Banned from Boing Boing?
This was posted here yesterday. I took it down after a few hours because I wasn’t sure the the proper intent was behind it and that it simply didn’t add fuel to the fire. After receiving a couple of e-mails about it from people who saw it (here or on feeds) and then saw it was gone, I’m going to put it back up with this note. It is important to note that I have been quite a fan of Boing Boing over time and have generally believed that they were doing all of the “right” things when it came to blogging and documenting the state of things on the net, especially the battles over copyright and the like. That is part of what has been this whole issue so much of a lightning rod for people, including me. We thought that Boing Boing was better than this sort of thing and feel a bit let down.
There has been an Internet “tempest in a teapot” during the last few days over at Boing Boing, the well known group blog that includes Cory Doctorow. (For those that don’t know it…) This has to do with San Francisco sex blogger and columnist Violet Blue noticing that all references to her have been removed from the blog. This is over 70 references according to her and go back several years in posts that mentioned her blogging or writing.
For the first day or so, Boing Boing ignored this, seemingly pretending nothing was happening. Any questions about it in comments on posts were quickly deleted (I had this done to me). Only after the Los Angeles Times and other high profile outlets started asking questions (Valleywag doesn’t count) did they make a post publicly mentioning it but they still refuse to say why they did it. That post has now, I believe, turned into the most commented post ever on Boing Boing. In the midst of all of this, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, the paid moderator for Boing Boing, and the commentors started going at it hammer and tongs with Teresa insulting people (later deleting or editing many of these) and deleting comments left and right when she didn’t like this.
I pointed out the following earlier:
and I now find myself (and my IP address even) banned from posting comments on the blog. No official explanation or notice was given, my ability to post comments now simply returns “An error occurred: Permission denied.” from the posting script and attempts to make a new account to post tells me that my IP address has been banned. Hmm… I would think a warning or even an e-mail would be in order?
I don’t blame the core Boing Boing writers for this sort of behavior but it does make me question the “moderation” of their paid moderating staff who attack the very community, with some rather unfriendly and confrontational language, after inviting that same community to comment on the post about the larger issue. Somehow, I doubt if I’ll be submitting too many more links to Boing Boing in the future. This is too bad as I was quite happy to see on of my posts on their front page a little over a week ago.
Update: I’ve had e-mail with Cory, who is on vacation and, I guess, staying away from the mess which is Boing Boing on this whole issue. He said that there is no reason why my IP address would be blocked and CC’d Teresa on his response. She has unblocked it (which she said was the fault of an assistant moderator who “is still a little shaky on IP addresses”). No word from her, in response to a direct question, about my seeming banning with no notice or explanation so I expect that I still won’t be participating on their site anymore. I’m still receiving an error message any time I attempt to leave a comment on any Boing Boing post.
I did appreciate the following comment posted by “Lizzle” near the end of the giant ass thread in respond to one of the true believers. She reiterates the issue that I touched above to how the “moderation” by Teresa, who is paid to moderate Boing Boing, affects the readers and, therefore, the overall community on the blog:
#1115 posted by Lizzle, July 2, 2008 4:38 PM
@ #1084 - How would you know what’s “normal” for BB if this is the first thread you’ve ever posted on? Are you claiming to be a lurker for years and this is your first post?I didn’t want to post here yesterday when this all blew up, because it seems fairly clear that it’s all about something unpleasantly personal. It’s been bothering me all day, though, and some of the things said by mods and extreme BB enthusiasts in the comments thread in particular are really disquieting.
Antinous, among others (is GregLondon a mod or just a TruFan? He seems very personally invested in the whole thing), have expressed the opinion that those who don’t comment here regularly can’t possibly be familiar with BB or have a sense of the ethical values that the site has espoused in the past. Teresa has just descended to ad hominem dismissal of people making comments as “nonsense”, “stupid” and “blockheads” - it’s a form of rhetoric she uses distressingly often when someone disagrees with the status quo, and in threads other than this one. I don’t comment here often; the moderation policy and the choice of someone with such an abrasive tone as chief moderator it has, in particular, made me feel uncomfortable. That said, I’ve been reading daily for long enough (I’d estimate six years or so - you’ve published some links I’ve sent in on occasion too) that the comment section still feels extremely new to me. (I also notice that among the mods, Takuan seems pretty much absent from this thread; and that among the contributors, Cory has also been very quiet.)
All this - the general comments policy, the mistake (you can’t deny, given the number of people who have felt moved to post negatively here, that it *was* a mistake) that sparked this discussion off, the sense that those who don’t comment aren’t welcome - simply makes me feel more and more disengaged from a site that I used to read daily. It also feels disingenuous to represent BB as a simple personal blog; you’re the third most popular blog on the Internet, you attract some big-money advertising and you’re looked to as a good example of how to manage a certain kind of really important, *good*, liberal content. Readers do have a stake in BB outside the free milkshake analogy, given that (more) advertisers are (more) willing to pay you (more) if they see you have a large readership. (My own blog recently grew a Google PageRank point, and I’ve watched the queries from advertisers and revenues grow as a direct result.) Some people here have been very dismissive of the notion that breaking backward links is against the whole sense of a wonderful networked, searchable Internet world that readers here like to imagine we inhabit, but I find the breaking of those links to be a really uncomfortable precedent, especially here at BB. We all have a sense of what this site stands for.
