Yeah. Everyone is an idiot when they make the choice to communicate violently, for better or worse. Even the idea of comparing one film with another, or a filmmaker with another filmmaker, is quite useless, unless it is beneficial to both films or filmmakers. I, personally, have much to learn from all of you. Especially if I rate the same film five stars that you rate one star – I prefer to understand your perspective, than to immediately defend my own. Because this site brings so many lovers of all things film to the same table, we must approach it with humility, so we can become “fuller, deeper, more informed, and all-around better people”.
All that to say, we have enough war and poverty to deal with outside of this website. If we can’t be at peace with one another in our international film forums, how the fuck can we expect anything different in our global political forums?
Thank you for the open letter Jesse. I fully agree with you, and also ask that Dimitris and Blue K return.
Peace.
Kyle
it is good of you jesse to think about this and i appreciate your effort. i always wanted to communicate these guys respectfully and ignored their manners but at this point i think we should do something against these kind of manners because if we not it is getting worse and worse and from now I’ll play with their rules,I’ll flag their comments like what they’re doing .
Oh dear. I think everybody needs to spend less time on the internet.
Vahid,
Please don’t start flagging comments, unless your goal is to destroy the forum. I’ve seen some relatively innocuous comments get moderated. I don’t think the moderators here (or anywhere else) spend a lot of time wrestling with relative offensiveness, they just get rid of anything that generates too many complaints. Trying to get posts or threads by a specific person or group removed is likely to lead to a cycle of retaliation that will diminish the forum.
I agree with you about manners and respect for the opinions (and persons) of others. I think the best way to promote this is through one’s own conduct. There are people here that thoughtfully respond to questions, providing information and encouragement to someone trying to learn. They won’t become the topic or focus of a thread, and often are not the most frequent posters to a particular thread, but I for one appreciate their insight and courtesy. I think this is the standard that we should all aspire to.
There is another thread exactly like this one with about a million posts on it . Was it really necessary to start another?
Obviously you must think so since you took the time to comment.
dp
The other was a reactionary thread. This is a reconciliary thread. They are two parts of the same process of coming to terms with a surprising and surprisingly emotional event.
—PolarisDiB
Thanks for this, Jesse.
I’ve been reading these forums for about a year and a half, I decided to start an account about 3-4 months ago, and only started posting much of anything in the past couple of days
Just to say that you guys have become unbearable to read lately and you all should be ashamed for defending Dimitris, who was ALWAYS unpleasant to read. No one should be surprised or shocked that he was muzzled. The admins had every right. His profile as it currently stands is an embarrassment to what the people who run this site are trying to do.
You can flag this post all you want and have it taken down like another post of mine, but still know that you’re defending one of the worst things about this forum.
give it a rest for f**k sake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@Matt- well hopefully they will come back…
@Peter- nice meeting you too.
Who needs soap operas when you got MUBI FORUMS.
“Just to say that you guys have become unbearable to read lately…”
Then leave. You won’t be missed.
“…you all should be ashamed for defending Dimitris…”
You should be ashamed that you think you can actually tell a group of people you’ve never met and never will meet how they should feel.
What gives you the right to tell me how I should feel about this? What kind of God complex do you have that you believe you’re opinion on a subject is the only right one one can have and that everyone else who doesn’t feel the way you do should be “ashamed of themselves”?
What a disgusting post.
“The admins had every right.”
They had every right nine months ago, but they didn’t have a single problem with Dimitris then (and I know that as a fact). They only had a problem with him when he decided to challenge them and their authority; which is not stated in the forum guidelines as a violation of the rules. This entire issue is just a show of power by Admin., and it’s ridiculous that some people are unable or unwilling to see that.
I guess some people here in MUBI havn’t got blood in their veins.
DuShane, to be fair, Dimitris challenged them to muzzle him, as stated by Adam Cook in a lengthy post last night. He asked for it.
Maybe he is into S&M
Exactly. Where does it say in the forum guidelines Admin. cannot be challenged? That you can’t taunt them? I’m only going by their own rules, which they wholeheartedly violated. And the worst part is they feel they should be awarded by their community for not even being able to follow the rules they themselves instated.
