| seteca |
09-14-2004 05:58 PM |
Mho...
I was one of the first few posters on this thread and asked to know why CV was banned, so I think it's right that I post my thoughts in response.
First off, thank you to Marty, Johnny Stew & any other moderator who has responded in this thread - I know quite a few message boards where Admin do not discuss their decisions even if WWIII is about to break out.
Although I understand the reasons you (plural) have given, I, along with many, many, other Ledgies, am sad to see that CarneVaca has been permanently banned. He was one of the few Ledgies whose posts I always enjoyed reading. I also understand, and respect, that this decision is final, and that the decision was logically reached with the FAQ in mind.
However, I also see an infamous problem which has famously recurred throughout ancient and modern history: should you ALWAYS follow the rules, even if it is the majority's wish (and in their interest) to do otherwise? Yes, this is a private message board, owned and controlled by Marty & Lisa with the help of the moderators, but I always assumed that the FAQ were thoughtfully set up in order to protect (in many ways) the users of the forum - the 2000+ Ledgies. Without the Ledgies, there would, for all intents and purposes, be no Ledge Boards. Like I said in my first (and only other) post in this thread, if I started a poll asking "Should CV be allowed back?" I think it is pretty clear what the result of that poll would be, i.e. a high majority YES. (I did read Marty's message which explicitly asked Ledgies not to start any such kind of a thread so I will respect that request, which means, yes, my previous sentence is technically speculation.) So, if the majority of Ledgies not only have no problem with the actions of a particular Ledgie, but also would certainly not like to see him go as a result of those actions, what is gained by banning him from The Ledge? At the end of the day, this, like any other internet message board, is just an internet message board (I mean that with all due respect, and full appreciation of it) so I'm not going to ridiculously start talking deep political theory, but there does seem to have been an unexplained disregard for the ideologies that form "basic democracy". It's a very toned-down version of the kind of situations which occur on message boards like those I mentioned above, where someone is suddenly banned or a post is completely deleted with no warnings or reasons given, purely because (and only because) the owner/admin felt like it.
I'll end this post with a very recent example of the sort of situation I'm talking about. Yesterday afternoon, during a bright sunny day in London, a member of "Fathers 4 Justice" (a group of divorced fathers who want to stop courts from being able to rule in complete favour of mothers for custody of their children) dressed as Batman, put a ladder onto the main gates of Buckingham Palace, climbed over, ran across the front courtyard, scaled the walls, stood on the side of the main terrace and began a 5 hour protest, all because he wanted to see his children again. Buckingham Palace is surrounded by heavily armed police and soldiers who are under strict orders to shoot anybody who even attemps to climb over that fence, let alone run across the courtyard and climb up the wall towards the Queen's bedrooms. The officer who had his machine gun trained on him did not open fire. He made a split second decision that this man was probably a protestor or a mental patient, and did not shoot him. However, his orders do not ask him to make that sort of decision - they were simple: shoot anyone who tries to get over that fence. He disobeyed that order based on common sense and has now been praised by the entire Met. Police Force for his decision - had he acted otherwise, a harmless protestor would now be dead and his children would have no father.
My point is that sometimes the truly correct decision is not always the logically correct one.
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