Posted 6 April 2013 - 3:00pm by Joe P
Edict #35
“It’s time to nut up or shut up.”
This is the last edict of the term, and it’s going to be one that will please some of you, but make many of you feel very uneasy. I’m ending the term with this because I want everyone to pay attention to it, and think about it very carefully.
STF is a wonderful group with certain shared beliefs. Many of those beliefs, however, are contradictory. I think that if we’re interested in making progress in the future, we need to start resolving some of those contradictions, or at least acknowledge that they exist. I think we don’t do now because we’re not willing to confront them and the problems related to them. If anything, the natural tendency here at times seems to be to make our problems go away.
Well? I’m bringing one of our “problems” back. How we deal with “the problem” is going to tell us more about what kind of group we really are and want to be than any Command discussion ever could.
The lifetime ban of TJ Morgan, established within edict Wonderly #23, dated July 1, 2011, is hereby rescinded. TJ’s member rank is only restored to Ensign, in light of the rather serious Terms of Service violation that resulted in his ban in the first place. Aside from that, there will be no additional restrictions on what he is permitted to do. Nor will there be any sort of probationary scheme.
I am doing this for several reasons. One reason is that I think TJ is actually sorry for what he did and doesn’t intend to repeat such actions in the future. Another reason is that, while a ban for what happened was within the realm of appropriate action to take, I don’t believe that a lifetime ban was justified, especially considering the involvement of the President at the time in the events that led up to the ban. Finally, I was the person who originally discovered the legal issue, and when I reported it in Command I was left with a sense that there was very little concern about the legal risks; that people were more interested in finding a reason to make an annoying person vanish. That, and my part in it, has never sat well with me, considering that the underlying legal problem could have been solved in less than 10 minutes.
Could this lead to problems down the road? Yes, it could. But consider the following: We make an awfully big deal around here about wanting to be as large a club as possible and how we ought to welcome everyone here. Other times, we can be closed, elitist, and cliquish. If we want to be large as possible, then lifting TJ’s ban is the right thing to do, and we should be more forgiving towards people who violate the TOS in the future (including people who I have chosen not to punish this term but could have). If we want to be elitist and closed, then we need to become explicit about doing so and think carefully about what kinds of people and behavior we want to exclude and how we want to do it. Right now, we keep trying to do both, and keep talking about doing both.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the term, I’ll see you around the club!
Joe P, President
April 6, 2013