Message Board Administration

Here's some thoughts on what my two and a half years at IIDB taught me about running message boards, presented in unreadable block paragraphs. Forgive me, please, but I had to get it out somehow, but I couldn't make it comprehensible.

• Given a large enough population, there will always be some people that disagree with a change in policy.
  

IIDB had long term users that had joined before the board had formally codified its current rules, and some of them considered the less restrictive environment "the good old days" and longed for the time where calling people names was allowed. They chaffed at the new rules, and some of them were eventually banned when they violated the rules too many times. Making sure that your users have a comfortable environment is key to quality moderation, but that doesn't mean allowing your long term highly recognizable users to run roughshod over new users just because they were around when times were different.

Disagreement doesn't necessarily mean disruption or argumentation either. People can be polite in their disagreement. I've seen it happen and if someone says "I can't be polite and expect you to listen to me" then you should immediately disabuse them of that notion. Politely.

Also realize that there's a difference between a few people and a vast number of people. If people start complaining and are still complaining two weeks later, that's probably an indication that the change you made isn't going over very well. It usually takes people a few days to become acclimated to significant chance. Also, if there are 200 people complaining on a website with 1000 active members, that might be another sign that you should listen to what they have to say instead of dismissing their actions as unrepresentative of the feelings of the membership as a whole. That's a large chunk, and while there are people that always complain, numbers above 1 in 10 should be considered significant.

• Moderation is intended to present a clean, comfortable environment for discussion and debate.

With all due respect to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I disagree with her practice of "disenvowelling" posts to make them nearly unreadable. Leaving incredibly unreadable and still possibly disruptive posts to indicate where disruption occurred can still be disruptive. On blogs with comments, such as BoingBoing, Making Light, and this one I would prefer to remove the disruptive post completely. Thus, space and attention isn't granted to people that need to learn how to make constructive comments.

This is a little more complicated in a message board situation. Our policy at IIDB was to leave as much of the post as possible undisturbed and insert special "edited" marks, and that's about as much disruption as I think is appropriate. If the entire post is provocative or problematic (i.e. a rules violation) then the entire post should vanish into the ether (but the moderator must let the poster know why it vanished). That allows people to know that an edit occurred without disrupting the flow of the conversation.

Also, IIDB mods were charged with cleaning up problems with the bbcode tags, especially the quote tags, which a lot of boards don't do but certainly contributed to the professional appearance of the board.

• Privacy relates to the personal and private information of users and everything else is simply a courtesy.

I first saw this become an issue at CF, where it caused huge problems in interactions between the staff and the general membership, but it had started to become an issue at IIDB when I was dismissed. IP addresses, real names, locations and anything else that the staff may be able to learn about someone through their higher level of access should be protected as "private." Anything else that is protected by the board's privacy policy is just a courtesy that the board provides according to the environment that the board wishes to cultivate. I would say that staff members shouldn't talk about infractions/warnings and edits required by users publicly unless those same users give you permission to talk about them, but that is up to the owner's discretion.

Under no circumstances, though, should staff have "privacy" from the users. Anything said about a user in staff forums, or pretty much anything said in a staff forum at all should never be considered "protected."

As soon as staff needs "privacy" in which to operate, problems occur. At CF, the staff cited privacy to cover themselves when they made mistakes and obfuscate issues in which they were clearly in the wrong. People couldn't defend themselves against unfair warnings delivered by abusive and factionalized staff members because the reasons behind the warnings couldn't be discussed with the person that had incurred them without breaking "staff privacy" even when the warnings were technically "official" correspondence.

• Promote staff due to competence, not ideology.

There is a certain acceptance of the goals of a message board that is necessary for a user to make a good staff member but I would much rather have someone calm and collected that can enforce the rules with equanimity that disagrees with me on who should be the next president of the United States than a hot head that thinks exactly what I think and enforces rules emotionally. IIDB was usually very good about this, but I did see the occasional problem with some staff members who seemed to be think that their rank gave their political opinions extra weight.

One of the requirements for inclusion on IIDB staff was the ability to let insults and personal comments slide off. If a staff member got mad or upset every time someone called them incompetent, then it wouldn't be long before someone upset them. When people are angry and emotional they make mistakes and so you shouldn't be moderating someone that is personally calling you a name, but you shouldn't let it get to you either.

A minor part of this emphasis on competence has to be a consideration of reliability. I noticed that there were a few people that handled most of the issues and could be counted upon to show up day after day, while other staff members might show up once every few days. Oddly, since input is important to being a moderator, those people that had irregular schedules weren't just holding up their own work but other people's work as well. This led to the delay in the resolution of complaints on multiple occasions.

I know that there's the old saying that the people that desire power should be the very last people that should actually have power, and that's partially true in moderating a message board. People that want to be moderators just so that can boss others around should never be promoted to those positions. In fact, I recommend making it clear that to be a moderator is a role of servitude: they serve the needs of the community. "With authority comes responsibility" to paraphrase the Spider-man movie. Be careful not to mistake people who want power with people who want to serve. Sometimes people that don't have the ability to consistently contribute discourse still have the time, ability, and inclination to moderate in order to make the message board a better place, and those people should be snapped up whenever available.

One final note on this, as much as I hate to use a phrase that's been used against me, sometimes good moderators are poor administrators. If you are having trouble with a new Admin but that person was one of the best moderators that you've ever had, consider explaining the situation and asking them to step back into their old position.

• Enforce the spirit of the rule, not the letter of it. Make this one of your rules.

If someone manages to insult someone else without actually breaking a rule, perhaps by way of comparison with something that most people wouldn't be offended by ("You are an Eagle" where "Eagle" is taken by the other person to be an insult), they've just broken your rules even if this specific instance isn't specifically mentioned in your rules.

This is a tough one, because experience with the American legal system is predicated in the exact opposite terms. Judges typically seem to uphold the letter of the law even if the result seems counterintuitive and users sometimes get upset that you are giving your moderators discretion to make their own determination of what breaks the rules or not.

