Comments Elsewhere

TracyW – Well, I could rehash about 712pp or so on this, but, as briefly as possible let me just say that the answer to your question is probably going to have something to do with overlapping, competing and polycentric outlets for public hearings, dispute settlements, and binding arbitration provided through consensual civil society. (This may for example include medical ethics boards, ad hoc community meetings, private arbitration associations, and a bunch of other folks.)

There’s a lot of work in the literature, and a lot of lively arguments, about what the details are likely to look like. And I guess we can talk about that if you’re interested but the main thing to keep in mind with the kind of questions you’re asking here is that the need for some social processes to deal with all these kinds of problems does not even remotely prove that there must be one single social process which addresses them all, nor does it mean that there must be one single social entity with a permanent institutional identity, professionalized administrators, a territorial monopoly, and vertically-integrated jurisdiction to do the processing.

Anarchists do not propose a society where there’s no way of settling hard disputes or arbitrating the terms of agreements. What we propose is that a bunch of other people, not just those in positions of political power, be freed to take on the task of doing these things. That is, it’s not the end of dispute-resolution or arbitration, but the liberation of these social functions from the institutional control of a single, territorially-exclusive political entity (the state). The point is to allow them to be taken up by other associations, institutions, customary conventions, contractual arrangements, non-institutionalized social processes, etc. that don’t necessarily claim the territorial monopoly, the expansive authority, the coercive sanctions, or the unaccountable legal sovereignty, claimed by the modern state legal system.

(Maybe you have an argument for why the permanence, the professionalization, the territoriality, the hierarchy of exclusive jurisdictions, or the monopoly control, is necessary to do this sort of thing in the right way — that is, for why anarchic social processes couldn’t manage it without becoming more or less archic in the process. But if so you’d have to give that argument.)

Hi there,

Well, if you are using FeedWordPress, here is a quick way to do what it sounds like you are looking to do.

First, you'll need to add some code to the functions.php file in your theme. Are you able to do this? (If not, let me know and I can offer some alternative options.)

In your functions.php, add the following code. Replace your own preferred values for the items in ALL CAPS.


add_filter('syndicated_item_author', 'my_syndicated_post_author', 20, 2);
function my_syndicated_post_author ($author, $post) {
$author = array(
'name' => 'JOE DOKES',
'email' => 'JOE@DOKES.COM',
'url' => 'HTTP://JOEDOKES.COM/',
);
return $author;
}


If you want to make sure that this is correctly matched to an existing user in your system, the best thing to match up would be the email address in 'email'.

Note that doing this will make it so that incoming posts are stripped of any information about who authored them on the original source. This may not be a problem, if this information is already included in the content of those posts, or if it will be obvious from contextual factors who wrote it. But you may want to filter the content of posts so that some information about the author will be preserved in the post content even if it is not recorded in the wp_users table. To do this, you can add something like the following to your functions.php file, right around where you added the above author filter. (Feel free to change out the HTML in the single quotes to whatever message you want.)


add_filter('syndicated_item_content', 'my_syndicated_post_byline', 20, 2);
function my_syndicated_post_byline ($content, $post) {
$a = $post->author();
$content = sprintf('<p class="byline">By %s.</p>', $a['name']) . $content;
return $content;
}


Let me know if this helps fix your problem.

Hi there,

I'm sorry that you ran into this issue. You might want to take a look at the most recent release (FeedWordPress v. 2012.1212 at the time I'm posting this comment) to see if it fixes the issue you were encountering -- it has been successfully tested against WordPress 3.5. If it fixes the compatibility issue you were having, great; if not, let me know a bit more about the problem that you're seeing and I'll see what I can do to fix it.

Thanks,
-C

Thanks for reporting this. I'm sorry to hear you're running into this problem.

The warning message you provided makes it clear that there is a problem with one of the plugins running on your site but unfortunately it's hard to tell if the problem is coming from FeedWordPress or if it is coming from another plugin. (And if it is coming from FWP, where it might be coming from.) Could you let me know if you are running any other plugins on your system in addition to FeedWordPress, and if so what they are? That might help me figure out a bit better what's going on.

Thanks,
-C

Hey y'all,

Thanks for the bug report on this. I just pushed a fix for this issue to the development version of FeedWordPress on Github, and the fix will also be in the upcoming incremental release to FWP, which should be released tomorrow. (Monday 12/17.)

