If Fathers for Justice invade again

[Nyac]

will they still be welcome?

I'm referring to the thread in the Feminism/Women's Rights section -

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a1419965-Agenda-much

where Justine said:

"an invasion - ie let's go on and tell those mumsnetters why they've got it all wrong - isn't necessarily the same as trolling tbh (ie deliberately misleading/antagonising). I think we ought to be able to be robust enough to be able to debate the issue, with the caveat, of course, that if visitors turn out merely to be here to wind up or hear to spread hatred then they are not welcome"

It appears that as long as they promote their agenda in PARD then no harm done. Is that a fair assessment?

They do, Turnip. Although the "ban" would just be removing the ability to comment.

@TunipTheVegemal

Please can someone clarify how the Facebook page works? Does MNHQ have the facility to delete messages and ban posters as they do on the site?

Yes we do. Please do let us know if you see anything on our Facebook page that we might need to look at.

thank you, Helen.

Thank you Justine for your replies.

I just want to reiterate what Nyac and Tunip said. "Rise above it" and "take the moral high ground" have all been used by the patriarchy to allow men to continue with abuse and women to put up with it. In fact there is a very good thread in AIBU at the moment withich illustrates

...it nicely.

(sorry pressed post by accident!)

@HandDivedScallopsrgreat

Thank you Justine for your replies.

I just want to reiterate what Nyac and Tunip said. "Rise above it" and "take the moral high ground" have all been used by the patriarchy to allow men to continue with abuse and women to put up with it. In fact there is a very good thread in AIBU at the moment withich illustrates

Just to clarify, folks: when we posted last night to say "We probably prefer to 'rise above'", we were answering someone who asked us if we (MNHQ) were bothered about Mumsnet (as a brand/organisation) being slagged off.

Which is not at all the same as us saying we'd suggest you all rise above some of the arguments being made by F4J members.

We have no problem with any of you countering their arguments ? as long as, in doing so, you stay within our Talk Guidelines.

We can all benefit from tolerance, understanding, patience and consideration in our lives.

Um, nongenderbias9, actually some folks benefit more than others from tolerance, understanding, patience and consideration, in certain contexts. There has to be a limit to which one tolerates, understands, is patient and considerate of those who behave unreasonably.

Sorry, I just spluttered coffee on my keyboard when I read the April Fools article with the comment from "Melvin Footlong," and his complaint, ""Because I don't have access to Mumsnet's Am I being Unreasonable boards, I never know if I'm being reasonable or not. It puts me and other dads at a huge disadvantage."

Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book 'Denying The Holocaust' and was sued by David Irving (who was imprisoned for holocaust denial in Austria) for libel. He lost his case, because what she said was true - even though he didn't like it - his books did misrepresent history. Lipstadt refuses to 'debate the holocaust' with revisionist historians.

The reason I'm writing all this is that I think there are some people and organisations that you can't have a reasoned debate with. These include:

1. Conspiracy theorists.
2. People who misrepresent/misuse statistics.
3. People who use intimidating tactics.

F4J do all of these.

1. They complain of a conspiracy within family courts to deny fathers access to their children. The genuine stats do not back up this claim. Only 10% of breakups even reach family court, and only 1% of those deny access to a parent - and there have to be extremely good reasons.

1. They describe the 3.8 million children in this country who have experienced the split of their parents as 'fatherless' when in fact, this figure is the total figure and includes those that have shared-parenting. They say that thousands of children will be silenced in family courts in 2012, which in light of the above is ludicrous.

1. Purple powder in parliament, handcuffing themselves to female MP's (as someone mentioned before - funny that they didn't target John Prescott!), threatening campaigns against Gingerbread.

And that's not even touching on their abusive language towards women - saying 'almost all' dv is made up. Saying women just have children to milk money out of men and the state, and so on.

Shows just why Justine is right SGM- libel laws in this country are very outdated and need to be changed.

I know that Irving wouldn't have been able to sue her over in the US, because their libel law is different. I remember the same topic coming up when Simon Singh was sued by the Homeopathic peeps as well.

My point was more that there are some people who you cannot have a reasonable debate with.

By the way, from Justine's 2am post:
'If they came and spouted misogynistic crap, we would ban them.'

It is the first time I have ever heard anyone from MNHQ say that so clearly (as opposed to saying they will only ban people for trolling according to the MN definition of a troll) so thank you very much for that, Justine.

Dittoing Turnip's post at 14:54. Thank you, Justine.

Thank you Justine for your response.

And thank you for saying that you will ban people spouting misogynistic crap.

I think that's probably where a lot of the anger last night came from, the track record of mumsnet seeming to tolerate the most shockingly obvious misogynist trolls. You would never say something like "We don't only welcome people who like black people here" (would you??). But you said something similar about women (sorry, I can't remember the exact quote). It's that kind of thing that makes some of the posters suspect your commitment to women's rights - it would simply be beyond the pale for you to treat a raging loon who was going on about the Jewish world conspiracy, as if it's just the right of free speech - or would it? I'm not sure, at what stage does something get classified as hate speech and no longer worth defending as free speech?

I think that's where there is space for so much bad temper and ill -feeling - perhaps this stuff can be defined a lot better -either we put up with all hate speak, as long as it doesn't actually break any laws, or we take hate speech against women as seriously as we would against any other systematically disadvantaged group. Was it Tunip who talked about how one of the reasons this site can be so lightly moderated, is because it has an ethos of robust but reasonable debate and precisely because it is mostly women, that assumption of sheer vileness being acceptable, which you find in most of internet-land, is missing here. It's one of the things that makes the site valuable IMO and I think it's worth you defending. I really do understand that you want to err on the side of free speech and you don't want this site to be boring and asinine like some other parenting sites, but we're so far from that, I don't think there's any chance of this place becoming stupidised because of erring on the side of not tolerating the sort of vile, insulting crap that is standard discourse on most of the internet. It's more likely to be stupidised by tolerating that IMO.

PMSL @ 'fillet them'

And then if they lose (do you like the 'if'?) they will think it's all part of the conspiracy to silence them, like when their Twitter account got taken down. (I wonder why that was.)

in February.

I don't know if it was for being sweary and abusive to people, but if it was, what a great way to feed a conspiracy theory - go around abusing or harassing people until you get banned from everything then say it's because They are trying to silence you.

Can't believe they'd be stupid enough to start on a solicitors firm.

As if, I mean, as if a solicitors firm would allow itself to be intimidated by F4J's aggressive tactics. I don't know who they think they're dealing with..