As for
That said, Goober did promise to apologise and what he has posted thus far is completely lacking.
Reviewing the crux of his public statement...
I do agree that the splitting and removing the thread was a violation of the principle of not moderating a dispute in which you are a party. For that I apologize. As I said in the internal board, I made two mistakes here: I misinterpreted an invitation to make a post as an invitation to take moderator action, and I did not double check before going ahead and doing it.
This is all technically correct, but it misses the point as to why I and a number of other forum members are deeply angry about his actions.
I can't tell whether Goober
- does not understand why a number of people are angry with him over this
- does understand but, for whatever reason, doesn't care
But I'll be forgiving and assume (1).
First, I
do get that Goob would take perceived attacks on his moral integrity extremely seriously. I learned early on from a PM conversation with him that he does have a very strong sense of morals, even if those morals may be markedly different from a number of other users', including mine:
In full disclosure, I subscribe to a moral code [...]
The details/context aren't important, and even though it was over 9 years ago, the point stands.
Thus I buy Goober's perspective that he saw his reply to Mjn as a vigorous and justified defense against what he perceived to be an unfounded and deeply offensive attack on his character. I disagree sharply with Goob on a long list of political and religious matters, but he's no white supremacist.
Yes, I know Mjn said
First... I accused Goober of being a white supremacist supporter.
However, Goober
perceived it as "white supremacist", even if incorrectly, and perceptions matter.
Similarly—and
very importantly—even if Goob
- felt that he was defending himself from being unfairly attacked
- genuinely didn't view his reply as a personal threat
- honestly thought he was authorized to moderate a thread that included strong personal accusations against him
many of us perceived (and still perceive) his behavior very differently, and again,
perceptions matter.
In fact, I learned this point on my very first day here:
My first post on HLP offered proofreading services to campaign designers. The original version of the post included some text that I intended as a lame "har har" joke.
But someone happened to find that extra text deeply offensive.
And the whole thing blew up in my face.Fun fact about that thread:
If TopAce hadn't jumped in right away with his, uh, distraction, I would have left that first day and never come back, humiliated as I was.
But luckily, things turned out differently.
Suppose that a ton of people had found that text offensive and not just one person. In that scenario, it might well have been reasonable to expect me to post a public apology for a remark that many perceived as inflammatory, even if I thought it was completely innocuous. Because, once again,
perceptions matter.
And I was a nobody who had just joined. Consider how much higher the stakes would have been for an incident of far greater magnitude involving someone who had been on the forum for years, with "Administrator" under their name.
Oh, and for the record, I
did apologize. Here's an excerpt from a PM I sent to Goober shortly after that:
And as I mentioned on IRC, I'm really sorry about this mess. I didn't expect my post to cause any of that, although in retrospect I guess I should have. I was expecting that people would look at the username, roll their eyes, and ignore it. I guess that's what they would have done if I hadn't included that extra paragraph about the username origin.
(For anyone who didn't know, "jg18" is not the username I registered under.)
Anyway, that's my take on what happened. Hope that helps move the conversation forward.
