Re: Agenda Denial Was: tone policing

[Paul Wouters <[e-mail]>]

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