This is exactly why I say that you should make this one of your rules, because each moderator action should be what the moderators understand to be a violation of the rules, not necessarily something that the violator understands it to be. I have my own understanding of trolling, and if I say "no trolling" then people could argue endlessly about what that prohibits or permits. However, this leads directly into the next point, which is:

• Allow moderators autonomy but review their actions.

Moderators shouldn't have to wait to do things. The absolute worst case of this is also derived from CF, where at one point you needed at least two people to sign off on any moderator action before the post was edited. I've heard unconfirmable rumors that at one point you needed two moderators and a supervisor before any action could be taken. Whether true or not, forcing currently active mods to wait for input before allowing them to edit problematic posts only cripples their ability to do their job.

Ideally, you should have a certain amount of trust in your moderators. Instead of waiting for multiple other people to weigh in, they should be able to take action as soon as they find a suspect post.

However, this doesn't mean that first impressions are always the correct impressions. I once edited a series of insults in a thread that I hadn't been closely monitoring only to find out that the insult had really been intended as a light-hearted jest. It wasn't the person who'd said the insult that complained about my edit, it was the person who'd been insulted. He was upset that I'd interrupted their friendly back and forth. When I re-examined the situation I found that the supposed insult really was clearly not a violation of our rules, and I reversed my edit and apologized.

Even though in the above example the insulted party complained, the first people that should be reviewing the moderator's action should be the other moderators. At IIDB, we had multiple moderators assigned to each forum, and they would review each others actions if they weren't quite sure that they'd done the correct thing. If they can't agree, that's when the Admins should step in and review the situation.

At IIDB if a moderator saw something problematic, such as a blatant insult or a copyright infringement, they could edit it as soon as they came across it. If you choose the correct people, you shouldn't have to worry that most actions are approved by handled by a single person. After all, if you can't reliably count on your moderators, then why are they moderators?

• Have a simple and clear way to complain or challenge moderator actions and never ever penalize anyone for using it.
  

Again, IIDB did this fairly well, especially for the first year and a half or so after I joined. There was no required format, only the requirement that you needed to provide a link to the post or thread that you were complaining about.

Once a complaint had been made, the other moderators of a forum would review the edit, and an uninvolved moderator of the same forum, or rarely an administrator, would provide a response. Now CF has moved to a completely transparent process where moderator deliberations can be seen but I don't necessarily think that's the better way to handle it because it can distract from the topics of conversation on the message board. As long as a board is well administrated (by which I mean run by people that understand that moderators can make mistakes which need to be corrected, and that prevents mods from forming cliques of moderators working together for mutual protection and support) I don't think that absolute and complete transparency is necessary to maintain a fair and working complaint system.

Granted, at the end of my experience with IIDB, this system had broken down mostly because there was no one overseeing it. In the ten days that I administrated IIDB two cases were brought to my attention of complaints slipping through the cracks, and more appeared to be on the way. However, when the system was working, it worked very well.

• Within reason, document everything.

When any edit is made, no matter how clearcut the violation is, the original text and state of the post needs to be documented somehow. When I started at IIDB as a moderator we used user notes to document any edit made by a moderator. Later we used the infraction/warning system that was inherent to vBulletin which had the added benefit of sending a PM to the user letting them know that they'd been edited.

There are always cases where this may be superfluous. If all a moderator is doing is correcting the formating tags of a post, I don't think that requires documentation. However, any time actual words are removed from a post, or a post is removed from place, that requires some note on what was removed and the reason why.

If a mistake has been made, or the other moderators or the administrators have determined that no rules were broken, the post should be restored with all possible haste, and the only way to do that is if the text of the post is saved somewhere.

• Term limits for moderators suck. Term limits for administrators are mandatory. (Only at big boards)
  

I haven't clearly differentiated between moderators and administrators, so let me do that here. Moderators are the people that handle the day to day work of editing posts, issuing warnings and infractions, and spend a lot of time on the public forums. Administrators are those people that make the decisions about what the rules are, how they are enforced, and they're the people a user would appeal to in a last resort for relief from an abusive moderator.

Moderators usually moderate forums that they love, and are invested in the topic. In my experience at IIDB, at busy boards administrators tend to have their favorite topics and forums as well, but they spend most of their working time in the staff forums making sure that things run smoothly. Or they should be doing that.

What that means is that moderators often have an emotional investment in the forums that they moderate, and if you were to remove moderators with term limits you would be removing the people that care most and are most knowledgeable of the forum subject. My experience at CF and IIDB has led me to believe that the administrator job is different. Administrators often don't have as much of an emotional investment in running the board as they do to contributing to it.

Eventually, when Administrators drift away and stop performing their duties, they tend to become entrenched. This happened all the time at CF, where the number of Supervisory moderators, Admins, and super-Admins eventually rivaled the entire number of moderators. At IIDB, some administrators reached that position and eventually stopped regularly contributing. Unfortunately, at that point, they had no one to review their activity or behavior and they would enter a fugue state where they wouldn't be contributing but they couldn't be removed either. Term limits, or perhaps just a non-staff governing body that reviewed the Admins could have prevented that from happening.

This doesn't make sense at smaller boards because usually they are privately run and the administrator is also the owner of the board. However, for large boards catering to large segments of the population such as CF and IIDB, making the top positions change is usually necessary, especially if:

• A council of equals should administrate your large board.

Erwin, the former owner and webmaster of CF, had almost no time to focus on the things that needed his attention because he did everything. Not only was he in charge, he did the programming, maintenance and set policy for most of his ownership of the forum. CF, with thousands and thousands of active members at a time was simply too large to controlled by a single person.

However, when things on the administration side went wrong (and they always go wrong) things had to be approved or fixed by Erwin which meant that he'd get slammed when he went online. And he was a busy guy, so he wasn't always online and things would take weeks or months to deal with.

At IIDB, the Internet Infidels Board of Directors created a circle of seven equal Administrators to run the board. Major policy changes were sometimes approved by the board, but the rules were written and enforced by the Admins, and they were the last resort in appeals.

A system like that is designed to prevent one person from getting too uppity. Major changes require votes, but the Admins can handle the more common administrative tasks on a medium to large message board by themselves, which means that no one is going to get overwhelmed. Just like the moderator actions are reviewed by other moderators, the administrators can review each other's work if there is a problem.

