Related Note to EN World

A post on EN World suggested "Post[ing] random quotes attributed to RC saying random or silly things in reponse to another post, things RC never actually said, but due to his total deletion of all his posts can never be conclusively proved that he did not say."  


Intentionally misquoting someone has been a violation of the Rules since the day I started posting there.  It also might open EN World and the poster(s) in question to legal action.


A report of that post, instead of spurring moderator action, ended in an email to me suggesting that I cannot have it "both ways"; I cannot both leave and expect the Rules to apply.


Interesting times indeed.


By all means, tease away.  Stop your teasing short of intentional libel, though.  Or publicly encouraging actionable behaviour.  And if you are intending on committing libel, be a little smarter than this.  Don't publicly announce it.

Too Long for a Comment (Sorry)

Those who are doing the mocking on Circvs Maximvs and EN World are not completely wrong to mock, either.  Certainly, they are right to mock my faith in the AOTHS, or in the moderation staff, to do the right thing.  Mockery is, BTW, par for the course at Circvs Maximvs.  In this particular case, it is mockery of the rather ironic school:  "This is so unimportant that we must pay a lot of attention to it!"

I note as well that most of those doing the mocking are among those who contributed the least toward the site in the first place.  That isn't universal; there are one or two who have made very valuable posts in the past, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future.  But the AOTHS cannot be blamed for this mockery; he is actually being very civil, AFAICT.  Especially for posting to Circvs Maximvs.  I'm not happy to tar the man for something he hasn't done.

The general thread of the mockery goes along with "Those posts were essentially worthless; how dare he remove them!?!"  For the most part, but again not universally, the CM thread is "those who cannot" mocking "those who can".  That's very often the case on CM.  The funny thing is that there is no apparent cognizance of the irony.

It is also ironic that they seem to be mocking Pawsplay for....well, for mocking them?  That sort of need for self-justification should evoke our pity more than anything else.

In any event, I note that Morrus (belatedly) took down the PM....I assume in response to ProfC's comment to the last blog post.

Which brings up a related question, I suppose:  How valuable are the Rules themselves?  In terms of a business, a site is set up, with or without free access.  Posts on the site drive viewing statistics up, and in turn make the site valuable both for advertisers and for those who wish to support the site via membership, donation, or posted material.

For example, I have three times been asked by EN World if I could supply material.  Once was a faerie article for EN World Gamer (which folded before publication; the article later appeared on site and in an extended format in Dragon Roots), once by Morrus (to publish my Doctor Who game with the Doctor Who elements stripped out; I agreed, but Morrus then dropped the ball), and once to provide material for War of the Burning Sky (which I simply didn't have the time for when asked, although I had been otherwise willing).

A large part of the willingness to do these things is, IMHO, the idea that the Rules of the site act as a covenant between posters and the site.  Almost a form of contract.

You know that you are not going to have to put up with pro-rape wankery because the Rules prevent this from occurring.  You know that your posts will not be associated with such a site because the Rules prevent this from occurring.  You know that no one is going to be perma-banned without just cause because the Rules prevent this from occurring.

But what happens when the Rules are unilaterally broken by the site itself?

One could make an argument that the site is obligated to abide by the Rules, because it received material (posts, donations, membership fees, etc.) under the pretence that the Rules would be enforced.

To do otherwise would be rather like a hotel advertising a pool, without actually having a pool on premises.  Obviously, if the pool is important to you, you might want to take your money back.  Equally obviously, if the pool is important enough to enough people, those people can take a class action to rectify the problem.

When I was part of Golden City Comics, a class action suite was settled against Diamond Comics Distributors.  It named as the litigants all customers of Diamond Comics Distributors which did not specifically waive their participation.  In the case of Golden City, the cost to Diamond was somewhat over $200 US.  But there are a lot of people using Diamond, and I am sure that the suite hurt.  It certainly helped to ensure that Diamond stayed within set policies in the future.

(As far as I remember -- and I could well be wrong, because we were not directly involved -- the litigation was related to returns policies.)

So, "How valuable are the Rules?" may be a relevant question in the long run.  So far as I know, nothing like this has ever faced a legal challenge.  Sooner or later, though, some site will face just such a challenge.

I wonder just what the threads on CM would look like then?

I imagine that they would look rather like they do now -- a lot of self-justification, with no one apparently aware of how ironic their statements are.  Certainly, I don't imagine any sort of reflection that the Rules - when egregiously violated by the owner or staff -- are worth fighting for.  After all, if that was the case, we wouldn't be where we are now.

Mistakes Were Made (By Me)

Further to the previous blog post, it is obvious that I could have responded to the events on EN World and Circvs Maximvs better than I have thus far.

I have to assume that the AOTHS (Admiral of the High Seas, or the Guvnor, if you prefer) is not a bad man.  I have to assume that, initially, the thread which some came to consider as glorifying rape didn’t seem so bad.  And, once that decision is made – “This isn’t so bad” – it can be awfully difficult to back down from it.  In fact, even with the extraordinary events that occurred, the AOTHS has to be commended because he did, eventually, agree that it was not only bad, but that it was very, very bad.  In fact, he may even have realized that it was as bad as his “opponents” made it out to be.

