllyllama @ 39:

Before people get too uppity about the defacing of public property, you should note that Candy's website clearly states the medium as being: Stencils, temporary spray-chalk.

Sssh! Don't ruin our pleasantly idiotic argument with something as useful and mundane as the relevant facts! Jeez. Some people.

Dcer @ 40:

Umm... what? When you can't afford to buy your own home it's god's way of telling you that you need to go to college or graduate school. I did, I got a better job, and everything became right with the world. Renting is not the natural order of things. ;-)

Yeah, it makes so much more sense to buy a place, so you can keep it for ever and ever. Better not ever die, though, or get a job someplace else. THAT would be awkward.

Jim Cowling @ 2:

I'm both apalled by the childishness and petty vandal mindset that would drive someone to do this, and impressed by what is a clever brainhack.

I'm not impressed at their "clever" brainhack. It's no more a clever brainhack then kicking someone in the balls is a clever physiology hack. How much cleverness does it take to target photo-sensitive epileptics with flashing lights? If they figured out a way to trigger epilepsy in non-photo-sensitive people, now that would be both appalling and clever. This is just appalling and cruel.

Ornith @ 36:

SOME jargon is necessary; Joe Random Guy on the street doesn't need to know about parse trees or flavors of quarks, but try talking syntax or particle physics without them. But I assure you that much of the jargon in the fields of literary/art/media criticism and [insert oppressed group here] studies is just nonsense.

I find that to be a pretty silly assumption. Sure, wacky humanities types have fallen for a hoax or two. So have perfectly respectable "hard" scientists. In my experience, the tendency towards pretentious, contentless, self-referential silliness is spread pretty evenly across the academic board.

What isn't spread nearly as evenly is people's tolerance for it. I don't know if it's because of the Doctor (or Doc) or what, but when it comes to field-specific technical jargon, people tend to cut physicists and mathematicians a lot more slack than, say, Minority Women's Studies professors. Take, for example, this thread: The knee-jerk assumption is that the "heteronormative male gaze" is some sort of wacky nonsense feminist lingo, rather than what it is: the short-hand label for a fairly straight-forward analytical concept. For the link-shy, I can even sum it up in one sentence: It's the assumption that the viewer of any given image will be a (heterosexual) man, and the viewed a woman. You can argue whether such a thing exists, or whether it is a useful concept, but you can't really claim with a straight face that it's difficult to understand.

Now, none of these links were hard to find. None of these ideas are hard to understand. So why the kneejerk assumption that it's all a bunch of nonsense? Would you be so fast to make an assumption of nonsense when reading a physicist discussing Lichtenberg figures?

JamesGyre @ 12:

BUT, you have to laugh at the aesthetics of some of that language. for as accurate as it can be, it's basically designed to turn off "mainstream" audiences.

Really? I tend to find that when people make up new words, it's because they need them. "Ping" isn't a word invented just for the hell of it. It exists because it describes a new concept that has never been discussed before.

Not to say that academia isn't remarkably insular--it is. But a great deal of that is due to the aggressive disinterest of the "mainstream," not the inherent tendency of academics towards elitism. Most academics I know would die from happiness if some random person on the street expressed interest in their specialty.

Jake078 @ 7: Wouldn't they conk him on the head first?

TLS @ 425, responding to Takeshi @ 424:

Disemvowelling lets me see why. That, in a nutshell, is why I like the practice. Full disclosure is always preferable to me.

Agreed. I like disemvowelling because, if the moderator's decision is contested by the disemvowelee, I can judge it for myself, rather than having to trust the moderator. Weird thing to hear from a dittohead, I know!

Technogirl @ 343:

Look , EvilRooster by and large I appreciate your comments and do realize that a lot gets lost via email - emotional misconceptions ensue. But I must say that I find it a bit condescending for you to assume that I feel "piled up on".

Such as, for example, your mistaken assumption that evilrooster is being condescending. Or that she was attacking you @ 277. See, I know evilrooster, and so I assumed that she was trying, as she generally is, to calm things down, not fire them up. Which isn't to say that your reaction was wrong--it was, given that you don't know her, perfectly reasonable.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that reasonable conversation cannot happen unless the people involved trust one another. Everyone has to trust that everyone else is honestly engaged in trying to share knowledge, not in winning (for whatever value of win.) Trolls, more than anything else, violate that trust. They force everyone to assume bad faith at the drop of a hat. This is incredibly corrosive to good conversation, which is what the Boingers hired Teresa to create. Which brings me to point two:

@ 348:

Not really Nelson considering the mnemonic half life of a largish internet posting board is overall something like a week (in my opinion and experience).

The fact that you assume everyone will forget a highly public kerfluffle in less than two months completely boggles me. If that is your standard for internet communities, no wonder you're having a really hard time figuring out the purpose behind Teresa's methodology. If I were to try to sum it up in a single sentence, "Communities that don't remember things for more than two weeks don't produce good conversation" wouldn't be a bad start. Teresa's philosophy of moderation (as I have experienced it) is that a moderator's job is bigger than just keeping the trolls out--it's building a good community, in order to build good conversation. A website that no one posts on is just as much of a failure as one overrun by trolls. This is very different than Slashdot's approach, or Fark's, but that doesn't mean it is wrong or bad.

