I apologize for the delay in returning here. For most of the last year and for the foreseeable future, I spend most of my time in the hospital caring for family members and/or being treated myself and so I find it very difficult to participate here in a timely fashion.
This post is in regards to my complaint about Marley’s reading comprehension levels.
First, a note: There should be a forum in which we can discuss moderation and mods’ decisions where just mods and admins can participate. Doing this kind of thing in an open thread is largely – if not primarily – a siren call for conformists and authoritarians to abuse people who have grievances with authority. One not only has to challenge authority, one has to get past all the people who love authority and will punish non-conformists. There has to be a better way.
[/soap box]
Okay, here’s the deal with Marley. I wrote an angry retort to orcenio in the EP thread that I knew merited a warning. The warning, from Marley, was entirely justified and I never imagined anything different, and I told him that many times. I even concluded that post by admitting that I knew I had crossed the line and that I offered no excuse because I knew there was no excuse.
Instead, what I objected to was that Marley – throughout more than 10 PMs – kept accusing me of a significant moral offense: He kept accusing me of trying to cheat and weasel my way out of that warning. In my first PM, I told him that while the warning was fully justified, I found his continuing accusations of weaseling and cheating to be insulting and that I was offended by it.
Now, I could have phrased the end note more on that post more clearly. When I wrote there that I didn’t need a warning, I meant that I didn’t need a warning to tell me I had crossed far over the line because I had just admitted that. And when the warning came, I wrote over and over that I fully deserved it and that I had no complaint about the warning itself whatsoever.
However, he kept accusing me of trying to cheat and weasel, which is grossly unfair and insulting and offensive and is a moral approbation that I did NOT merit.
I would have let it lie after the first PM, but Marley kept PMing me to tell me that he didn’t understand why I was offended. I then explained again, whereupon Marley kept PMing me to tell me that he didn’t understand why I was offended.
But he absolutely could not comprehend what I was saying, as witnessed by each and every PM he sent me. He kept sending me PMs saying he didn’t understand why I was offended, but that I shouldn’t have tried to weasel and cheat my way out of that warning!
Over and over again, he wrote comments such as “I don’t know what you find offensive”.
His reading comprehension was simply awful.
He was locked in a kind of apparently never-ending loop. Here’s how I summarized it in a PM:
He also insulted me by telling me that my posts weren’t “important.” Since when is it a moderator’s job to assign value judgments of what is, and what is not, important? Telling me what I was trying to say “isn’t important” is an insult in itself. If a rule was enforced that one could only write “important” things, who and how would that value judgment be made?
So, when I asked if there was any recourse in my OP, I wasn’t asking for Marley to be reassigned. I was asking for ideas, not ordering changes. One idea floating in my head was that Marley might voluntarily recuse himself from future moderation of my posts in GD. But as I think on that possibility now, I can see how unworkable and patently absurd that would be in both concept and practice, for it would be akin to special pleading and favoritism and pose all kinds of ludicrous complications, so I withdraw all of that.
But the larger issue remains: Punishments can be severe (though again, I admit I deserved the warning in question). As such, if you can’t make a mod understand such a ever-so-slightly subtle distinction as being offended not by the warning but by the moral insults accompanying it – even in ten back and forth PMs – how much confidence can we have that a mod is sufficiently capable of making the kind of subtle distinctions and judgments that the job calls for?
(And I expect to pay still more for my presumption in even posting this and my OP).