• People have different senses of humor.

I suppose that just thinking about this, I could shorten it down to "people are different" because that's certainly true. However, as it relates to message boards, I think that humor is a more important quality to be taken into account.

The upshot of this is that sometimes someone will say something intended to be funny which comes out completely wrong. I've definitely said the wrong thing and the wrong time and had my head nearly snapped off by upset users/moderators/admins. In the sort of situation where no one's really at fault, instead of telling someone "YOU BROKE A RULE, OMG!!!" it's much more effective to discuss the post with the person that's offended and the person that made the offending post.

Most good users (i.e. people with an ounce of compassion) will understand this implicitly and sometimes even agree to edit themselves or personally apologize to the offended party. Sometimes the offended person will calm down once they realize that what was said wasn't intended to be mean/nasty/rude. And if they don't understand, then you'll know that they're probably trouble makers that may need some further attention.

Oh, right, I forgot this when I proposed the "enforce the spirit of the rules" bulletin point: Enforcing the spirit instead of the letter of the rules means sometimes not enforcing the rules. After all, the rules are intended to provide a clean and comfortable place for discussion of the issues and sometimes you can bend a rule if its relevant to the conversation. Ask your moderators to recognize that sometimes the enforcement of a rule isn't necessary, but if they aren't sure to bring the matter up with other moderators and administrators to ask for their feedback.

• If you aren't having fun, then you're probably not doing it right.

There are a few odd people out there that can't deal with online socialization, and obviously this point doesn't apply to them, but running a message board is fun. If it isn't fun, then you're doing something wrong and you (and possibly your admins and mods) may suffer from burnout.

The most common problem I see that tends to lead to burn out is the driving need to make sure that you get everything done right now! You don't. If you're facing an overwhelming amount of work find more people to help Administrate and search for more good moderators to help them deal with their forums. More people equals more fun, as long as they're competently doing their jobs.

Besides, there's nothing special about the number 7. If you run CF maybe you need a group of 11 Admins or maybe 21. Maybe they do need to be divided into teams of administrators to deal with different sections of the board, but be careful. Large bureaucracies can turn a little bit of poor leadership into huge honking messes. The people at the top need to be the best of the best, regardless of what they believe. They need to be able to coordinate dozens and sometimes hundreds of people and make sure that they're all on the same page and getting work done at multiple levels. This is where you need dedicated HR people, dedicated moderator trainers, and a Super-Admin group, all of which can be interesting jobs, but need to be carefully watched.

Remember though, if you can't trust the people that run the site, you'll have problems. This is where its especially important to promote due to competence and not seniority because the temptation will be there. You'll certainly have people that will get upset when they're passed over for positions but you have to remember that these people don't deserve the positions, they earn them.

Finally:

• Any message board staff other than the owner are there to serve the interests of the users and the board, not the other way around.

This is sort of a big deal, and it has definitely been touched on before under "promote due to competence." CF eventually had people in powerful Super-Admin positions that took those positions not because they wanted to do them or were good at them but rather because they liked the feeling of superiority that they had over all of the normal members.

The didn't realize that Administrator is actually the lowest position on a message board. Yeah, it's an exclusive position and it offers a lot of benefits, but it requires mounds of hard work in the guts of the system, often dealing with angry people and upset moderators. It's hard and emotionally draining, and if you aren't up to dealing with all the pain and tough decisions you really don't want to get involved with it.

Administration means that you see everything, including all the worst facets of people. You'll deal with almost all of the porn, spam, fights between friends, stalking and internet spats that occur on the site. Every move that you make will be questioned and examined for a deeper meaning. People will consistently fail to treat you nicely.

And through it all, you need to remember that your position exists to serve the people that treat you like crap.

What's Happening

Yeah, I know I haven't updated recently, but then again, I know that those of you that read this aren't going to see it soon anyway.

What's been happening? In no particular order:

Well, I'm doing better. I'm mostly off of the neck brace now, but I'm still in physical therapy twice a week.

I'm worried about Viable Paradise. I don't really have the money to go, so it's going to be interesting paying off the debt that I'm going to have since I don't make enough money to cover my bills anyway.

The summer's beautiful. We've been getting some rain and some thunder storms, which are beautiful and stunning and everything that summer in NM typically is. Now that I'm thinking of leaving for good, I'm apparently going to miss this place something fierce.

The dogs are both getting very old. I'm worried about them. My dad's not doing too well either, and I'm worried about him too.

I have a crush on another cute internet boy. This one is straight, which fits right into my comfort zone. His name is Jamie Stroud, and he's a gymnast/martial artist from Cali. He's also a member of the Unification Church. Considering my interest in comparative religion, I find that awesomely cool, and I want to go ask him all sorts of questions about it.

Also, he's hotter than hell. *Cough* (<---Link removed due to brokenness, Feb 08)

I'm going to see Elliot in September when I go to Viable Paradise, which is going to be awesome. I'm going to finally bring him my "real" wedding present, which differs from the "from the heart" present that he already has.

Ah, right, I had a sort of mental breakdown about two weeks ago. I'm on prozac again, and I'm wondering about my mental health. I wish I didn't have problems. I wish I could be not-depressed like other people, so that I wouldn't have to be depressed about being depressed. Ah, the vicious circle.

There have been some interesting happenings on CF and IIDB. No promotion for me yet on IIDB, but they've allowed some non-Christian mods on CF for the first time. Raven got one of the positions and I'm rooting for her. Go Raven!

Oh, duh. I got the last Harry Potter book, and I saw the most recent movie. The movie was very good, the book was just good. Don't get me wrong, I liked the book, and I thought the ending was appropriate and in line with the entire theme of the series. However, the editing was poor. There were several internal contradictions that a careful editor should have fixed revisions ago.

(At this point, I'll warn you that there are spoilers in the next paragraph for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, although hopefully by the time its published you'll have read the book for yourself.)

Also, there's some interesting speculation on the religious nature of this last book. Yeah, there's the Calvary walk, the death, the resurrection, and even the crucifixion, but I still see lots of non-religious themes in the book. Some of the ones that strike me at this particular moment are Harry's reliance on his friends, the utter lack of betrayal that he suffered by someone close to him, and the fact that he lives through his "death" and goes on to live happily for a long time afterward.

