On Tue, 10 Sep 2019, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
It might be more helpful to consider Keith's original point in terms of agenda denial which is a tactic that is used to avoid discussion of topics that a party knows they will lose if they get to the facts.
You seem to be assigning a bad motive to anyone who wants to improve the atmosphere for discussion within the IETF by stating "tone policing" is only used as a way to do "agenda denial". However, what we were discussing was the situation where hostile or rude participation lead to people (especially newcomers) to avoid participation alltogether. That would seem _more_ of an "agenda denial" item that the one particular and very specific abuse point that you raise. Furthermore, your issue which would be a moderator abusing their power to suppress factual discussions on topics would be reasonably easy to proof to the ombudspeople. One would expect from a WG chair that you would be given a chance to refuse your email content without the - by the moderator considered - unneccessarilly hostile tone. And again, this did happen to me two weeks ago and while I did think my message was fine, it was also very easy to just rewrite my message to be less inflamatory and less hostile.
Tone policing is an agenda denial strategy.
"could be abused for" would be a better phrasing than "is", unless you would believe all of us who are asking for an improved atmosphere at IETF discussions all have a hidden agenda. I don't think you actually think that.
But so is jamming a conversation with irrelevant and repetitive statements.
Which can also be resolved by messages from the WG chair to improve the tone and/or moderation if it does not change, followed by a possible appeal via the ombudspeople.
Tone policing is the specific strategy of saying that because something was raised in the wrong way, it cannot ever be raised.
Not at all. It is a way of asking the participant to see if they can rewrite their message so it contains the same valuable content without the unneeded negative wordings that would have a negative impact on the willingness of other people to remain in the disuccion (or in the IETF completely). Paul
