On Jan 19, 9:46 pm, Chris Jenkins <[email protected]> wrote:
> If you'd caught me five years ago, I'd probably think the latter, rather
> than the former, but after the several times we've had to get conversation
> on track here, and away from endless ad homs (Chaz) or endless persecution
> complexes (espace), I've found I have very little patience for it.
A "persecution complex" or "paranoia" is by definition irrational, and
is very different from my case. (That there are also some features in
common I don't deny, and I even try to spell out the main one below.)
My case may just as resistant to "treatment" as any case of paranoia,
but I am rational and ethical. (Evidence to the contrary may be
presented, and will be considered.) :-)
People who are rational and ethical should not be punished, not even
if they are a nuisance, especially not if they are merely being
perceived as a nuisance, when there are, or recently have been,
clearly perceptible nuisances committed by people who were not being
rational or ethical, and most especially not at all if the person now
being accused of being a nuisance was deliberately picked out as the
target of those previous nuisances!
That is a general rule, not one applicable only to my case ("hard
cases make bad law"), not special pleading, not something cooked up to
let me off the hook, or to let me carry on with what you (quite
wrongly, in my opinion) perceive as a "second round of trolling", but
which is in fact far more painful to me than it is to anyone else.
(However, today I think I'm starting to get over it, and to learn as
many lessons from it as possible.)
Really, it should be my choice as to whether to carry on with this
conversation or not. Diminishing returns should make the entire
process self-limiting, if no-one is interested. If no-one wants to
talk about any of the topics I have raised, that will be an end of it.
Conversely, it was the moderators forcing an end to another thread
(the one aimed at me personally) that really pushed me over the edge
into becoming a nuisance (as I think I almost certainly was in the
thread that poor Lee started). The disturbance could probably all have
been confined to that one thread, started by a troll in order to
attack me. When that confinement was broken, the disturbance spilled
over. Bad decision. (I'm not saying that in order to score points,
but because I think that a lesson can and should be learned from what
has happened.)
And that is not really any different to the usual advice given for
dealing with trolls. Trolls can be ignored; and I cannot reasonably
complain, nor will I complain, if I am ignored.
If, even when allowed to reply rationally to attacks, and allowed to
start threads of my own which others are free to ignore, I cannot
restrain myself from intervening in other peoples threads, in a way
which is a disturbance and a nuisance (as I think I have already done
on one, and only one, occasion, following my exclusion from the troll
thread), then, even if I am superficially rational and ethical, I can
quite reasonably and fairly be regarded as, if not "mad" exactly, then
nevertheless so mentally disturbed that I cannot be allowed to
continue participating in this group; and I do not think I would even
object to being banned for that reason, because it makes good sense
even to me.
In view of your long experience of the history of this group, you may
consider that there is a need to "punish" behaviour which is neither
irrational nor unethical, but merely disturbs the smooth running of
the community. I would say, in view of my own long experience of
living in human communities in general (although I have very little
knowledge of this one in particular), that that end does not justify
those means - with the one exception which I have just tried to
explain, i.e. an instance of "mental illness" which is just too
disturbing for other members of the community to be reasonably
expected to put up with, because it interferes too much with business
of theirs that has nothing particularly to do with the mentally
disturbed individual in question (in this case, me), and that person
would then become infuriatingly omnipresent, interfering with the
creative activity of the group, to everybody's detriment. (I've seen
exactly this kind of dreadful thing happen, in Real Life, not only
online.)
> I think you'll find I have a very open mind on a wide range of topics,
> however.
I have no doubt about it.
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