Now that Rowling's done with the series, I hope she does the smart thing and allows others to expand on her intellectual property. Not me, per se, but I'm sure there are writers out there that will give their left nut to contribute to a series that will automatically guarantee that their works sells millions of copies.

All she'd have to do would be approve the plots, and let a new batch of writers take over. Even splitting the profits with the new writers, Rowling's sitting on a gold mine. Look at what Tolkien's son is doing with his father's old intellectual property (And Frank Herbert's son as well).

Some writers jealously guard their intellectual property, but sometimes they fail to recognize that sometimes letting it expand under their supervision but not their direct control can be just as effective.

Finally, there are frogs or toads croaking in the riverbed, which is not a usual sound for NM.

I think that's about it for now.

Omelas

Are you familiar with Omelas? It's an interesting place. I hear the architecture is something special.

If you aren't familiar with Omelas, you should be. Read the short story by Ursula Le Guin here:

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

I happen to think that it's one of the most brilliant short stories ever written. I've cried several times after reading it and then coming back to it later. I can't describe how powerful a short story without characters or a plot can be, but this is one of the most moving pieces of writing that I've ever read.

I've been obsessing over Omelas recently in regards to one of the websites that I belong to, CF. There's no child at CF, but that doesn't mean that the parallels, the aspiring perfect society with deep underlying flaws aren't comparable.

I've been thinking about it a lot. There are those that live in Omelas, those that walk away from Omelas, and there is a third group: those that stay and try to rise in society to the point where they can open the door and release him.

Only those that walk away are without blame. They're stronger than I am. I would be in the third group, if I was a person. I'm not. I'm a non person. Nothing more than a watcher.

That isn't depression talking. That's an accurate description of my place at CF. It's an odd place.

I know there wasn't a Lex and Lia this week. Sorry, I need to take a break for a week, but I promise that it will be back next week. I'm also going through a dry patch with other blog posts, so I wanted to apologize for that as well.

Jihad

I was very excited about getting Wildblue satellite internet back in the day. It meant being able to occasionally watch YouTube videos, for example.

Now I’m beginning to despise it. I’m writing this offline because once again my internet completely ceased working between one click and the next. It’s not a problem with the wireless router because that is registering as just fine (signal strength is “excellent”). However, there is no internet behind it. I click on a link, and instead of a fark comment thread I get “Server not found.”

This happens often. This Sunday, for instance, it was out all day long. A call to their service line was never returned.

I have repeatedly tried restarting all of the equipment involved, with little effect.

This is fucking torture. The internet is my lifeline. That’s how I communicate with everyone I know. It’s not like I can go see them or anything.

We’ve never had problems with our Dish Network like we have with Wildblue. You know how many problems that we’ve had with our TV connection? Less than ten (not counting the bizarre programming in their transceivers, that doesn’t count because it isn’t a connection problem). I’m listening to Sirius right now, actually. Dish works fine.

On a completely unrelated note, I was just thinking about the term jihad.

Jihad is a really interesting term to me, because the way I see it is completely different than I think the majority of Americans do.

I think that most people think that jihad means “holy war” and that isn’t right. I think a better definition would be “holy struggle.”

Rahma explained this to me more than a year ago, and this is how I understand it (obviously unable to look it up in wikipedia for the reasons above):

Jihad is the struggle of a Muslim to follow his faith. There are different parts to this struggle, but in order of importance, the internal struggle to act in a pious manner ranks before defending the Uma (the Muslim community) which is the only legitimate cause for violence in Islam unless you accept Hadith of which the isnad is possibly munkar.

Okay that probably didn’t make much sense. Let me try again. The most important part of jihad is acting piously. When you are walking down the street and Jessica Simpson walks by in hot pants, a pious Muslim man should avert his eyes. That struggle not to look at her is jihad.

When a Muslim man burns his finger on a stove, the struggle not to say, “Allah damn this infernal equipment” is jihad.

At eight a.m., after a night of heavy celebration (or studying for that big test), the struggle to get up and go to prayer is jihad.

That part of jihad is something that I respect because sometimes when I burn my fingers I have to struggle not to say “Jesus.” Not because I don’t want to take the Lord’s name in vain but because I keep reminding myself that in order for that curse to have any import, I would have to be a Christian, and I’m not and I would rather not have people think so. Instead I’m trying to remember to say “frack.”

So when is jihad the murder of Americans?

The community of Islam is called the Uma, and part of being a Muslim means protecting the Uma. You are allowed to kill people, if killing them protects the community of Muslims.

We (Americans) are occupying Saudi Arabia. At least partially through their invitation, but people like Osama Bin Laden aren’t very keen on that invited occupation because Saudi Arabia contains two of the three most important cities to Islam. Bin Laden thinks that by provoking America to senselessly invade Muslim countries that haven’t invited them he can convince Muslims to rise up and throw Americans out of their holy land.

This plan is working splendidly, thanks in large part to the moron that was elected to the Presidency in 2000.

Another thing: You know how the Bible is divided into the Old and New Testaments? There are two parts of the Islamic holy book: the Qur’an and the Hadith.

The miracle of Christianity is that Jesus rose from the dead. The miracle of Islam is that Mohammed (an ignorant herder) took dictation from God. I don’t read Arabic, but Muslims claim that the proof is in the pudding. Could Mohammed have produced the beautiful poetry of the Qur’an if it wasn’t divinely inspired? They claim that he couldn’t have.

I don’t believe that this is a miracle, but as far as “this miracle impresses me” this is somewhere between the “wow” of the Hindi milk miracle witnessed my millions and the “you mean someone moved the rotting corpse and you’re calling that a miracle?” of Easter.

Anyway, the Qur’an is the literal word of God. The Hadith are the collected sayings and actions of Mohammed, as passed down in verbal tradition through various people that met Mohammed during his lifetime.

As you can imagine, the Hadith are constantly argued about. They’re oral tradition first off, and second, some people are untrustworthy. Have you ever heard two people tell the same story, and the stories are recognizable but different? That’s the problem with the Hadith; they’re basically anecdotal.

