Option to ban a specific troll from the comments (Updated)

Update: The poll closed early at fred’s request. fred is now banned.

---

In order to improve the quality of the comment section, yet uphold the ideals of free speech and democracy, readers of the blog Restructure! can vote on whether commenter ‘fred’ should be banned. I will honour the results of the vote. (If the motion to ban fred does not pass, I can put it to vote again sometime in the future.) fred may appeal the ban by submitting a persuasive essay on whether or not minorities are at a disadvantage within a democracy.

Here is a sample comment by fred:

At first, I wasn’t sure whether you were black. But after reading that last comment it’s obvious. Its devoid of reason and logic. [...]

The poll closes in a week.

Some thoughts on voting by Spider Jerusalem of Transmetropolitan are below the fold (trigger warning for a description of sexual assault with a weapon). Vote first, then, if you choose to, read the comic.

Tim Wise is my white blog-friend.

In Reading Comprehension 101: Text, Subtext and the Politics of Misinterpretation, Tim Wise writes (emphasis mine):

In other words, putting aside the inherent absurdity of this interpretation — I am white after all, as are my kids, as is my wife, as is my momma, all my immediate family and my best friend too — some who read the piece believe against all logic and in the face of plain English (however aggressive the piece may be), that I have announced, excitedly, the coming of a glorious race war and the end of white people.

Normally, when a white person asserts that she is “not racist” because she has a black friend or he has an Asian wife, it is considered an invalid argument, because knowing a person of colour does not grant immunity from being racist. Here, Tim Wise argues that he is not anti-white, because he is white, his wife is white, his best friend is white, etc.

I would normally consider this bad form, since making this argument may give some people the impression that the tired “black friend” defense is acceptable. However, some readers of my blog have constantly accused me of being “racist against white people”, so I will try to follow Tim Wise’s lead and invoke whiteness as a defense against accusations of being anti-white.

I write like science fiction writers.

I submitted several writing samples from my blog to the statistical analysis tool I Write Like. Apparently, I write like H. P. Lovecraft most of the time, of whose writings I am a fan.* The second writer who came up consistently was Cory Doctorow, and I have read and enjoyed many of his short stories as well.

Both are writers of science fiction short stories, and their writings are available either in the public domain or under the Creative Commons license, which means you can find their short stories for free on the Internet. If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, you can install the free app Stanza and find these and other free works under the “Feedbooks – Free Content” catalogue.

---

* I am not a fan of his pathological racism, however.

Meta-Restructure: Top Five Most “Interesting” Posts + Delurking

Here are the top five most “interesting” posts on this blog for the past year or so, determined by some crude statistical ranking.

1. Libertarianism is rational for rich white people only. (July 14, 2009)
2. People of colour are not a story of suffering . . . Or resistance. (October 29, 2009)
3. Feynman called a woman “worse than a whore” for not exchanging sex for sandwiches. (August 7, 2009)
4. Male IT geeks think they are “low status” males. (February 1, 2010)
5. White, male startup companies get funding for being white and male. (February 10, 2010)