Seriously, I'm getting goddamn tired of this.

[nagia]

Dear zvi:

I think you need to step back and reexamine your actions and your motives. Because it looks to me like you've got yourself in a hole, and rather than jump out of it, you're just continuing to dig.

Do you understand that your post in your journal about this tangent makes up a part of the larger imbroglio? Do you understand that people, in following the larger imbroglio, will re-direct their attention to your post, because you have positioned it as being a part of the larger discussion at hand?

I'm a late-comer to this, but from what I understand, the entry in question would not have received much attention--if any at all--had it not been posted to linkspam, and had the resulting kerfuffle not been posted to metafandom.

It is completely permissible to rabbit trail on a personal journal. That's half of what they're for. And if you rabbit trail on your personal journal, you're not hurting anything. You're not shutting down anybody else's conversations. You're not making a discussion between or about other parties all about you.

If the user in question had posted links to that entry here, back, and beyond indicating that it should be part of the discussion, you would have a point. If the user in question had invaded somebody else's meta post and gone off on this tangent, or had deliberately re-directed someone else's conversation, you would have a point.

But from all indications I've seen, the user in question did none of that.

Not everybody wants to be part of every conversation all the time. I will say this again: not everybody wants to be part of every conversation all the time, and it is ridiculous that you would drag someone into a fight they didn't agree to enter.

This user didn't even have the option to say, "Please take that link down, I don't want to be part of this discussion."

The party who linked the "derailing" entry was linkspam. If linkspam felt that the post was only tangentially related, it had the option of not linking. To decide to link a tangentially related post, tag it as "derailing," and then offer no recourse for the link's removal is, gasp shock surprise, appropriating somebody else's content.

Let's try that again, just to make absolutely sure my logic is clear. linkspam took something that was not linkspam's, without permission, and posted it under a label one hundred percent sure to offend--again without permission--thus using content for linkspam's own purposes in a way it had not been intended.

What exactly would you call that?

Comments

[schattenstern]

And didn't the person who wrote the "derailing" (<.<) post say that they chose to post it in their own journal rather than as part of the discussion that inspired it, specifically to avoid derailing the discussion? (Of course now I can no longer find the comment in which they said that. Meh.) That makes the whole argument of "You're derailing the discussion whether you want to or not and talking about a tangential topic will always always always be derailing no matter how far away you are, and if you disagree you are not aware of your privilege (or whatever)" argument even more... strange, to say the least.

[nagia]

IIRC, sie did, and that makes the issue even more infuriating to me. Not that this is the first time zvi has been an idiot.

I am all for pointing out privilege and pointing out that people are derailing. But what zvi has done here is appropriated somebody else's content and is now backpedalling and backpeddaling with increasingly more insane illogical arguments about how sie has not appropriated somebody's content because it happened to be unlocked, and everybody knows unlocked posts are fair game.

Well, tough shit, zvi, because they're not. Somebody else's entry is somebody else's entry. It does not belong to you. You do not get to do whatever you want with it.

And, for that matter, appropriation is in the exact same category that derailing is in: "shit thou shalt not do and name thyself ally."

I just want to smack hir on the back of the head, and I dont' even know hir.

[schattenstern]

Yes, of course it's important to point out when someone is derailing a discussion, but... this is barging in on the discussion somebody is having with a couple of people in front of their house (let's call it discussion A) and telling them they cannot talk about that because the topic of discussion A is tangential to the discussion B held two blocks away, and that, because someone from two blocks away could wander over and overhear bits of discussion A, it's somehow silencing discussion B? I don't get it.

[nagia]

It's even worse than that. Because not only is it invading Discussion A from two blocks over, it's taking House Owner A's patio furniture two blocks over to House B, without asking, and refusing to give it back.