There is a whole branch of study in Islam devoted to determining which Hadith came from reliable sources and were passed to people that repeated them without errors. I can’t remember what the name is, but the “path” of Hadith from person to person is called the isnad of that Hadith. If a Hadith didn’t originate from an actual experience with Mohammed, or if someone screwed it up during the centuries before it was written down, the isnad of that Hadith is said to be munkar.

So, to say again, many of the problems with the interpretation that killing Americans is a valid defense of the Uma, and therefore part of jihad is that it may be based on Hadith with isnads that are munkar. Bin Laden is just picking and choosing to fit his preconceived notions about killing Americans.

That’s why the majority of Muslims are not out to kill us. They realize that we are not converting the Saudi’s at the point of the gun, and they don’t need to kill us to defend the community.

However, more and more Muslims are looking at the war in Afganistan, the war in Iraq, and the continued occupation and support of the Saudi royal family, and they are saying to themselves “Maybe Bin Laden was right.”

That is my much simplified view of the Middle East situation, and about jihad and Hadith. I’d love to know if I’m basically correct by looking it up online, except I can’t look it up because I don’t have any internet access.

Arg!

Update: Let’s see how I did. Wikipedia’s first definition of jihad is “struggle.” Although in law it is defined as military action, it has a common usage that is very similar to the way that I described it.

When I was talking about which is more important, the general idea that I was thinking of was the difference between “the greater jihad” and “the lesser jihad.” The article on jihad describes that difference.

Interestingly, I see some similarities between the five kinds of jihad listed in that section of the article and the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, except of course for the one involving military action. That has no corresponding guideline in Buddhism.

My memory of the definitions of Hadith, isnad, and munkar seem to have been fairly accurate as well. The term that I couldn’t remember about the study of Hadith seems to be Ilm ar-Rijal, but that doesn’t sound right to me. I also put the apostrophe in the correct place in Qur’an.

I did misspell “Ummah” as “Uma,” but I got the gist of the definition correct.

To be charitable to myself, we’ll pretend that I didn’t screw up the “reasons that Muslims can kill others” section too badly.

Leavetakings

Last night I went to dinner at my brother's house. My brother's roommate cooked, and there were a lot of people there.

My mother, my father, Makoena and I all drove down together. My brother's roommates were both there, as were both of their significant others. Marge stopped by after work, and Piper's father stopped by as well. That's eleven people, if I'm counting correctly, and two dogs.

Today my brother is driving toward California, and tomorrow (Wednesday) he'll check in at the base in San Diego. Within a few days they'll fly on a charted commercial airliner to Kuwait (usually by way of Germany) and then wait for a flight into Iraq proper.

So last night was the last time I got to see him before he ships out for Iraq.

Last time, my brother was so horribly overqualified for grunt work that they assigned him to something called Force or perhaps FORCE and his job was to drive around the city at night and break down people's doors and search their homes.

This time apparently he's going to be a sniper. He's a darn fine shot with a gun, even though he really hadn't handled one with any regularity until he joined the military. I do remember playing GoldenEye on the N64 with him back in the day, and he was an unreal shot in that game. I lost to him 99% of the time, and that last 1% happened between the time that I memorized the layout of every level and before he managed the same thing.

He's an inspiring person to watch playing a strategy game. I tend to be extremely focused on my own personal situation in video games and I don't focus on winning until after I've maxed everything else out. I tend to play on the easiest difficulty on games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri (and nearly everything else). I'd much rather be city planning than leading troops (although I suck at Sim City, bizarrely).

My brother is action oriented. He leads his troops, doesn't emotionally connect to individuals, and focuses on achieving the goals of the scenario.

Back in the day I would occasionally watch him play games like Shogun: Total War for hours. I don't have to play myself, and I don't get bored either. I simply watch my little brother's actions, and try to understand the bigger picture of the impact of the battle and why he's making the decisions that he's making.

If I ever engage in territorial dispute, I'd choose my brother to be the general of my forces.

When we were driving back home, my mother spent the entire hour crying. She tends to be a wreck when my brother leaves, and apparently this isn't going to be an exception. We tried to point out that as a sniper, my little brother will be defended by an entire team of well trained marines who's entire mission will be to protect him, but she can't find consolation that being a sniper isn't all that most dangerous that an accountant.

I get pissed off at this miserableness. I don't really understand why completely. After all, I worry about my little brother too, and I don't like thinking about it.

I think that when I see my mother in shambles, leaving the porch light on as a vigil and avoiding news, it reminds me of my brother. I can put it out of my head as long as I don't see her moping around the house and worrying to the point where she's physically self-destructive.

I get angry at her when she's like this. In the car last night I wanted to slap her and yell "Don't you think you should be strong for him?" or "He needs support right now, and crying isn't f***ing helping him." Really though, it's about me. The crying isn't helping me.

The problem is that there isn't anything that we can do to help him. We can't keep him home unless we shoot him in the leg ourselves and apparently we couldn't bring ourselves to do that to him. He won't see us anyway, so she doesn't have to be stoic for him. She can do whatever she wants, and she wants to spend all of her time crying.

So he's off to Iraq.

Last time I asked him to keep a journal, and he didn't. We got a few letters from him, which was nice, but I did buy him a really nice journal and a couple of pens before he left. He said he'll probably write more this time, and I hope he does.

One last quick aside about him, he reads when he's in Iraq. He takes Proust and Nietzsche with him, and we ship him Aristotle and all sorts of other classic works that I couldn't sludge through even if I was stranded in the Iraqi desert. I've tried, and I think the two most classic works that I've read are Catcher in the Rye and the 1001 Nights. He's a much better person than I am, and it's why someday I hope to make him President.

I'm thinking of my own leavetaking, of a sorts. I'm thinking of taking a break from online (and television). I've already been avoiding IIDB due to Stiletto's suicide, and I haven't been to CF at all this month. I don't have any formal requirements to check in at WritingForums.org, and so I could just disappear for a week. I've been thinking about it for a month or so, and it seems like a decent idea.

Oddly, taking a break from television and internet during the day would probably mean that I'd be posting here at (Myspace/Blog depending on where you're reading this) more often.

