Posted by Sidney Parker in Old Times
I was just thinking of old times here in Command. Man were we hotheads. I am thinking some new members probably think we are lame but I can remember the battles. Not that it was a good thing but I do fondly remembering that I was going to have to dig deep to debate/argue with Jack Dipper. All those memories that once made me a little perturbed have turned to a fond kind of recollection even when at the time they were not so much so. Good times.

Sidney

I don’t think that’s weird at all to think that they were good times. Regardless of how dysfunctional they seemed at the time, they were better than the present.

The best thing about the Old Feuds is that they took the form of public debates about what kind of club we should be. There was value in talking about that and exploring disagreements over that, because doing so allowed us to identify things to do that would move us towards taking action to make the club better. When Jack would argue that The-Club-Needed-More-Rules and you’d argue that The-Club-Had-Too-Many-Rules, a member could read all of that and just think about it, and then pitch a solution to a problem. That’s part of how we ended up with X-Fleet; you and Jen Herr would argue with Jack and Larry Garfield and I just watched the whole thing and came up with a way to test the notion that there were too many rules preventing us from trying new stuff out (spoiler alert: there were… but at the same time, there weren’t…). The other nice thing about the Old Feuds is that everyone involved loved the club enough to table them when they thought the club wasn’t doing well. Jen and Jack used to argue rather viciously with each other, to the point where it was really not that healthy for them personally, but if they thought the club wasn’t doing well they would put their nonsense on hold and make a point of publicly agreeing with each other on basic principles to get the club back to adequate health.

Our current conflicts are not productive in these ways. We don’t even acknowledge our current conflicts, except in private conversations that don’t take place anywhere on our website. We do not even respect each other enough to disagree openly on matters of substantive importance. Then again, we can’t even say that there are matters of substantive importance to disagree about, because nobody can actually express their conflict as a disagreement over a principle. It’s all about how those other people are bad. Those other people are bad, and you can’t spend any time talking to them. Don’t write with them, don’t talk to them on Discord, don’t ever talk about everything. If you do, you might become bad like them, because they’re “toxic.” And whatever you do, don’t volunteer in the club and don’t write in Command, because that’s “political”. Being “political” is basically 80% of the way to being bad, or so I was led to believe when I was being asked to run for President to stop the other bad people (this was before I was bad).

What makes it worse, is that Rob and James are (when they are present) allowing this model to continue, because they basically have accepted this is the way that conflict between people must be, and that there’s not much they can do about it. Their approach is to minimize conflict, by treating the club as if it is a prison that they are the wardens of. That is, to maintain order by taking the leaders of gangs in the prison and telling them all that they need to keep their own people in line so everyone can just do their time in peace. I know this, because I was asked by them to regulate the behavior of some other people who are on the “side” that I am alleged to be on. I dunno man, these gang tattoos must only be visible under ultraviolet light, because I can’t see them in the mirror.

I’ve been avoiding being critical of Rob and James about this because, quite frankly, I think they have good intentions and want to do the right thing. The current conflict is undesirable and they’re trying to make it less so, by limiting it before it gets big, dumb and public. But at the same time… they’re not really addressing the problem, and it’s inhibiting a lot of people’s enjoyment of STF.

Certainly, I don’t enjoy it here anymore. I didn’t spend years of my spare time doing everything I’ve done here just so I could watch everyone self-segregate into their own private Discord servers and nurse their grudges. Watching that happen is distressing, and what’s even more distressing is that there’s very little I can actually do about it. I cannot control the desires of other people, and the sad thing is that there enough people who desire this state of affairs to continue because they derive personal validation from it. There are also not enough people willing to directly confront that, because they don’t have the confidence to say “this thing here is wrong, we should not tolerate it,” largely because the “it” is not something that is publicly visible or easy to explain, even if everyone involved knows exactly what is happening. Even if everyone involved is perfectly willing to talk themselves blue in the face about it everywhere on the entire Internet except for this place. I mean, if we talk about it here, we might actually discuss it as a club, some people might have a disagreement about it, and that disagreement might even be resolved by some kind of action we didn’t know we could take before the conversation started.

But, that could also turn into a hot-headed battle. Hot-headed battles aren’t so great in the moment, as you yourself correctly pointed out, and in today’s highly stressful society that’s been ravaged by coronaviruses and Russian barbarism, perhaps we don’t have the same ability to tolerate a discussion that turns into a battle. The question we should ask ourselves is “Can we tolerate the alternatives to a disagreement?” I don’t know the answer to that because I don’t know what the alternatives are, aside from doing nothing. I’m pretty frustrated with doing nothing. If we don’t want to have public discussions anymore, and we can’t figure out an alternative to conflict that we all find acceptable… maybe I’ll need to find my own alternatives. I dunno…

Joe