The EmacsChannelHarassment saga continues... Time to finish this!
Perhaps the last posting I made will be a good summary of my feelings on the issue.
`#emacs` was a great place until Beth and her boyfriend showed up. Beth, you are a self-professed lurker and your boyfriend is a troll. You are not contributors to `#emacs`. You appeared out of thin air, yangchu started insulting people and you started swearing at them. Your only contribution to our community is to start a smear campaign against people you don’t even know. And when the truth came out, that it was a plant all along, you didn’t even offer an apology.
You hide behind a thin veil of politically correct indignation, which you smear over anyone convenient, except yourself and your boyfriend. How dare you come into our house and swear at us? How dare you? Who do you think you are?
Go away. We have no need for your vulgarity, no need for your derisive words and no need for your underhanded tactics in our channel.
– a concerned `#emacs` community member
Dear anonymous concerned `#emacs` community member,
Somehow this does not feel like a correct and fair assessment of what happened. But even if it were, it would be foolish:
1. It seems you don’t want to draw lessons for yourself from this page, therefore the next time something alike happens, you will go through the same moves. I hope you agree that the entire thing is quite annoying by now.
2. Your message is not polite, it lacks respect. Even if Chris’s message lacks respect towards those who do feel that `#emacs` is a community, it doesn’t justify this response. Two fools don’t make a pal.
3. It doesn’t help to find closure. We need to find closure before we all just leave because of attrition. Your message doesn’t help.
4. In any case of abuse situation, proof of harassment is always tricky. All too often, the blame falls back on the victim. Luckily, this is not a court, and we are not a jury, therefore we don’t need to know who is right and who is wrong. We do need to help prevent such sitations: We need to prevent harassment, and we need to be able to discern false accusation of harassment in the future. Dwelling on the particular case doesn’t help. Specially since Beth herself in her mail to TerryP was mostly interested in what we were going to do about this in the future. We don’t need to assign any blame now if we can avoid this in the future.
5. You claim to be a community member, but provide neither name nor nick. That doesn’t help your case, since we cannot give you the benefit of reputation. We must rely on the words you wrote.
– Alex Schroeder