If you're reading this at the Worlds & Time blog, you may have noticed that I already added a whole slew of new buttons at the bottom of each post. If you feel like it, you should think about hitting one of those buttons occasionally. I wouldn't mind the attention. I know I act sort of shocked when someone reads my blog, but it's actually a good feeling to see that someone is paying attention. I'm thinking of slicing up an image that's not me and putting it up as my profile picture to get the sort of attention that I know that Derrick was getting (although I think that was actually him).

I'm also thinking of trying to start up a weekly feature of my fiction writing. I've been considering journal entries by Jonathan, but I think that might be too confusing unless I start his own blog, and even then there are a lot of choices that I have to make. What stage of his life is the blog from, and is he here in our time or in whatever time period I choose in the future? It wouldn't really help me unless it was in the future, and posting it online would defeat the purpose of trying to get my book published.

The other option is 'Lex and 'Lia, the adorable tormented kids living in a vampire/wereperson/witchcraft novel. I just bought the Anita Blake series but I haven't started on them yet, so that would probably fit in with my frame of reference for the next few weeks.

I'm obviously leaning toward the Lex and Lia stories. I don't know what the format will be yet, so I'll certainly have to consider that. I also want to finish the hard sci-fi short that I've been working on first. So, keep a watch for something.

In the meantime, no one else do any leaving. I want promises from all of you.

Settlement

Let’s say that suddenly we had both available worlds that support human life, and the ability to travel to them.

The UN would probably start accepting applications from groups to settle on these new planets. If there are enough planets, I’d guess more than three or four, you’d probably find that each petitioner would be applying for a whole planet to colonize.

If there are four to ten planets, you’re probably going to find that the petitioning groups are countries, and the ones that are going to get the planets are going to be the most powerful ones. Guessing, I’d say the seven permanent members of the U.N. security council in order of GNP plus India, a predominantly Islamic country (Indonesia, perhaps) and one planet that the U.N. will never be able to come to a decision on.

If you have more than ten, the U.N. will probably consider the requests of groups of people instead of nations. Instead of just an Islamic planet, you’d have separate Shiite and Sunni planets with co-op governments formed by smaller independent groups. You’d have different ethnic groups as well that would be vying for new land, and you’d probably see a couple of really bizarre choices in the first few decisions, like an Inuit planet or a Sub-Saharan African culture planet. Still, the U.N. would tend toward establishing constitutional democracies.

My universe postulates a dozen early terraformed planets, and then forty more planets that eventually support human life.

Even if nations controlled these planets, they’d treat them like America treats Puerto Rico. As a territory. They’d have some decent benefits at first, but eventually I think it will be inevitable that the planets are going to declare their sovereignty. Eventually.

Once they’re sovereign, all of these planets are also going to have singular planetary governments, which are going to be very different than what you see on Earth.

Here’s a momentary tangent. I belong to ChristianForums.com, and one of the things that they get the most disagreement about is what “Christian” means. After that, some of the most vicious arguments come from people that belong to the same denomination as each other. Catholics will bitterly attack each other over minor theological points, and so will Baptists and just about any other Christian group. Individual Christians are often less concerned with the fine points of theology, but look at the split within the Anglican Church. People are vicious even when the stakes are small.

That same effect is going to create problems as planets try to define exactly who they cater to. You’ll get many serious confrontations about minor things, but one thing I’ve noticed is that outsiders are more reviled the more strictly you define your group. With the necessity of groups applying for planets in larger groups, you’re going to end up with lots of infighting among some of the planets, even though they’ll claim to speak with one voice.

And, humorously, I still expect them to be more peaceful than Earth. Earth is going to be conflicted and having internal conflicts for thousands of years yet.

If I had to guess, I’d say that the planets that have the broadest possible diversity are going to do the best. If you have a singular cultural focus, you’re not going to make the most of your resources, at least at first. It takes some time for desert or temperate or cold cultures to adapt, but if you land with those cultures ready to fill their niches, you’ll have a broader base of support for a population that is going to be struggling to establish themselves.

One of the most interesting things to me about establishing new planets is about what kind of economy they’re going to produce. Industry is going to be important, so most of the planets are going to focus on metal and chemical processing. Today, many places (like where I live) depend on tourism, and with new alien landscapes you’ll have a new frontier for people to explore. Another huge industry is going to be media, and media production. I do agree with Time magazine that our culture is trending toward personal media content, and so I expect to see many “local” planetary channels, with the occasional interstellar hit.

I’ve always talked about one kind of industry, finding materials for building and simple objects, but the more high tech industry, such as computers and spaceships are going concentrate on certain planets that are willing to spend the billions required to create the specialized infrastructure that are required to produce them.

If a planet fails, it probably will be an economic failure and not a political failure. After all, our current situation has proven that political systems can be painfully forgiving in certain respects. Economies though, can be fragile, especially when they’re starting out. It’s going to take money to start up all these colonies, and so they’ll be in debt in the beginning.

Still, once a planet is settled, they’re not going to unsettle it. Unless some disaster happens to wipe out life there, people are still going to live there even if the government and the economy both collapse. You’ll see a lot more hermits on the frontier because it will take centuries to explore all those planets to their fullest.

There’s an interesting environmental point to having more worlds. Earth is going to be destroyed by people that no longer see any reason to preserve Earth. So are other planets, actually. Once something isn’t unique, people aren’t going to see the need to protect it. Environmentalism is still going to be an issue, but it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Election 2006

Okay, first off, I'm already slightly wrong. My prediction here has not come true. I am no prophet, because things are changing.

But not really.

I was talking with my dad today about my fervent fever dream for America . . . a parliament.

Did you know that the 45 Democrat Senators represent more people than the 54 Republican Senators? Those statistics are for the Senate before the election, of course, and since that's done with, I'm not going to try to find the source for this again. The point still holds though, ours is not a representational government. The same is true for the House, though not to the same extent. Of course, in the House, the Democrats typically get a higher percentage of the vote in the districts that they win.

Brilliant.

So, due to the structure of our democracy, the people in power have no reason to make any changes, but let's talk about my idea anyway.