Buttseks @ 312:

Whigs suck!

You take that back!

(full disclosure: I am a regular on Making Light too.)

Technogirl @ 306:

The point that I was trying to make was not to in providing accountability for moderation (because there is no accountability here - let's be real) but rather to point out what I thought were effective vs. ineffective means of moderation.[emphasis mine]

It seems to me that you're getting caught on the difference between "accountability" and "doing what I want them to do." The reason this policy exists is that people demanded it. The moderator herself is replying to your comments. She's not being particularly receptive towards your ideas, but she's read them. It true, her job doesn't hinge on how well she pleases you or the commenters. That isn't the same thing as saying there isn't any accountability.

Now, you've been very clear that you think Teresa's moderation style is ineffective and doomed. You may be right--none of us really know. But there are as many counter-examples as there are blogs on the internet. Every one of them has a public, vocal moderator, and every one of them works fine. Thus, your argument of inevitable destruction just isn't terribly persuasive to us.

@ 308: I would note that there are still editors with unlimited mod points--how would you deal with it if one of them found an axe to grind? It still comes down to trusting a particular person with freakish amounts of authority. Besides, Slashdot isn't a black-box at all--people can trust it because they know exactly who is doing the editing (everyone) and how it works. It's a totally explicit system.

@ 329:

...used the word in a correct context as in "to pillage." One could say, quite properly if arguably, that Teresa is raping the comment pool by altering the structure of selected comments.

I wonder how you reconcile this opinion with Cats Unite @ 290's "red bedsheets." It seems rather obvious that Cats Unite had the sexual meaning firmly in mind.

Most people have been making analogies to Fark, Digg, or Slashdot, and other large forums. But that's inaccurate--Boing Boing isn't a forum. It's a blog. And there are zillions of successful, widely-read blogs with absolutely idiosyncratic posting policies. And it's perfectly well understood that that's the right of the blogger to decide what topics are discussed, and what behavior tolerated, on their blog. That's the whole point of a blog: you go there to get a particular person's take on the world. It's also well-understood that the blogger is going to be posting in the same comment section that they are moderating. And it all works fine. So why are people jumping down Boing Boing's throat for doing the same?

People are getting too distracted by the title of moderator, I think. It conjures up images of forums and bbs boards, not the comments section at (insert your favorite blog here). Because Teresa isn't one of the ones making the posts, it's very easy for people to question her authority. "Who gave YOU the right to tell me what I can say?" But that's bs. The bloggers picked her to do this. She has the right because they gave it to her. They decided to trust her with it. If you disagree with their decision, then maybe you aren't quite as in tune with them as you thought you were.

Technogirl @ 284:

Do not misunderstand me - I absolutely loathe trolls and uncivil behavior. But the more that I think about it the mroe that I feel that the correct manner of dealing with it is silently, behind the scenes and without fanfare and adulation.....Personality must, in my opinion never enter into the moderation process.

Personality will be a part of the moderation process as long as you have human beings doing the moderation. It would be great if we had silent, machine-like moderators, capable of adjudicating objectively on every issue. Thing is, we don't--we have human beings, who are error-prone and fallible. You know this:

a. The tendency of human beings to abuse their authority (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? )

So why do you think that the best way to keep humans from abusing their authority and indulging their personality quirks is to keep them in the shadows? When has that ever worked? The lesson I get from reading history is that if you want accountable authority figures, you have to subject them to as much public scrutiny as possible. Which is why, in a weird, roundabout way, this whole thread has been a huge success--people are engaging in a dialogue with their moderator.*

If you have anonymous moderators, it won't get rid of personality conflicts. All it'll mean is everyone will be in the dark regarding one half of the conflict. You want a black-box system, which is wonderful in abstract but, practically speaking, impossible. The next best thing is a moderator who we all know and, hopefully, trust. If being a public part of the community breaks that trust, then the community will burn. You seem to take for granted that this will happen. We aren't so sure.

*Which is not, I note, the same thing as agreeing with their moderator.

Avram @ 56:

Comments complaining about how boring the post is are nearly always, themselves, boring. In order to keep these self-referential comments from bootstrapping themselves into computerized sapience and spreading their boringness throughout the Known Net, they have to be deleted.

That's a lovely, shiny comment. Reposted in full for the sheer joy of it.

And I must say, I really like this pair of criticisms:

Kpratt @ 211:

Context? A framing to the post such that some of us don't see "AND YEAH VERILY THOU SHALT READEST MY TOME." and wonder what the hell just happened?

Ogre Lawless @ 231:

No user policy needs to be seventy seven paragraphs. Its length, tone and odd "whimsy" of disemvowling seems like poor choices were made in judging the discretion of this moderator. Respect is a two-way street.

Too authoritarian and too whimsical at the same time! How do you do it, Teresa?