Subject: And my thoughts...
Author:
Posted on: 2017-05-26 03:31:00 UTC

...are very divided. I shall present these as a dialogue with myself:

Delta: I think Tomash has a point. I don't think Bram is acting maliciously, and... this smells a bit witch-hunt-y.

Juliette: But on the other hand, I agree with Phobos, from a constitutional analysis, some pretty fundamental behavioral guidelines for the community have been solidly broken.

Delta: To pick a specific point, I think that Phobos's charge of sockpuppeting, though technically true, is both past the statute of limitations and wasn't done maliciously - zdimensia existed as an attempt to prove a point, if I'm reading Bram correctly. And... that's been a thing that's been done before, IIRC. hS has done so, I have done so, a couple Veteran Members of the Community have created sockpuppets for the specific purpose of stepping completely outside of oldbie privilege and throwing their voice into the milieu to see what happened.

Juliette: Sure... but that was done for specific purposes, and when the experiment ended (days later, rather than years!), the experiment was explained and data was discussed.

Delta: To expand back out to a more general argument, I don't think that Bram has done anything out of active malice - the heat of the moment seems to be a longer-lived concept for her, and she lacks communication skills that those of us who are closer to neurotypicality have, but... that's not being malicious. Should we really ban someone for Not Getting It?

Juliette: But that's it. She Doesn't Get It, or so it seems, and that includes not working with the many people who have offered to help. And that's not something we can fix - I deeply appreciate the PPC's utility over the years as a space where we have helped people become more mature, understand themselves, and so on, but that process is voluntary and I don't see Bram accepting that help.

Both: Bottom line, I don't think that her being here, in her current state, is good for her or for the community. It's not an at-fault situation, it's a fundamental mismatch of communication skills and technologies.

Ideally, I would like Bram to work with a mentor/advisor on communication skills. It could be one of us. It could be me! I've volunteered, she knows how to poke me on Discord. I would like her to acknowledge that she needs some guardrails, that this chunk of road is twistier for her than it is for other people. I would like to see her learn, and grow, and become an awesome member of this community.

But I don't think we're in an ideal situation. I really, really dislike swinging the banhammer in this case, it's not at all as clear-cut as ypurs were. But I believe that the current situation should not be allowed to continue. I believe we have given enough offers of help, given enough additional chances, had enough of this sort of conversation.

Ultimately, I believe that a banning may be necessary, in the interest of cutting off an interaction that is clearly hurting Bram as well as the rest of us.

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