DE-RATTING: THE ORIGINAL ACCUSATIONS AND MY RESPONSES
Preliminary: the original accusation and my responses, which this is
https://app.simplenote.com/p/wKW9DP
1. The main letter:
https://app.simplenote.com/p/02HJS2
1.a. Memory / awareness as it relates to disregarding archival:
https://app.simplenote.com/p/P5Jn9Y
2. Clarifications on frivolous shit:
https://app.simplenote.com/p/8gcsJY
3. My concerns going forward:
https://app.simplenote.com/p/lmlrpv
Several reasons were cited for my removal. Here are the specific claims and my explanations.
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1. Making several people uncomfortable to the point where they say they don't want to be in the same events with Alfred or be in the same server as Alfred.
Reality: partially true, though misconstrued.
At least one of these people was someone who I had a personal dispute with, but knowing them this was done as an innocuous courtesy and I'm guessing it was misconstrued as some kind of ultimatum. (Note: This has been resolved for a while now.)
The other people making this kind of ultimatum should be obvious because you all read the dispute in Culture War, which this is clearly a reaction to. I don't need to name them; you can take an educated guess.
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2. Trying to pit members against each other in clearly manipulative ways in private messages, and being manipulative in other ways.
Reality: completely bullshit.
The last people I have DMed in discord are:
https://i.imgur.com/SRH6T7f.png
asara, cherrvak, jynelson, whytefeather/trolo, Meefburger, btrettel, untoward and whytefeather are all dated 12/27/2021. last message to lesalia is dated 12/24/2021, GeneralAntilles 12/14/2021 and wolfrayette 12/13/2021.
Only one of these messages I sent recently that could be construed as "pitting" anyone "against each other" (read: it isn't) and it was about who I thought the StopBeingABitchAlexZ account could be. My DM used the verbiage "I don't have any way of confirming this though, keep in mind" and "I'm being deliberately vague here for the sake of privacy" and "Please don't bring this up. But, given the circumstances, that's my top suspicion and I figure you deserve the information."
Given how recently these decisions occurred, there is no other message this could be about.
(Thanks for honoring my "please keep this between us" request. Aren't I supposed to be the one in trouble for indiscretion?)
Manipulation, by the way, in really white upper middle class settings is sort of like a power word because it's like the Matrix. It appeals to the paranoid in us and you never know if I'm doing something insidious. I could be manipulating you at any time, you don't know, you could be a bluepill ready to turn into Agent Smith at any moment. So this is a great way to stoke unreasonable fears that I'm working against you in secret.
More to the point: If anyone from the above list of people DMs has any messages that are construable as pitting anyone against each other other than this one, please express your concerns to me, because that isn't behavior I approve of either and I would like to know if you think I'm doing that so I can not do that.
In fact, if you disapprove of anything at all I've done independent of this incident you are free to message me on FB about it. The insinuation that I'd do anything dishonest to any of you is serious and I'm willing to go to bat about it.
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3. Sharing private information about group members to outside groups.
reality: real, but with a caveat
I know what this is about, and it pertains to a single personal dispute. I also know who specifically made this complaint. It's unfortunate that they did, but I'm not going to hold it against them. (If I intended to, you'd know.)
This is important however: the claim is a personal incident and irrelevant to anything I've done on the LW discord. If you never trusted me over DM, that would be reason to not message me, but there wouldn't be carryover to a discord server itself. As it stands, even if I *were* ready to post any private detail about you at a moment's notice, this would be unrelated to whether I or my friends should be able to participate on a (what was until about 10PM today 12/28/2021) semi-public discord of ~120 people where dozens of people lurk, the is discord invite link obtainable from google and the server has few to no clarifying statements about some kind of attitude toward privacy beyond I guess "don't talk to NYT reporters."
(I don't, and have never, cared about what you post on the discord server. This is imaginary.)
If any sort of outside-discord discussion about your personal details were a real concern, what you could have done instead was vet lurkers heavily and update the rule about privacy, then notify everyone that this is a thing you want people being vigilant of. If the concern were really outside-discord discussion of what happens on discord, this would have been clear long before this decision. Since this decision is clearly related to a single dispute, this is obviously out of retribution/personal bias against me than the security of anyone's personal details from the server.
SIDE NOTE: If this is actually a thing y'all actually care about going forward, you might want to do the following things: get new discord invite links; get some kind of vetting process for new adds; turn on phone verification for the server; hold meetings in a slightly more private location than a central market; use a better group notification system than google groups. (Turns out that the solution to convincing you that pareto was misguided in that one money game is just convincing you that the guy who has an extra $10 might bribe someone with it to screenshot the server.)
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META.
This will be unsatisfyingly vague to some of you, far too vague to be convincing, and I sympathize. High-confidentiality social norms have this incredibly abuseable exploit where anyone can spread rumors about you and the inaccuracies will rarely if ever go corrected because people following these norms are forced to speak in HRish nothings like "there was a dispute."
Regardless, you may want to reconsider how invested you are in a community if a combination of gossip, rumors, and unrelated outside beef is the reason you can get removed from gatherings with your friends, with your friends as a consequence at risk of removal too. A year or more's work of investment in your social network could be reduced to pointlessness.
translation: Don't re-add me if you have a sudden change of heart -- given the egregiously poor reasoning and standards of evidence used to remove me, I'm not exactly interested in rejoining knowing something similarly whimsical could happen to me or my friends again, and even if I did communicate it would be muted and reserved knowing that we could be removed for gossip. If I did rejoin I would have to be assured that something like this wouldn't happen again, which I'm not sure is possible at present.
But, to return to the purpose of this note: I do care that those of you who I am friends with want to stay friends, so again -- if you have any concerns about knowing me personally, please message me. Or text me. Or signal, or whatever.
-Alfred
contact:
http://facebook.com/1441668545
main letter:
https://app.simplenote.com/p/02HJS2