The only justification for muzzling Dimitris at this point is if his last moderated post was so offensive they couldn’t allow him to continue posting (like with R.U.S.). That’s not the case though. Admin. got angered that Dimitris told them what he thought of them, so they muzzled him. THAT’S NOT A VIOLATION OF THE RULES.
How can they honestly expect any member to follow their rules when they can’t?
I don’t want to argue about this.
I will say that I wish all this BS hadn’t happened, that everyone affected are friends of mine, but that Admin didn’t ask for it.
And yes, Peter’s post is in pretty poor taste.
Should each message Admins received on Dim be posted in a thread so everyone can know, or should management just make a decision?
It’s too far, everyone needs to let it die, ’cause nothing will be solved with all the bickering.
“How can they honestly expect any member to follow their rules when they can’t?”
If you go to a theme park, museum whatever, and start doing a bunch of stuff that ISN’T listed on the map, program, etc., and, when the managers tell you that even though their is no specifically stated rule against anything you’ve done they would like you to cease and desist, and you tell them to fuck off, you’re gonna get thrown out.
Is this an amusement park? No it isn’t. And beyond that it’s a pretty terrible analogy.
When a person of authority gives you a list of rules to follow and then you see them violate their own rules it doesn’t give you any incentive to listen to what they have to say. The actions of Admin. have been awful on this issue. They either ignore you or give you a half-baked, childishly simplistic reasoning for what they did.
I, as a person that still sees the possibility in this site (even though each event like this (which is more and more common place on here) seems to makes that hope seem impossible), demand much more than what I’ve been given from Admin..
They can either straighten me out, or act like their too good to address this issue. If they choose the first I’ll gladly apologize for everything I’ve said that was incorrect. If they choose the second I don’t see any reason to not continuously discuss how terribly their handling this issue.
didn’t realize there was a flagging problem. i always considered that to be like taddling, when you’re little.
personal attacks being flagged i can somewhat understand, but even then I’d try to work it out with the person privately if it was ever such a heated issue. but flagging comments based on opinion or trying to craft the site into your “image” is misusing it, IMO.
my flag count on others is proudly 0.
I’m dismayed this matter is not being treated with the gravity it warrants.
I’m sorry to inflame the issue again, but has anyone actually read Dimitris’ profile?! The level of odiousness in some of those comments is bizarre. Since when has Drew, for example, attacked him?
For me, as someone who rarely posts, I’m split between dismay at what I percieve the battle between self-righteous elitism and general film nerdom, and at the ridiculously entertaining soap this presents.
for anyone interested, I find this post from The Film Talk’s Gareth Higgins to be at the heart of the real issue here…
http://www.thefilmtalk.com/2009/09/03/a-non-dogmatic-declaration-of-intent-part-1/
“Who needs soap operas when you got MUBI FORUMS.”
hilarious
No doubt many of these posts are by dimitris’ proxies, much like the one he left on my wall. Can’t they muzzle him from updating his profile? That is the most offensive stuff I’ve ever seen on this site. And that includes that Porno binge last year.
Thanks for The Film Talk piece, Kyle. It said pretty much everything I’ve thought about this subject, and had the added virtue of predating the Dimitris controversy, so that no one can accuse the author of taking sides.
It’s worth reading if you haven’t read it yet.
Jesse Richards
An Open Letter to My Friends Dimitris and Blue K:
I understand where you guys are coming from I really do; because I’m coming from the same place. I see things out there and it makes me want to scream in people’s faces. I see the things that I believe in as being a cause of sorts (as I think is true for you both), and I think this makes me less tolerant of things that strike me as bullshit, less tolerant of people that seem to be adding to the problem, rather than making an effort to change things, to make things better, to help all of us become fuller, deeper, more informed and all-around better people.
However, the screaming usually ends with people tuning me out- and then my cause becomes fucked- which is ultimately what someone is wanting when they push you to scream in their face. There are always going to be idiots, liars, people that don’t want the things that will make them and all of us better, people who don’t want to learn- but things can still change even with that. We can still learn, we can still share.
This is starting to sound like hippie shit. Point is we need you guys back. Things can still be better, things can still be changed. We can move beyond the canon, beyond the apathy, beyond the personal disconnect on the internet.
Something good can happen. I take back my suggestion to flag idiot posts. Let’s just make good ones instead. Come back guys.
Jesse