I have no idea what the real definition of "parliament" is, but, let me give you my definition:

A parliamentary house is a house that gives seats by a popular vote. This doesn't mean that you have a specific candidate when you vote. There is no person for your district with their name on the ballot. Instead of voiting for a person, you vote for a party.

Like, I would vote for the Gay Atheist Psuedo-Socialist Libertarian Party (yes, I realize the inherant contradiction in there). My mother would vote the Liberal Old Person Party. My brother would vote for the Marines Against Stupidity Party.

Now, you'd look at the total number of votes for each party nationally. Let's say that the GAPSL party gets 2 million votes. The LOP Party gets 3 million votes. The MAS Party gets 2.5 million votes. So, out of 15 seats, the gays would get 4, the old people would get 6, and the marines get 5.

Now, no party has a controlling majority, but obviously the old people have the upper hand. They form a coalition government by negotiating with the other parties, and select a Prime Minister from their party.

Now, if you want to get something done, you have to negotiate. The gays want to legalize gay marriage? The marines would probably object to that, but if the old people agree, then it'll pass. The marines want to invade another country? The gays would object, but if the old people agree then we're going to invade.

But, if the old people want to increase taxes to 50% income to pay for old people medication, the gays and the marines can join together and vote against them.

This means no more two party system, because nearly any opinion would be represented. If you're a economic liberal who only objects to abortion, you can vote for the democratic pro-life party. If you're a gay person that believe in (Goldwater/Reagan) conservative values, you don't have to vote against your own self interest by voting for the Republicans.

Granted, there will still be corruption, but watching the election coverage, I can still dream that some day I'll have some actual representation.

Also, I found something that I have to laugh at, even though it should be scary. At first look, this is a joke. I mean, could anyone really believe some of that stuff? But it's real. Poe's law, named after someone I've met at CF, states that an extreme satire cannot be distinguished from the real thing.

I have to quote one thing from Mr. Steele (emphasis his):

We can all work on purging the Republican Party of homos after this election is won. Right now we need to ensure that Republicans retain control of Congress. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone that we are still engaged in a war against Islamofacists who want to kill us. The Republicans are the only ones equipped to stand up to the terrorists and to keep us alive and I think you know that.

I mean, I may be gay, but at least I still live in the real world, right? I have something to tell Mr. Steele. We're undetectable, and you're never going to get rid of us.

One other thing: Steven Colbert is a genius.

Finally, I got my new wireless desktop, which probably doesn't sound like much, but for means that I can write again without having to put a huge strain on my neck. I'll still have to take it easy, but it means that I really have a lot more freedom than I had before. I can post blog entires again.

That's kind of exciting for me. I'm not limited just to reading anymore.

Inevitability & Contradiction

Bill "Gambling is moral" Bennett was on the Daily Show a couple months back, and he pretty much admitted that gay marriage was on it's way to America at large.

It reminded me of the time that Jon Stewart bitch slapped Tucker Carlson on Crossfire a little bit, and made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It wasn't perfect, but it was still a nice thing to see. Further, I agree with him. Gay marriage is inevitable, I think. Our constitution simply doesn't support it.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when someone on CF asked me for a definition of evil, and my response was something to the effect of "Acting against the interest of others, and the society."

Now, I think that this is a simple way to phrase a complex moral problem. It's true that it does need some explanation though, and that's where I begin to have problems explaining what I mean by "interest of others" and "interest of society."

This is just a sounding board, not really a finished thought, so constructive comments are welcome.

"Interest of others" is about the way we interact with the people around us. Helping someone with a blown tire on the side of the road when it's raining is good. Stealing from someone is bad. It's often about giving people what they want, but not always. There's also a huge section of acting in someone's best interest that has to do with "character," or, as most people would say, not getting your way.

Not giving a pound of candy to an 11 year old is acting in their best interest. Stealing the keys from a drunk man before he can drive is acting in his best interest. Enforcing a curfew for a 16 year old is probably also in someone's best interest.

Some people though don't really understand what these things are or not. Prohibiting gay people from marrying isn't in their best interests.

Society, in the context of this little thought experiment (and in the world at large, the more that I think about it) exists to support the best interests of the individuals that belong to it. The foundational words are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." That's why murder is a crime in the U.S.A., because it infringes on an individuals right to pursue his own brand of happiness.

This is why I don't completely understand speed limits, the war on drugs, or the war in Iraq. Those all seem like things that are in the best interest of the government, without being part of the best interest of individuals living whatever life they choose to live.

Gay marriage is another thing that it seems contradictory to that whole "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness thing." It's like people haven't really thought to much about why they're banning it, or if they have thought about it, they think that we live in a theocracy. (Soce would disagree, I think.)

Anyway, thinking about my definition of evil, I realized that one of the things that I consider evil is fostering division. Whether it be racial, economic or even access to education, any attempt to divide off one part of society from another part of society is not the way that things are supposed to be. I'm not talking about Communism, I'm talking about tolerance, acceptance, and equality.

So, all those people on CF that want to divide the True Christians (tm) from those that they consider "Christians in name only" suddenly shifted from having a different point of view to evil. Granted, I've believed that the homophobic bigots have been evil for a while, but those that want to divide cover a lot more people than those that want gay people to go back in the closet and lock the door (not really, but they're more vocal about it).

Don't think that I don't see the contradiction there though. As soon as you start calling people good and evil, thats a separation, and I think that I've already decided that separations are bad.

I haven't managed to work through this contradition though. I'm not sure how I can reconcile the belief in evil people without acknowledging that I'm evil. Should I drop the whole clause, or should I qualify? Perhaps that's the point. Perhaps, unless you love everyone (and their "evil") then it's impossible to be "good."

At some point though, I just remind myself that it's all relative anyway, and I'll figure it out. And I will. I just haven't yet.

The Other Side of Morality

I once had a person on Christian Forums tell me that if he didn't believe in God he'd loose all sense of good and evil and would start murdering everyone that displeased him, raping women he found attractive, and simply stealing everything that he wanted.

Now, I'm not claiming that this person represents Christianity. It was just one person whom's comments were particularly emotive and over the top.

I thought I'd just take a moment to talk about my own morality for a moment. I should point out first that I don't speak for all atheists in the same way that the above person doesn't speak for Christianity.

