[New-imc] Re: Rogue IMC Block

[Arc]

I think it's pretty disturbing the amount of attention that's been put
on individuals, flamewars, accusations..  this is creating a culture
that's far from consensus, a culture where it's laughable that anyone
would expect to reach consensus on anything.  We're suppost to represent
positive social change, but yet we find in technicolor the same behavior
patterns present in the world we're supposidly creating an alternative
to.

The way several people, mostly those who commonly use irc.indymedia.org,
have to deal with Ithaca's block is to flame me (personally), spread
misinformation and exadderations about what the block is about, and to
use peer pressure to convince inactive members of the IMC to get
involved again and create a disruption.  Example of this here:

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-ithaca/2003-April/000902.html

To quote, for those who wont bother to read the full email:

"Per multiple strong requests from multiple individuals affiliated with
multiple IMCs, I intend to "unnconsense" the inappropriate "block"
against Rogue-IMC that was allegedly made in the name of Ithaca-IMC."

This comming from a new member who has only attended 3 meetings and not
contributed to the IMC in any way outside of meetings.

I think this, more than anything, shows how far we are from being able
to adopt a liason-based model for global decidion making.  When people
raise legitimate issues, such as Mr. Rice did on IMC-Process, these
issues become a flame war and eventually led to threatening to ban him
from the list.  I believe these threats were specifically to pressure
him into removing his block.

Furthermore, when Ithaca's block was made last week, the reaction by a
vast number of people involved was to target me personally and spread
misinformation about the nature of the block.  There is apparently alot
of misinformation floating around, since some members of Rogue IMC
apparently believe that the 2/3rds majority clause was enforced on them
by Mr. Rice, where as far as I've been able to read the 2/3rds clause
had been in their earliest mission statements and his block was against
2/3rds majority voting, not for it.

Fighting over the validity of a block is a pointless way to deal with
it.  In the time since Mr. Rice's initial block this could have been
dealt with and Rogue could have been official and everybody happy.
Instead the conflict-thirsty have swarmed, people have come out of the
woodwork, and everyone's trying to break shit up.  I wonder, in all of
this, who is actually working for the good of Indymedia?

I'm making a personal block, just to make my personal position clear,
backing up some of Mr. Rice's concerns, and other members of IMC-Ithaca
will be making their own personal blocks.  

I believe that for IMC-Rogue to move forward that Jay should continue to
act as new-imc volunteer for them and the issue of consensus vs 2/3rds
needs to be addressed.

In this email I am raising a far larger issue, however, that will
persist long after Rogue's issues have been dealt with.  This is an
issue that covers a large amount of our global communication, which
unfortunetly seems to be dominated by what I can only describe as 
"IRC Culture".. tho has nothing to do with irc.indy, so that name may be
confusing.  I'm not pretending to know how to fix it, but it needs to be
addressed or these kinds of issues will continue to come up.

-- 

Fascism (noun) A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of
the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business
leadership, together with belligerent nationalism. 
 (From the American Heritage Dictionary, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983)

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