[governance] Update from today's MAG call

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

On Sun, August 4, 2013 7:13 am, michael gurstein wrote:
> Stereotyping is about the characterization of individuals.  If there is

... or communities, or stakeholder groups for that matter.  I see some
(unspoken) undercurrents run through a lot of the discourse here.

"Government is invariably invasive of privacy and generally evil"

"Industry is greedy, selfish and focused only on their own profits. They
could support civil society good causes and the IGF with an amount that
wouldn't even be a rounding error on their balance sheet"

[etc]

Why does it become acceptable to engage in this behavior for stakeholder
communities when it is long past established that doing this to describe
specific races or orientations is highly offensive?

> Finding and articulating normative consensus (perhaps another way of
> saying "circling the wagons") so as to draw a boundary between those
> party to that consensus and those who aren't is a necessary function of

A normative consensus is NOT circling the wagons, sorry if I wasn't
sufficiently clear.

When you circle the wagons, you craft a specific ideology and then stick
to it - defend it at all costs, treat defense of this ideology as a
political goal to be achieved at any and every cost (innuendo, "creative
rewording" of others' words, browbeating etc).

To the extent that new ideas, participants from other stakeholder groups
etc get to feel alienated and "not part of the group" - which leads more
or less to them forming their own such groups.

This isn't restricted to civil society, I have seen much the same behavior
from sections of all the stakeholder groups here - and it is painful for
those who try to build bridges between stakeholder communities.

If there's still a perception gap here, I am afraid I haven't expressed
myself as clearly as I should have. It is early here and I've had a very
late night yesterday with friends, so let that be my sole excuse for not
expressing myself clearly enough.

--srs


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