I think it’s absolutely delightful that BB has fans who are dedicated enough to post such impassioned defences of policy to those who have disagreed with what happened over the Violet Blue thing. I wish I could feel the same, but my own engagement with the site has been dribbling away in recent months, especially given some of the moderation decisions I’ve watched being taken. The Violet Blue disaster and the generalised snippiness about the value of discourse with people who aren’t regular commenters just alienates me a bit more (the mods’ opinion and attitude here is, for me, intimately associated with the opinion of those who write the blog and with my understanding of the blog as a whole - I can’t possibly be the only person who feels that way). I feel a bit like someone who is arranging to gradually see less and less of a friend she used to get on with but doesn’t really want to see much any more; it’s a shame. What happened to whuffie?
I must also add this limerick, found on metafilter, which seems to sum things up nicely:
A blogger named Violet Blue,
considered by some taboo,
last year or last night,
was erased from the site…
The official response was “Who?”
Update for 7/3: Teresa responded after two e-mails on the issue (the second one after 24 hours or so) and she cc’d the entire Boing Boing staff. In response to my stating that her lack of response after a day was just fodder for the blog, she stated “You’re now threatening me and Boing Boing because you didn’t get your answer instantly? That’ll play well.” My immediate reaction to this kind of thing is “And they pay you to actually moderate a public blog site?” Wow. I didn’t realize pointing out that this kind of thing is blog fodder was a “threat” (and not just to her but to ALL of Boing Boing!). I mean, seriously, when I’m bitching about being banned on Boing Boing, the fact that the moderator, after responding on one issue, then blows me off for a day is likely to wind up being mentioned here. It looked pretty willful to me since she responded within ten minutes on the other issue when Cory e-mailed her.
Shunryu Suzuki and my Father-in-law
One interesting thing came up this weekend when we were at Green Gulch Farm. My father-in-law, Leon, came along with us and we had a chance to chat a bit here and there. I had been told in previous years, in a vague way, that he had done some sitting meditation previously but there hadn’t been many details given. He doesn’t make much small talk so I’m not surprised.
While we were there at Green Gulch, Leon went to a meditation session without the rest of us. He mentioned to me over dinner later that, based on something that was said, he thought that the place had something to do with a teacher, Suzuki. I told him that, yes, it was part of the San Francisco Zen Center and that had been founded by Shunryu Suzuki. Leon then told me that he’d studied for about six months with a zen teacher named “Suzuki” in 1962. He said that the group had met near Japantown in San Francisco in a building that was a converted synagogue (which probably stayed in the memory of my father-in-law since he’s Jewish). Later this same day, Leon mentioned that he’d seen a photo of the same teacher in the library upstairs, which is where I had noticed a picture of Suzuki Roshi earlier as well.
On getting back to town, I checked wikipedia and other information that I had about Suzuki’s history. It turns out that he came over in 1959 from Japan. He was brought to America to be a priest at Soko-ji, the only Soto Zen temple in San Francisco, which served the Japanese community. Soko-ji was, unsurprisingly now, in a converted Jewish synagogue. There is a picture of the temple in Crooked Cucumber, which is a biography of Suzuki. It was on Bush street and looked like a synagogue, not a Japanese Buddhist temple, so no work was done to convert the exterior. At this location in 1960, Suzuki Roshi did the first sesshin (a three day one) ever held in North America and began to take on more and more non-Japanese students. (I have elsewhere been told that this caused a bit of trouble as members of the Japanese community were not entirely pleased with this turn of events at the time.) In 1961, Richard Baker, who was Suzuki Roshi’s later successor and the founder of Green Gulch Farm, showed up and began to study with Suzuki Roshi. (As an aside, a friend of Baker’s, who was hanging around with him in Fields Book Store having a discussion, sent Baker to see Suzuki. Fields is currently owned by a friendly acquaintance of mine who is probably reading this…) Philip Kapleau, who became very well known later on, showed up in January, 1962, for a visit which he wrote about in a Zen newsletter, Wind Bell. It was only in the later 1960s that the new center (now called the “City Center“) was purchased and Suzuki Roshi left Soko-ji.
So, it turns out that my father-in-law was sitting at Soko-ji and studying with Suzuki Roshi at the same time as Richard Baker and a number of the other early movers and shakers in American Zen. The funny thing is that Leon did not know that Suzuki Roshi was famous or had gone on to seriously kickstart Zen in the non-Japanese population here in the United States. Leon was flipping through Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a collection of Suzuki’s talks on Zen, and he’d never seen it before and had no idea it was one of the most influential books in Zen Buddhism in the West.
