Silence implies consent vs acceptance of what is

[Jade]

I have been scouring the original thread to find where this call took place.  I just re-read it, because I wanted to see if there was some call I missed.

I could not find any explicit call.  Any call for help was done after the fact, in the form of "Why didn't you help?"  Maybe you can point it out to me, Jade?  Because I really do want to understand what we expect of each other.

Again, I just want to state that I don't think an opinion, however odious, becomes punishable simply because it is written or spoken.  I do think people were surprised and angered that opinions like this were held among the membership.  I do admit to a distaste for people who expect everybody else to agree with them out of the box.

I'm not saying an opinion becomes punishable. I'm saying an opinion can be unpalatable and destructive to a group of people who are trying to harmonize with each other.

And I felt the call for help in both of Glow's posts, mostly when she said she felt no point in contributing to the discussion anymore. Because this is the state that women are put into when they are told, again and again, that they have nothing valuable to contribute to society: they become defeated. They feel like their voice doesn't matter, who's going to listen anyway? Why put in the effort? This is what I felt in her post, and why I felt a call.

I made the analogy earlier for you to decide when you would feel like you were receiving a call: What would your wife have to say or do for you to feel like she wanted your support in an issue? How much outrage would she have to show about something that was said about her, before you felt like you should comfort her?

But this just brings me back to the thing I'm confused about: if these expressions were truly hateful, why didn't you ban earth_spirit, Jade?  I really, really don't get this.  How can earth_spirit be at once dangerous and at the same time not be breaking the rules and need us to rein him in?  Do you see maybe how this doesn't all fit together for me?

Has Bring4th ever banned anybody? Certainly not while I've been on the mod roster, and likely not in the almost 4 years I've been posting here. I feel a little bit like you're being disingenuous by asking this. Do you really think this is the way to harmony? Do you really think that the mods default to this action to bring harmony? I guess by opening up the discussion, we are asking people if that's what they expect from a forum: If someone seems bent on sharing a hateful ideology, do we just censor them occassionally or tell them they are totally unwelcome?

For what it's worth, most of the time, Bring4th protocol is to put a person who is abusing their posting privileges on "mod status", which means they are free to make posts, but a mod has to approve them. The fact that e_s just decided to leave after we removed the post prevented us from taking any more punitive action, because it actually isn't about punishing people for having opinions. I think this is our attempt at "the light touch".

I agree with this.  But I think there's different viewpoints at work here.  I saw Glow's anger as her throwing down the gauntlet to fight, much as SMC has done in the past.  I did not see Glow as a victim of earth_spirits's.  I appreciate you pointing out how you see this because it helps me understand how narrow my vision is of these matters.

And I saw her reaction as one of pain and shock that someone would actually say something like that to her, on this forum. I felt it too. Did you see earth_spirit's post as the one initiating the throwing of the gauntlet? Because I feel like that's a point that's been missed: SMC and Glow were being blamed for the "escalation", when the original statement was so incendiary from the get-go, that I couldn't believe they were being blamed at all for the reaction they were having.

I don't understand how you can conclude that the forum supports those sentiments.  I don't see that at all.  Surely we can bring more nuance to this topic than you're either with the women or against them, can't we?

I said that it seems to support the rhetoric more than it abhors it, I didn't make an absolute statement saying that the forum supports this. And it's not just this, it's the subsequent discussion where I was told my words were more hateful that earth_spirit's, etc. There is an obvious bias in the forum, and it only makes sense because of the demographic skew.

Have you read this Q'uo, Jeremy? http://llresearch.org/transcripts/issues..._0204.aspx How do you feel about what Q'uo has to say about the work we have to do to balance the societal imbalance in gender perception? Do you think you are outside of it? Do we believe Bring4th has risen above this already? Because Q'uo seems to think it's a big deal, and encourages any effort we put into it.

The path of evolution is a path of integration. Integration involves portions of selfhood that have grown, that have developed over the course of a pattern taking place in many lifetimes, in such a way that not all portions of the being grow and evolve at the same rate and in the same way. And that creates a situation in which it is possible for portions of the self to be cut off from the larger whole, and to be forced to exist a kind of satellite existence on the periphery, causing perturbations, if you will, in the main body of the developing complex. In order to reabsorb these elements, one must, first of all, discover that they have in fact been denied admittance into the center. And one must find, first of all, a way to grasp how it has come about that they have been thrust out from that center. And then secondly, they must be loved as that which has been thrust out, and as that which properly belongs in the center.


And so, if we would discover that a significant portion of the female principle has been thrust out from the center of the pattern of spiritual evolution taking place upon a cultural level, there is remedial work of a fairly significant nature that must be done. And so we would agree that in order to take up a relation to this displaced female energy, that it must be brought back into a place of honor, and that is work which will require a good deal of self-reflection, not only on the part of those males which have been party to its repression, but also upon the part of the females that have learned to live within the framework of that repression.

It is a natural expression of this attempt to heal upon a cultural level that those presently embodied in female form might reach out in anger and attempt to claim their rightful place in the center in a way that can seem strident. Sometimes a certain amount of stridency is necessary in order to capture the attention of one who is, shall we say, asleep to a problem, who is not aware of the nature of the problem, of the scope of the problem, of the reach of that problem.

And so, there will be friction that one might legitimately anticipate as the female principle—in the persons of incarnate female individuals—wishes to announce that it cannot continue to be pushed to the margins, and that a balanced configuration of the social complex requires a greater integration of its female portion.

...

We will tell you that there will be no passage into fourth density until this work has been, to a large extent, done. That the doing of this work is essential to this passage, and the repair of the dysfunctions in the relations among the sexes is central to the integration of the social energy complex which governs your planet at this time, and which, in seeking its integration, seeks the first entry into a possibility it has not yet realized, which is to say, that it shall evolve into what we have called a social memory complex.

The development of that complex will be the work of fourth density. You presently stand at the entrance to that density, but there is work to be done, and we feel that in your question today, you have managed to put your finger on an essential element of that work, which suggests to us that you are very much about that work at this time. You would not have been able to identify with such clarity the nature of the problem had you not already been working on that problem for some time and at some depth. So we commend you to that effort and we would say that we have seen signs of a lessening of distortions and a beginning of a greater integration which shows promise.