DU Jury Nullification

[mike_c]

19. the jury system is only part of the problem, and I really think a small part....

In an ideal world, the DU jury system would do precisely what it's meant to do-- help create and maintain community standards for participation.

The real problem begins with the alert. I now believe that some DUers utterly abuse DU alerts to harass others with whom they disagree, or whom they simply do not like. Once alerted on, a post automatically goes to a jury, and that's where it becomes apparent that DU has become so diverse in ways that no one expected-- we might all be (mostly) liberal, but that's probably the only unifying characteristic on DU these days, and it's suspect too-- that there are often no broad community standards that define us generally. Sure, we can all agree that "Jane, you ignorant slut!" is a personal attack, but there are factions now who will vote to hide even the comedic version of that statement (SNL, anyone?) as sexist regardless of the irony that of course Chevy Chase meant it to be (and I only cite that because it applies to that particular example). Others become outraged by sports scores. And so on. In fact, I saw this phenomenon described recently as "outrage driven media."

Given that volatile mix of outrage driven perspectives making up juries, alerts become reasonably dependable weapons for harassment because it's too often true that enough jury members will be outraged by SOMETHING the DUer said.