While I understand why you’d want to remove his blog access, it does seem like going from one to ten without hitting the numbers in between. This seems to have escalated very quickly.

I agree, it did escalate a lot quicker than I would have thought it would. But I think our responses to the various situations have all been entirely appropriate and proportional. If you’d like, I can take you through the steps that led to this point.

Despite often making presumptions of being full members, Ben and Miranda have been in something of a probationary period for the last several months. Unlike Ben, I won’t go into the details of our private interactions. But suffice it to say that during this time, they increasingly failed to impress myself and, later on, Jason and Giuli. By the time Miranda had posted the article that started all of this, we had pretty much decided to deny their request for membership. But at this time, we still had no intention of having such an ugly confrontation.

All of us were sort of taken aback when we saw Miranda’s April 5th entry, in which she wrote, “I’m one of those people that say, ‘Well, come on already, Collapse Already!!!’” It seemed to betray a disturbing callousness. I can’t speak for the other members of Anthropik, but I chose not to make an issue of the statement since it was only one line that was not even the main point of the article.

Besides, by the time I read it, you, Al, had already publicly taken issue with with the line. I had no problem with this, since we ourselves found it unsettling. I expected Miranda to then recognize the problem and give an explanation saying something along the lines of, “I misspoke. That’s not what I intended to say.” Instead, she tried to defend it in a manner that only made her seem all the more callous. And that is where that particular thread began to escalate.

But the tipping point, and the point where I chose to enter in, was when Ben decided to come to Miranda’s rescue. In his post, he was totally unapologetic about his lack of compassion and his selfishness. He even used evolution and genetic survival as an excuse for his beliefs. Now this is something that Jason and I have had discussions about in the past. And we both agree that using evolution as a basis for morality is monstrous. In fact, this is something that people recognized even in Darwin’s time. So I was shocked to see Ben using evolution as a substitute for ethics. I decided to rebuke him, and then I went to bed. I had no idea how much the thread would escalate in my absence.

What followed almost seemed to be a race with Ben and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Miranda to see how quickly they could show Anthropik to be morally bankrupt. Now to be perfectly honest, Al, I don’t agree with everything you said in that thread either. But you were a guest. Ben and Miranda were contributors. When they say things like, “I think you’ll taste good with carrots,” it reflects poorly on the site as a whole. Especially considering that we receive criticism for being unfeeling just for stating things that are actually true. So we have very little tolerance for that sort of talk. Jason had little choice but to close the thread to prevent the situation from going even further out of control.

That was when Jason wrote the e-mail that Ben speaks about in his reply. And apparently, this is the main source of his angsts. Jason told Ben and Miranda to write something to undo the damage they had done to the site’s image. And this is where Ben accuses us of being hierarchical. And in a way, he’s right, in the sense that all groups have some hierarchy based on the status of its members. In any group, would-be members are always subordinate to full members. There was no choice here. Ben and Miranda had done harm to the group. If they had any desire to continue any kind of relationship with the group, they needed to repair that damage. Rather than doing this, however, they decided that they were somehow entitled to the same status as full members, or even higher than full members. And in their presumption, they chose to ignore Jason’s e-mail.

In an attempt to make it clear where Anthropik stood, Jason posted a new entry titled “The Ethics of Collapse.” And we actually had a good discussion with relatively few problems in this thread for about 60-70 comments. Ben’s comments in the previous thread were only mentioned in passing. But this led Ben to post a comment Sunday night essentially looking to start a fight in which he said, “However, if any of you has something to say about me, you can say it to me or not at all. This cowardly sidelong attack is not appreciated. Come at me, or stay silent.”

I responded that everything that anyone had to say about him had already been said publicly, and that if he took issue with any of those comments he should say so. And this is where this thread also begins to deteriorate. Because rather than saying what his problem with any of the comments was, he and Miranda simply began filling the thread with personal attacks. In the end, the thread had gone so far off-topic and had become so personal, that it had to be closed.

It was then that Ben decided to post his reply. This reply consisted of quotes taken out of context, quotes from private discussions, the singling out of one of Anthropik’s guests for attack, and pure misinformation about the internal state of Anthropik. I deleted this post for the reasons stated above. And it was at this point that I locked both of their accounts in part because they had asked to have their request for membership revoked, but mostly because it was the only way to prevent them from abusing their privileges or vandalizing the site any further than they already had.

Not content to leave gracefully, however, Ben went on to post his petty reply on IshCon and possibly elsewhere on the internet. The launch of this smear campaign essentially burned any bridges Ben and Miranda had left with Anthropik.

While I understand why you’d want to remove his blog access, it does seem like going from one to ten without hitting the numbers in between. This seems to have escalated very quickly.

Since you took the time to write about our little “meltdown” over on Anthropik, I just thought I should clear a few things up. First, you shouldn’t consider yourself to be the cause of Ben and Miranda’s removal from the site. We had already decided the reject their request for membership. All we were still deciding on was when and how to tell them and to what extent they would continue to be associated with Anthropik. Your comment merely started their final escalation of cold-hearted rhetoric and personal attacks. Any rift that now exists between us and them was purely the result of their own actions, both on and off line.

Ben’s last post on Anthropik was deleted by myself. Jason is generally more open than I am to people posting whatever they want, so I don’t know how he would have responded. But it was my call. And in my opinion, Ben’s post represented a blatant abuse of the privileges he had been given. The fact that he used Anthropik as a pedestal from which to launch a petty smear campaign against the very site that had taken him in as a guest was as disrespectful as if he were to walk into my house, slap me in the face, and take a shit on my carpet. Anyone who wants to read what he wrote is free to do so on IshCon or wherever else he may have posted it. But I’m not going to tolerate it in my house.

To those who do decide to read it, though, I recommend taking it with a grain of salt. The description he gives of the “heavy internal disagreements” are vastly exaggerated. The whole thing is really little more than the misinformation of two bitter, rejected people.

Finally, while there were a number of points on which I disagreed with you, Al, and even thought you were a bit out of line at times, I was saddened to see that Ben specifically picked you out as a target in his last post. Going after one of our guests in such a manner was completely inappropriate. Unfortunately, I can’t stop him from saying such things. I can only apologize for the actions of our former contributors and hope you do not take it as a sign of the manner of behavior that Anthropik condones.