Hey y'all,

Thanks for the report backs on this, and for the kind words. I am sorry for any unpleasant surprises that the original decision may have caused. I just wanted to let you know that I've implemented the solution I mentioned above for the Visual Editor tab: it will now appear, but if and only if the setting under Posts & Links > Formatting Filters is set to "Expose syndicated posts to formatting filters." When this setting is set to "Protect," using the Visual Editor to edit posts would result in mangled formatting on posts (mainly, edited posts will look like they've had all their paragraphs-breaks and line-breaks stripped out). So in that case the Visual Editor will be disabled. But if this setting is set to "Expose," using the Visual Editor won't have the same bad effects on formatting. So if it is set to "Expose," then the Visual Editor tab will appear when editing syndicated posts.

The fix is available currently on Github, and will be rolled into the next incremental release of FeedWordPress, which I plan to release tomorrow (Monday 12/17) after I've had a chance to run through other outstanding issue reports.

Hey there,

Thanks again for this bug report! I believe that I have identified the source of the error. (It took a bit of chasing to figure out what's going on, but it had to do with the handling of feeds that have been deactivated, but which still have posts from them archived in the wp_posts table.) It should be fixed in the current version of FWP on Github, and will be rolled into the incremental release that I'm putting out on Monday. Tentatively, unless I see it cropping up again, I'll mark this resolved when the new version is released.

Hope this helps.

-C

Hey there,

Thanks again for this bug report! I believe that I have identified the source of the error. (It took a bit of chasing to figure out what's going on, but it had to do with the handling of feeds that have been deactivated, but which still have posts from them archived in the wp_posts table.) It should be fixed in the current version of FWP on Github, and will be rolled into the incremental release that I'm putting out on Monday. Tentatively, unless I see it cropping up again, I'll mark this resolved when the new version is released.

Hope this helps.

-C

> Everyone is in favor of some kind of gun control. Those with mental disorders and violent tendencies should be kept from accessing dangerous weapons. Speak for yourself, please. If I were only 20 years older, I would have been diagnosed with a "mental disorder" for my sexual orientation. As it stands I am all too aware of the numerous ways in which psychiatric diagnosis is used to marginalize, stigmatize, regulate and control people along traditional lines of social privilege, and to confine those who have done nothing wrong other than deviating from oppressive community norms. I have less than zero interest in giving institutional psychiatry any privilege at all in determining who can be stripped of means for self-defense.

> Obviously the choice itself should be left to each community to democratically make. Well I guess that would seem pretty obvious to me, too, if I believed in democracy or majority rule. But I don't. I am an Anarchist. "Communities" don't have authority over people who peacefully decline to be bound by the will of the majority. If folks have weapons on hand but they aren't using those weapons to coerce or impose on or assault anyone, then it is hardly the "community's" business, and there is no way that a "community" can "democratically" control their access to those weapons except (1) by means of universal consensus, in which case it's hardly "controlling" so much as an universally agreed set of best practices, which the weapon-owners themselves are participating in; or else (2) by means of the more numerous or more powerful faction *non*-consensually constraining the dissenting minority, in which case what you have is a dominating exercise of privilege. But of course it is clear that you mean (2), not (1), since you have laid out a fairly extensive bureaucratic mechanism for stripping people of their weapons without their consent if the community, or those acting in its name, decide that they can't handle them responsibly. The rest of your comment is a laundry-list of increasingly authoritarian proposals to prop up the core privilege (of the ruling majority over the dissenting minority) by means of appealing to, and massively reinforcing, a number of other toxic privileges, notably the privileging of a diffuse "community" bureaucracy to "register" hunting grounds and ranges, license gun-owners, enforce testing standards, etc.; the privileging of "extensively trained" warriors over the disarmed populace (!); and the privilege of medical experts and institutional psychiatry. These are in fact some of the most toxic forms of privilege in the history of the world, have repeatedly been used to target, constrain, confine, disarm, disenfranchise and/or institutionalize the most socially marginalized and the most vulnerable people, and the privileged authorities in each of these cases (warriors, shrinks and bureaucratic administrators) are more or less inevitably proves to be the most conservative defenders of status-quo power in any community. They are exactly the last people in the world any radical should ever trust with any ability to limit people's access to means for self-defense. Now giving community authorities extensive power to control the non-aggressive behavior of dissenting minorities is of course something that looks a lot like democracy, in one sense of the word democracy. But this being /r/Anarchism and me being an Anarchist, I think it is important to note that it's pretty hard to see in it anything that resembles anarchic social relations.