Cognitive dissonance theory tells us what happens next.  The person in charge is then faced with a conundrum.  “I am not a bad man.  Yet I didn’t see how bad this was.  How can I explain that?”

There are two possible ways to go here.  One is to realize that one has blind spots…that even a very good person can make very bad mistakes.  The other is to find someone else to blame.  In effect, I wasn’t wrong at first.  It really wasn’t so bad until “They” made it so bad.  

And once you have found someone else to blame, it is difficult to step back.  It is difficult to go back to that first possible choice.   Even a very good person can make very bad mistakes.  In fact, scientific experiments in cognitive dissonance would indicate that the more self-confident you are, and the more you feel your chosen victims are helpless to retaliate, the more cognitive dissonance you feel, and the more you convince yourself that they are really bad people in order to relieve that dissonance.

My first step into this morass based of EN World's "pro-rape" thread and the fallout that resulted wasn’t the post I made on EN World (copied into my last blog post).  It was a private email to a moderator I trust, asking what exactly had happened.  

I should have sent that email to the AOTHS instead.  And I should have taken that moderator’s advice and contact the AOTHS directly.  Instead, I discovered Piratecat’s post on EN World (also copied into my last blog), and felt a need to stand against injustice.

Doing so, first on EN World, and, then, when there was no real response to the EN World post, on my blog, has probably made it more difficult for the AOTHS to step back and reconsider.  Taking a stand against injustice is not a mistake.  Not giving the AOTHS a chance to calm down, think it over, and perhaps reconsider was.  Not contacting him directly was.  I should have sent him a personal note, and then given him a week or two to consider before pressing him farther.  We might have ended up in the same place, but, then again, we might not have.

Removing posts causes harm to individuals who were neither involved in the atrocious behavior on EN World and Circvs Maximvs, nor (in some cases) were even aware of it.  I am truly sorry for that harm, to those individuals.

But EN World is a business, and it is a business that is funded by (1) advertising revenue, (2) memberships, and (3) product sales.  Both advertising revenues and memberships are spurred by traffic, and traffic is spurred by the quality of posting.  If the posts being removed are of poor quality, they do not help to drive traffic or memberships – but neither does their removal do much harm.  If the posts being removed are of good quality, they do more harm, but leaving them there provides content to drive traffic toward a business acting in a fundamentally unethical manner.

Again, if people only read newer posts, there would be no harm in leaving them for me (as they would not be driving traffic) or removing them for anyone else (as they would not be reading them anyway).  That, however, is not the case.

My decision was to remove the posts, organize them into essays, and repost them here or elsewhere.  The goal was to minimize any involvement toward driving traffic to EN World, while minimizing harm to others by making the content (if not the form) available elsewhere.  I am aware that this is not a perfect solution, and I am willing to consider any better solution anyone might offer.  Be aware, though, that such a solution must address both of these goals.

I am far from perfect. 

If you have a better plan, I’d love to hear it.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by EN World)

I have been involved with the EN World rpg website for some time.  I lurked, then joined in 2004.  At the time of this writing, I have 12,488 posts on the site, and am #12 (of 112,271 members) for XP (a method by which useful posts and posters can be rated). 

I believe that I have made valuable contributions to the site in the past.  I have spent a lot of time on the site, and stepping away from it is going to hurt.  I believe that EN World has been great in the past, and has the potential to be great in the future, but conscience requires me to disassociate myself with it now.

Allow me to explain.

EN World was originally owned by Eric Noah, and had what came to be known as the “Eric’s Grandmother” rule.  To wit, if something was not appropriate for Eric’s Grandmother, it was not appropriate for the site.  This rule was retained (and rightly so) when the site was taken over by the current “Admiral O’ The High Seas” (hereafter AOTHS).

Recently, a thread appeared on EN World that dealt with topics which the Eric’s Grandmother rule would seem to apply to.  Specifically, to the topic of rape.  Rape was depicted in a way as to be offensive to several posters.  And, no, I am not going to go into details about this depiction.  Some of these posters went to great lengths to attempt to get the AOTHS to deal with the problem.  They were unsuccessful.  In fact, the AOTHS perma-banned at least one of those posters from both EN World and its sister site, Circvs Maximvs.

In a Meta thread on EN World about this topic, EN World moderator Piratecat posted:

Up until now, we've never needed guidelines about this. In the recent event a discussion about in-game rape occurred under very congenial "I abhor this in real life but it occurs in my game world" discussion, and it very understandably made a lot of people furious. That's a problem in part because the moderators, quite correctly following our rules, moderated the people who lost their temper and not the polite person who brought up the subject regarding his game. 'Cause hey, using babies as human shields is truly repugnant too, but a thread where bad guys in a game do this won't even raise an eyebrow; shouldn't a discussion of in-game rape be treated the same way?

We've decided, quite correctly, not a friggin' chance.

Baby-shields don't require a trigger warning. One in five people aren't subject to baby-shields during their college years. And while we've been moderating according to our guidelines, in the case of discussion surrounding sexual assault the moderators and administrators here agree that our guidelines are flat-out wrong.