I asked Leon what had happened and why he had quit going there. He said that he’d sat often for about six months, riding out with a friend who had a car. He’d attended the Saturday meals, he said, which happened with the sitting, but he wound up moving out of San Francisco (to Berkeley, where he lives now, I assume). Since he had no car and this was before BART, he had simply stopped going. He didn’t really have a lot to say about it and I didn’t want to pry overly but what a strange connection. To have been with Suzuki Roshi at that time, at the very beginning of such an influential change, and then to not even know about all of the things that had happened in the 46 years since then. It was an odd thing to come out during this weekend, that’s for sure.
Starbucks Buddhism?
The Karmapa Has His First Cup of Coffee Ever Courtesy of Starbucks - A Telling Moment.
This last weekend, I went to see the 17th Karmapa in Seattle during his first visit to America. (Actually, I think it is his visit to anywhere outside of India since eluding the Chinese in Tibet.)
My thoughts on this whole event are rather bifurcated into my thoughts concerning the content of the event, itself, and my thoughts concerning everything around it.
Let’s deal with the former first… In many ways, this was a typical “Rock Star Lama” event. There were two sessions a day, 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM, for between an hour and a half and two hours each. Each required a separate ticket (for a total of four on Saturday and Sunday), which kind of left a weird taste in my mouth. The event was held at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Seattle. The last time that I was there, it was to see Dead Can Dance play on a reunion tour, which gave weird associations. The theatre holds a couple of thousand people and there were, I am told, 2,500 the first day and 2,800 the second.
We had to work our way through as much as an hour of security each time. You couldn’t bring a camera in (no photos!) and had to get wanded by bored guards. I’m not sure what they were protecting the Karmapa from exactly. Communist snipers? Exuberant Buddhists with cameras? We then got to sit in assigned theatre seats (mine was in the second mezzanine, about three floors up).
The Karmapa was refreshingly direct and frank in his discussions. During the first day, he discussed the foundations of practice and directly spoke about the role of the teacher in practice. He spoke at length about the problems with teachers who are not worthy of trust and the difficulties in evaluating a teacher. He made some jokes about creating an ID card system for teachers and their credentials but admitted that it would take 20 years to properly evaluate a teacher for it, making it a bit pointless. He spoke quite a bit, on both days, about both how much smaller the world is, effectively, and on how we have to collectively work together in an active way to make a better world, avoiding sectarianism and also avoiding retreating from the world.
Much of the first day was taken up with his discussion of the ngondro, prelimary practices, that he had written and that were distributed at the end. He wound up giving a lung transmission for them as well (but on the second day!). On the second day, he gave the empowerment for Chenrezi (Avalokitesvara) and went through the sadhana for him. There is something distinctly odd about sitting in a theatre with several thousand people all (badly) chanting in Tibetan but with great joy. Of course, someone’s cellphone did go off, loudly, in the middle of the empowerment, echoing around the theatre.
Now, I want to go to my thoughts concerning everything around this event. In short: What a fucking zoo! It seems like every Dharma practitioner with any pull, money, or (pardon the pun) desire on the West Coast pulled up stakes and showed up. Imagine all of these people packed into and passing through the lobby of an ex-Movie Palace and it is a scene of chaos. I wound up standing in line in front of people from the Nyingma center (now dissolved) that I used to practice with a few years back. My friend, Nathan, only had to stand in place in the lobby for person after person to walk up and say “Hello” to him from his time at Gampo Abbey, Crestone, and other places as a student of Thrangu Rinpoche. It wasn’t just Tibetan Vajrayana practitioners either. I saw a Chinese nun or two, a Chinese monk (in orange), a cluster of Soto (?) Zen priests wearing dark green rakusus and full robes, and at least one Zen practitioner from another sect. Of course, it being a Dharma event, 90% of the people were white and, seemingly, Boomers. (Well, actually, while it was probably mostly white, there were plenty of rich Chinese from Hong Kong from what I was told by a few people…).
I realize that I am some sort of afflicted curmudgeon but nothing makes me want to head the other way more than a large crowd of Buddhists at a Dharma event. It is the weird combination of a “New Age” vibe, hippy dippy commentary and attitudes, and a general feeling like I’m in the middle of a giant human herd. I’ve always felt this way in large Buddhist groups so it isn’t their fault in any way. I became a Buddhist for very direct and personal spiritual reasons and I’m a bit antinomial in nature. I dislike feeling like I’m in the middle of a church (and a very wealthy white one at that). Nathan and I did have a discussion about various shocking things Milarepa would have done in the lobby in front of this crowd in all likelyhood.
All in all, I’m glad that I heard the Karmapa speak and got to attend a historic event. All of the trappings around it, while well meaning on someone’s part were pretty offputting though. It felt more like a Stevie Nicks concert much of the time (or maybe CCR?) than a Dharma event. A lot of husk for the kernel offered. I’m not sure that I would do this again (and this applies to seeing the Dalai Lama as well). I’d much rather go on a retreat with a few people and practice or sit alone in my back space practicing meditation or a sadhana than go to Buddhist Church. That being said, I thought that everything that the Karmapa said during his brief teachings was reliable and I like meeting a lama who admits to a childhood fascination with X-Men comics (moreso than the lessons he was being taught). I think he is likely to continue to be an important figure and I look forward to seeing how he and his teaching developers in future decades.
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