Re: Re: IT: Prioritising

[danspector@xxxxxxxxx]

mudrat,

1. Statistically speaking, I would be shocked if anyone on this list
(barely 1000 people, with a large non-American contingent) was in a
Nielsen household. And since we were the specific people you urged to
vote with our remote rather than make anti-ME posts, I think it behooves
me to point out the ineffectiveness of that sort of "negative feedback"
on our parts.

2. Well, you didn't draw any lines saying we can be "x" amount of
critical, but not "y" amount of critical, so I used hyperbole because I
felt that you were on some basic level opposing the concept of
criticizing the show at all. Your statements (I haven't bothered to
pull your May posts on this, so I'm going from memory) that we owe
something to ME for making the show at all and that we should therefore
always be grateful and not too critical may not have included the phrase
"Patriotic Duty", but they did seem to be very reminiscent of the
"America: Love it or Leave it" and "My Country, Right or Wrong"
arguments espoused by anti-dissent factions in the US in previous times.
(And equivalent Australian statements, whatever they may be.) You
stated that you didn't think people who disliked the show should be
criticizing it; you said that we should stop watching it. (And if you
didn't say so in so many words, then you certainly implied it.) So
while the analogy was hyperbolic (and hyperbole is a tool to more
clearly illustrate an argument) I felt it was essentially true.

>if they're not enjoying *any* of it, why bother?

Sentimental attachment. Hope for improvement. And things do change on
this show, and have gotten better in the past, so that's a rational
reason for staying. Heck, the fact that Steve DeKnight left to destroy,
er, work on "Angel" is a check in the plus column already, to my mind.

>I simply pointing out that all viewers have a *choice* to watch or not
watch.

Yes, and you pointed it out in such a way that there was a strong
implication that, rather than complain here, the dissatisfied viewer
should shut up and stop watching. (If you weren't intending to urge
this action, why point out the possibility? I'm reasonably sure that
everyone already knows that they have the choice to stop watching.) The
sense I got from your comments was that you were essentially urging
non-watching as the preferred alternative to strong criticism of the
show. Since I don't necessarily believe that an active dislike of the
show mandates turning it off (see above), and since I don't necessarily
believe that turning off the show means that you can't still share your
opinions here, I disagreed with your argument.

3. I certainly know that this is a UC 'ship list; that why I
extrapolated what I hyperbolically refer to as your "either love the
show or stop watching and shut up" argument to illustrate how it
conflicts with the concept of the list. I never said that you advocated
only canon-'shipping; I merely said that it seemed to me like a logical
extension of your position.

4. I'm glad you like the Indexes. And I'm all for more fic. I'm just
not on board with Mad Hamlet's frequent requests to limit the posts to
fic and, essentially, only fic. It got very quiet here in
January/February, in part because all the peripheral discussion moved
from the (then) 900 people on the list to the 44 registered on JAABAW.
Rod said the lists were on "life support" and he may have exaggerated,
but it wasn't good. To my mind, activity stimulates interest, which
stimulates fic. We got people talking and soon they were writing again.
I know, post hoc ergo propter hoc and I don't have any direct causal
evidence, but removing the "community" part of the concept seemed to
hurt the fic output. In fact, it's one of the things I worry about for
when we get a new board, even though I know we need one to have a
properly threaded discussion.

5. Well, I don't know if what you feel is my non-receptivity to your OT
posts can be construed as truly analogous to how writers and fbers feel
their input will be received. After all, OT posts are different things
and we haven't, to my knowledge, had anyone flamed for a fic or feedback
lately. And I hope that no one thinks that a contentious OT discussion
means that you would be flamed for fics or fb; you won't be. It's a
separate item.

(Besides, you don't *want* OT posts on the lists, so my encouragement or
lack thereof for your OT comments shouldn't really matter to you, right?
To say that I'm not being receptive to things you don't even want and to
use that as an argument for why people aren't sending in fics seems a
little specious to me.)

And for the record, I don't mean for you to think that I don't want your
OT comments. As for "firing up and putting your own meanings to what
I've said" I think we're all responsible for how others take our
implications. (As I am responsible for how you took my past response,
if you thought it meant something that I didn't intend it to do.)
Claiming that you never said something in so many words and therefore I
am irresponsibly jumping to conclusions dodges the issue, which is that
you did say things which I felt implied other things. I don't feel that
the responsibility is on me to double-check every single intonation I
get from your post; you have an equal responsibility not to write in a
way that lends itself to misinterpretation. No sentence more complex
than "see Spot run" is free of implications and unspoken corollaries;
that's why we have a distinction between the "letter of the law" and the
"spirit of the law".

(Heck, on the show, Buffy has used the phrase "I love you" to Angel to
mean "I have strong emotional feelings for you" ["Lie to Me"], "why are
you acting this way?" ["Innocence"], "I'm sorry that I have to send you
to hell" ["Becoming, Part 2"] and "don't kill yourself" ["Amends", "The
Zeppo"]. Subtext is always with us, even in the simplest phrase.)

So yeah, you never exactly said "sit down and shut up", but I felt it
was implicit when you said that OT complaints were ruining your
enjoyment of the lists and that we had other options, such as turning
the show off. I really don't think I'm reaching there, and if you
really meant "gosh, Dan, it hurts me to see that you're so upset; maybe
you shouldn't watch because I'm worried about your health", then you
should have clarified that.

Having said all that, I'll admit that since your complaints are about a
change that has occured in recent months (since I became moderator),
specifically a field that I have tried to encourage, and since your
initial post was criticizing a post I had made, I may just be a tad
defensive. I am in fact trying not to overreact (I don't actually feel
that it's a personal attack, or anything like that) and hope that I
haven't.

("Batting in the sixth po-si-tion, the right fielder, Number Twelve, Tad
Defensive!! Defensive, batting sixth!")

Dan