My morality is conventionally based on what Christians know as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Why do I follow the Golden Rule? Because I find that since I recognize that I am a person, and there are other people, then those other people probably have feelings similar to the feelings that I have. This is the basis for empathy.

Since I have empathy for other people, I'd like them to feel how I would like to feel. This is, namely, happy.

The problem is, the Golden Rule isn't perfect, because all people aren't all the same. If you're just following the Golden Rule, for example, you can be either neutral or against gay marriage because if you're straight, you probably don't want to marry another person of the same gender. The thought process is: I'm straight, and I'm trying to treat others the way that I want to be treated, so I'll treat gay people the way that I want to be treated and vote against allowing people to marry others of the same sex.

Yeah, that's overly simplistic, and it's not why most people vote against gay marriage, but it illustrates the problem, I think.

The solution is another version of the rule, my Platnium Rule: Do unto others what they want you to do to them. Not as catchy, but as a precursor to the Golden Rule, it covers the differences between different people. Now, even if you don't like getting whipped and your girlfriend does, then the Platnium Rule provides you with a basis for interacting with her in a moral way without preventing her from getting what she wants.

You'll note that all the things that the golden rule prohibits are mostly still verboten. Murder, for example, is probably not what most people want to happen to them, so that's out. I can't steal your stuff, either. Or have sex with your husband. That is, unless you want me to have sex with your husband.

See, there's the big problem with the Platnium Rule: it's really, really hard to accomplish successfully if you don't know someone. You need a lot of information about what other people want and like and what they find mortally offensive, so the Platnium rule isn't perfect, and when you don't have enough information, that's when you fall back on the golden rule.

Now, there's a problem with both of the above rules that requires and addendum that I call the Silver Rule: If either the Golden or Platnium Rules call for something that you know is not in a person's best interests, then ignore the first two rules and do what you think is best. I'm not talking about hurting their feelings though. I have to have a darn good reason to think that something is against a person's long term interests before I'll resort to the Silver Rule. For example, if someone hands me a gun and asks me to shoot them, the Platnium rule says that I should. The Golden Rule asks me how I would feel, and since I'm chronically depressed, that says I should too.

However, I know that shooting someone that's suicidally depressed (or perhaps just crazy) is not in their best interest. Silver rule wins out, and I try to talk them off the ledge.

There's one final rule that restricts what I do, the Copper Rule. The Copper Rule says: If you have no other basis for making a decision, try to follow the law. Granted, we're down to fairly common metals at this point, so there's some leeway with the Copper Rule, but at least it provides a general guideline.

And that's basically my decision making process when it comes to ethical dillemas. Granted, there are a lot of things that require a solid defition. For instance, I don't think that something that can't think and has never been able to think is a person. Also, I don't think that a corporation is a person. That sort of stuff. But all that is sort of off topic. This is just the basic process.

Michelle and Marriage

Really posted on April 22, 2006 just after midnight (so the night of the 21st) but back dated to fill a gap.

Michelle claims to have once been a liberal that supported gay rights. After some thought and reading over the tenants of her (fundamentalist Catholic) religion, she was able to determine that homosexuality was wrong, and therefore gay marriage was/is politically a no-no.

I came in on the middle of a conversation about a "support group" for homosexuals that she supports. The main idea that I seized upon was the group's dualistic expectation of behavior: either remain celibate forever (lovely chastity!) or deconvert (and for some gay people, throw away all hope of not going to hell, Michelle is very clear on the existence of hell and gay people's place there).

It was sort of different because there wasn't a lot of emphasis on change (not that I saw, anyway.

Interestingly enough, Michelle is married. So I took a look at the duality (which actually doesn't mean much to me, atheist and all that) and I offered it too her:

"You're married, and I'd guess that you must be in love with your husband. What if, when you met your husband, instead of encouraging you to find a relationship that glorified God you were told that your relationship was an abomination in the eyes of the Lord? Instead of being able to love him as a man and a wife you were required to keep your distance forever. You could love him as a brother, but you could never love any man as a husband.

"That's the challenge that this group is putting in front of homosexuals. You may either disregard God or live alone forever.

"So Michelle, what would you do? Disregard God, or live alone forever? I suspect you'll indicate the later, but I'll doubt the veracity of the answer. It's one thing to say, and it's another to live."

I was right of course. She said she'd live alone forever, and it's true, I don't believe her. I think she's a liar, and I think she's a hypocrite and worse.

But it was when she said she understood the sacrifice that my eyes narrowed. It wasn't her statement that she could live alone forever that caught me because somewhere in the Catholic church there must have been some nun somewhere that managed to make it through the temptations and die a ripe old maid. It was when she compared living alone forever to two years back in the day when, and I kid you not, she had to spend a few months not sleeping with her husband because her marriage wasn't recognized by the church.

Which means that any brief period of pain is equal to hell, I suppose. I have to say, I'm not really scared any more. Obviously, if I can last for a couple of months, it'll be like forever.

She also pointed out that since I'm unchurched, I could never understand the depths of her emotions, and that she feels misunderstood because of her frustration.

I sit back here, and I wonder if I could hate her any more. I don't want to. I really feel horrible about my feelings (the hate, not those other ones) but I can't help but to feel just blinding sheets of anger toward her.

Two years is a long time, but someone once said that the presence of hope is heaven, and the loss of all hope is hell.

She was willing to equivocate the difference.

This is venting. Half of it. Because I can't honestly say that this blog represents me without at least a little bit of my dark side. So here is the hate that I feel for others to see, not because I'm proud of it but because you shouldn't know me without having some idea of who I am. And here's the darker section:

The other half is in my response. It's not a nice thing, writing out your dislike. I know it's going to hurt her, and it hurts me to write it (I have no illusions . . . it will hurt her worse than me). But if I don't let it out, then it'll come out somewhere else. There's not going to be any creative outlet, no kick boxing or punching a pillow. I'm a writer, and it's going to be words, either with Michelle or with my mother.

After that I'm going to think about crying for a while. For my loss of innocence, and for the pain that her church is causing others, but mostly because what she represents is so wonderfully talented at bringing out the worst in me.