If we spend hours and hours obsessing about "the next time" or "it could be worse," well, the phrase that comes to mind is "the terrorists have won." Straighten up from the paranoid crouch, folks. They'll come, we'll deal with them. Is that Spike hot, or what?

Another board I'm on (not the one mentioned above), created a discussion thread that was only for members #X and lower and those they chose to invite to join the party.

Wow. That's... unpleasant.

That's putting it mildly, RL. Given that I missed out on being one of the 'chosen few' by about a week, I was a bit annoyed, even though I never ventured into the purely social threads on that board. (I'm still a member there, but only because I post my anime fic there).

I was on another board where a member was banned after sub rosa discussion by the mods. The banning took a lot of people by surprise, but unfortunately the banning came along with an edict of We Shall Not Speak of This Again. It led to a lot of backchannel nastiness, etc.

That's exactly what I was talking about! See! That's your collective Big Brother right there. Decisions taken in secret, discussion discouraged, goalposts moved, evidence not brought forward.

Oh yeah, and earlier I was talking about "someone who came here from another online community" and I think Theo said "that's me you're talking about" and it wasn't. For the record.

But it was someone where the two things "has the technical status 'able to delete posts and remove users'" mapped directly to "has been granted the moral authority to decide when that should happen".

This is not true here. And that's a good thing.

I think the only person who tried to label the situation, or us, as Big Brother, was Mieskie, in his last post.

we x-posted -- I wasn't responding to anything you said.

It was just the I wrote my post and then read yours and then realized that despite agreeing with you, it could be seen like I don't - I didn't express myself clearly, that's all.

I don't think we need to be so nervous about how we'll deal with problems. If past performance is any indication, we're really pretty damn good at it, and we should relax and enjoy what we've created.

If this was a secret thread where only certain Popular Kids came and talked behind people's backs, you'd have a point with the Big Brother thing. But you can't have a public "collective Big Brother" -- it's a contradiction in terms.

I'll just go around with the agreeing with the both of you, here. Again.

[Edit: askye, Mike_P "Firefly 2: You Can't Take the Sky From Me." Jan 1, 2003 3:42:28 pm EST]

I think the only person who tried to label the situation, or us, as Big Brother, was Mieskie, in his last post.

No, it was someone else. MikeP, I think.

Look, can we just cut to the chase, buy an island off e-Bay or something, and form our own government already? I trust Buffista governance more than the government I helped elect into power.

the only person who tried to label the situation, or us, as Big Brother, was Mieskie, in his last post

Mike_P mentioned the term too, that's all.

But nobody's giving Mike a hard time. It's a literary or usage point as much as anything. The term gets used much more broadly than its original incarnation in the novel and its usefulness is diluted when that happens.

1984 was a novel in which Big Brother honed in on, careened toward and then literally decimated offending citizens.

t giggles