So we apologize, and here's the deal. Like racism or adult topics, this isn't the place to discuss your campaign's variants of rape or molestation. We don't care, we don't want to hear it, and we won't put up with it. We will moderate accordingly. Folks, please report it if you run across it.

All well and good, right?

Well, no.  Because, despite coming to the conclusion that the AOTHS had been wrong to dismiss, repeatedly and vociferously, those who tried to tell him just that – rather than being thanked for fighting so hard to make EN World a better place – have been ostracized.

There were claims that “we don't discuss moderation with anyone other than the person being moderated” but moderation often appears publicly.  Anyone who examines the site can see public moderation appearing frequently in red or in orange text.  Indeed, people are asked not to use red text because that colour is reserved for public moderation. 

Moreover, after publicly castigating individuals for trying to point out the obvious, a public apology is in order.  Or, even, a public admission that, perhaps, said castigation was a mistake.

And, of course, the cross-board drama went a bit beyond castigation.  When the AOTHS threatened to close Circvs Maximvs – when it became clear that there were more people who thought the original decision was as obviously mistaken as the EN World moderators eventually came to realize – the overblown vitriol was somewhat disproportionate, shall we say, and it was not aimed at the individual responsible for both (1) the original error and (2) the threat to take his toys away, but rather at those who pointed out the obvious moderation problem.  And that vitriol was of the type that, in the “real world” beyond the InterWeb, almost anyone would be ashamed of being associated with.

There have been claims that the moderation staff of EN World are not “a big fan of cross-board drama”, and people have been banned from EN World for posts on another site (SomethingAwful). 

Of course, Circvs Maximvs has always been about “cross-board drama” – the staff merely don’t want the drama going in a direction that makes EN World look bad.  There is always an “Asshattery on EN World” thread of some sort ongoing, where people create cross-board drama, including intentionally trolling EN World and then returning to Circvs Maximvs to brag about it.  So, this explanation for the behavior of the AOTHS and moderation staff falls rather flat.

It also rather ignores that the thread arose on SomethingAwful, not simply “to get a rise out of” EN World, but because of the actions of the EN World staff.  To wit, making it impossible to speak on EN World requires either that one goes elsewhere, or that one shuts the fuck up.  Clearly, people on EN World are being punished for not shutting the fuck up.  As though the AOTHS can control people’s reactions to his actions, even beyond the precincts of his little spot on the Net.

(Not long ago, I’d have been surprised if I were banned from EN World for making this blog post; now I will be surprised if I am not.  Of course, not so long ago, I would have denied that anything like this ever would happen at EN World, where the moderation has been historically excellent).

The real problem, IMHO, is not that EN World refused to take action to deal with the “pro-rape” thread – everyone makes mistakes.  No, the real problem is that, knowing this to be a mistake – an obvious and egregious mistake, the AOTHS has apparently chosen to punish those who pointed it out in an ongoing matter.  In other words, it is not the mistake that was made, but the mistake that continues, which is the real problem.

So, the claims about how this is being dealt with, and the reasons for actions, seem to be rationalizations (at best) to avoid fixing the real problem.

“In normal circumstances, people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility…..[T]here were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum.  On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world.  In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.”

-- Albert Speer

“We were completely wrong, and only when we have admitted that and paid the price of our mistakes can we expect the public at large to have much faith in our government or our political system.”

-- Jeb Stuart Magruder

Of course, Albert Speer was talking about the Third Reich, and Jeb Magruder about the Watergate scandal, but the difference is in degree, not in kind.  Those posts have been put behind a wall, so that only members can see them now, but they are not pretty.  And, again, they are so not pretty that I am not going to post them here.  Some selected quotes have appeared on the SomethingAwful website if you really need to read them.

Suffice it to say that what the Third Reich did, select denizens of Circvs Maximvs and EN World expressed a desire to do.  In the case of Watergate, lies, cover-ups, and blaming those who discovered misdeeds was rationalized as just another step.

And it is so easy to take just another step.  After all, this is only the InterWeb, and no one takes anything we say or do seriously, right?

I posted:

If EN World recognizes that mistakes were made, kudos to you.

I assume, then, that those who should have been moderated will now be dealt with appropriately, and that those who were inappropriately moderated -- and, perhaps, banned from the site as a result -- will receive an apology and an invitation back?

Because, if not, it isn't the decision you are trying to undo; it is the consequence of the decision. And if it is only the consequence of the decision you are trying to undo, I don't believe that is acceptable.

Obviously, I am only asking in a general sense. I am not asking you to comment on any specific moderation. But if anyone remains banned for trying to bring the site owner & staff to come to the conclusion that you seem to have here, I cannot in good conscious remain associated with EN World.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.

-- Lao Tzu

Time to decide how great, or how petty, EN World is to be.

My post has been described as “petty” by at least one poster.  So be it.

I have begun the process of removing my content from EN World, from those threads where I am still allowed to edit my posts.  I will continue to do so, periodically, until I am no longer providing content to the site, I am no longer able to remove posts due to moderator action, or the AOTHS takes Jeb Magruder’s advice and restores my faith in his government.