Marvin said: > Finally, the notion that banning him is a good way to teach him > "boundaries" as though he's some kind of kindergarten student, is > insulting and insane. No, it's worse. It's fucking bullshit.
One of my friends suffers from a serious dissociative disorder. We used to allow her totally free access to the #culture IRC channel. Sometimes she would rant and rant for hours, mostly about her parents and about death. These rants would collapse rapidly in coherence and then even grammar and spelling would fall out of the picture. It got to the point at which she was doing this every day. She would also describe for us such unpleasant things as tearing apart her pet frog or making and eating food with her own blood when she was more lucid. Furthermore, she refused to get any psychiatric help (mostly because her mother, who had seriously abused her, was a psychiatrist and so she is terrified of them). On one occasion, I returned to the computer to find that she'd been ranting away into an empty channel for over an hour. I have many megabytes worth of such material. In the end, she almost drove a very sweet and caring channel regular to a nervous breakdown, used things she'd learned about various of us in extremely hurtful ways and mailbombed me with a large number of emails saying "traitor! this is war!" By that stage, many of the less frequent visitors to the channel had ceasing going there, and the core of five or so people were actively hiding from her and talking by private messages. Finally, we decided to ban her until we could handle her presence again or she showed signs of being able to control herself in a more civilised manner. Was that unwarranted censorship? (It seems to me that it wasn't. An IRC channel not listed in the public directory feels more like a private room than a public space, and as channel founder I owned that private room. She ended up setting up her own channel almost immediately.) What else could or should we have done? Rich GSV Hard Decisions
