But, therein lies the point. It's not really your job to "get past misconceptions". At least, not a big part of your job. If you believe people are misunderstanding the points in the petition, then the petition is written poorly. It is being interpreted in a way that you don't believe is correct, but, even after trying to clarify, people are still not buying your interpretation.
So, at that point, you have two choices. Dig in and keep trying to "correct the mistakes" of others, which is what you've been doing for many pages now with many different poeple. Or, you rewrite the petition and either drop the issue entirely, or find a rephrasing that is acceptable to others.
My point is, it doesn't matter one whit if you are 100% right or not. It doesn't matter. Because people do not believe that they are wrong. I certainly don't believe that my interpretation is mistaken. Being right isn't the point. Getting people to support your view is the point.
So, you have to decide, which is more important; being right or working with people to gain support?
No offense, but it takes two to tango. I feel like this misses a lot of discussion about this thread and the nature of the critiques against it (many of which have literally talked about taking down the piece, editing the piece, or censoring it). At a certain level, it's also on the people commenting to be accurate, too, which is what I've been pleading for. I really don't care if they sign or not, but watching people constantly get what is actually in the petition wrong, honestly or not, has been what I've been trying to have a discussion about.
If you want to discuss more about this in private, where I can probably give more detailed thoughts, sure. But honestly I'm done discussing it here.
You mean a single D&D board with 239,943 members?
The original thread had 235 replies and 12k views, this one has 327 replies and 9k views...
I mean, active board members? Are they all going to this forum, clicking on this topic? Further, are all those views repeats by people commenting or...?
I'm not saying the petition is perfect, but I find this sort of thing to be the wrong way of viewing how board traffic actually works.
As the person who attached the label of Orwellian Thought Policing (don't think that was the exact wording, but close enough), let me clarify something. I fully the support the opportunity for someone to put up a petition like this. I will never stand in the way of someone expressing their opinion. I certainly didn't say that posting the petition was Orwellian. What I did was give my opinion on the result of that ask; if successful, the result would be Orwellian. A successful result from this petition attaches the opinions of a singular person (or at best a very tiny group of people) to a published work. To me, this is censorship and yes, thought policing. Pretty large difference between this and what you just ascribed to my posts.
No, this is basically what I said it was. It's a petition: they can choose to accept it or not. If they are convinced, that's not Orwellian thought-policing, that's just someone making a choice. It's how free speech works. It does not matter if it's one person, a few people, or everyone. If a lot of people don't like it, they can attach their
own petition to it and try to change it back! But really, attaching the opinions of a singular person is not the downfall of free speech. Rather, we call that a
foreword.
And with that, I exit the thread.