Given you seem to be a bit stressed in general, it might not be ideal at that; it's aggravating and frustrating to see people being so comprehensively stupid in such widespread ways. Energy and time are finite - if you can't spare yours for this, that's not inherently bad.
Of course - as I suspect you've now discovered, etc - the only way to avoid engaging with RaceFail without copping quite a lot of flak is to stay
right out of it. Replying even to relatively tangential posts to criticise the discussion itself has been a common enough tactic of people trying to suppress the entire concept of discussing the problems with race representation of sf/F that everyone who's been paying attention over time gets extra narky about it. (And I know how you hate to find you're retreading the path of fools, even with different intent.)
And, you're right, it does rather put you on the back foot for further involvement. I respect you tremendously so I
want to think well of you, and will always try to interpret your actions and words in the best possible light; people who don't know you are going to form a different impression, one that I can't say is exactly false, just incomplete, and the fragmented glimpse of you that showed in the first impression made in this thread is more-or-less you at your worst.
The discourse has been flawed, and those somewhat memetic bingo cards and cheat sheets and generic responses are a bit problematic, but at the same time, they're a function of a couple of things, I think:
- Repetition avoidance and the expectation of bad faith. The same arguments and errors
keep happening, over and over again, and the differences are small enough that people stop caring, especially since the people making those arguments aren't usually that interested in engaging with counter-argument anyway. They're just not listening, so people stop thinking it's worth making the effort to speak directly to anyone who hasn't demonstrated that they're really, truly willing to think about what's said to them.
- Rhetorical assistance for the rhetorically disabled. A lot of people aren't that good at engaging in these (or any) kinds of debates, and so they're reliant on other people expressing the arguments for them. That's what all the "Yes. This." is about - overt recognition that they share the viewpoint, that this person's words speak for them too, where otherwise one person can be dismissed as speaking only for themselves. (Also done by people who
are capable of expressing themselves freely, but don't see the point in repeating what's just been said in an already-repetition-beset hypertext when they can just add support to it.) It's also what some of the linking is about - if someone else has already constructed an excellent refutation, it's easier for someone to link to it than to try and construct their own, especially if they're not confident in their rhetorical skills.
It's not really like Usenet arguments. It's a newer paradigm yet - interactive hypertext. Usenet arguments can thread out and get repetitive and be at crossed purposes, but a hypertext debate is cross-
linked, and it's rather the point that in the discussion at large, there is no moderator at all. Attempts - most visibly and notably by Elizabeth Bear around the same time she revealed that she'd disagreed all along with the critique she'd said she agreed with so she could act as an example of how to deal magnanimously and kindly with the little darkies (I may be paraphrasing) - by individuals to control the terms of the debate, and even to decide when and if it should be taking place at all, were roundly and deservedly mocked.
A hypertext this extensive becomes awfully hard to follow, though - hence all the summaries and introductions, establishing entry points into the text, were spawned. It wasn't about being the official archivist of the revolution (apparently to her own surprise, it was quickly concluded that
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rydra_wong was the Keeper of the Links, and so she stopped merely collecting links she agreed with and took on collecting all links that were relevant, and people assisted her by, rather than keeping their own lists, supplying her with anything that seemed relevant).
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