quote:Originally posted by Greybird: If you've had enough and thought enough about Rob Kamphausen and his Legion message board, please stop reading now.
I apologize in advance. This posting vents a bit, from anger that still resides in the depths, despite my best efforts over three weeks. It also documents a still-twitching nerve fiber of that venue, in the nature of an autopsy.
I was fighting insomnia tonight, by doing some computer cleanup, when I ran across Steve Lightle's heartfelt plea for Legion-fan cohesion (posted elsewhere, including the DCMBs, as "The Legion Family") in my all-remembering ClipMate clipboard utility. And it occurred to me that I had read about his having posted it on Rob's Legion HQ.
With all that had transpired, I was morbidly curious as to the reaction over there. Emphasis on morbid, because that forum is dead, despite its still having a few intelligent people -- some from here -- inexplicably still posting amid the ruins occasionally.
I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see Rob himself posting tonight in that thread, freely admitting that it was after he'd been drinking for three hours.
He Who Wanders had been kind enough to mention me earlier in the thread, by name, and note that on the DCMBs (blue version) he and I had disagreed on the importance of tact. I took HWW to heart, and decided to not post a response to Rob on his own private property.
So I did what I'd neglected to do earlier: I removed all personal information from my user profile, turned off the Dawnstar avatar, and left only the URL "www.legionworld.net" as my custom title. I didn't want anything of a personal nature on that system, except an endorsement of this one. (And my written words up to then.) I came back here to post.
Rob delivered a rant about being an injured, generous innocent that had to be seen to be believed. Yet I won't dissect all of that. I'll confine myself to this:
===== {After setting up "Legion HQ"} we hadda buncha crazy yet happy legion fans doing and saying whutever the heck they wanted in a forum completely free and random, just like they asked for.
then, in the span of just a few hours, when i was out doing my "real world" thing, many of these happy people realized exactly what "free and random" means.
see, as a moderator for half a decade now, i'll letcha in on a lil secret: seems almost no one wants freedom of speech. what people want is freedom of -their- speech. its a distinct and clear difference, but not one many will accept or admit. =====
We Legion fans asked for nothing "free and random." And what Rob Kamphausen will not accept or admit is that he is not merely a grammatical ignoramus, as this and other postings have shown. He is also, as this shows, a historical and a logical one.
"Freedom of speech" belongs, and it always has belonged, to the realm of politics. It has to do with -government- action, with its being prevented from trampling on one's natural and (per Jefferson) inalienable rights. It has nothing to do with private actions.
Rob controls his property -- as much as he wants to do so. Or not. What he allows on his message boards is not a matter of "freedom." It is a matter of what he prefers. And he prefers to -not have discussion forums,- when his cronies feel like trashing them.
That, quite simply, is the crux of what went wrong. Rob misled us into thinking that the Legion HQ (or his boards, more generally, earlier) would be a place for discussion. Wild and woolly and astoundingly off-topic at times, but nonetheless discussion.
He didn't want that. He wanted something "random," with no constraints whatsoever on anything that might disrupt rational expression.
That is what he was never forthright about, until the trashing of Legion HQ and the mass departure. He was, and is, footing the bill for that venue, but that gives him no moral right to posture as the injured and generous benefactor, when his actions were a matter of deception, however partly passive.
I know this has been chewed upon endlessly already, yet I never got to the heart of it in my own mind until now. I had to put it on record.
Some of you are going to say, "Grey, get a life and forget about it all." And you're right, I should. Yet we should also grieve for being deprived of any place to speak one's mind, where it can fire on all cylinders. This is how I'm doing it. And I've said enough.
