> > Then tonight, I realized that chat isn't a >>friggin democracy. It's a dictatorship, and >>Sam is the Pharoah. So if there are 500 >lamers in chat and only six non-lamers, and Sam >decrees that the lamers must go, they MUST GO. >End of friggin story.
> >
> > And, as BG says, as ops and admins, we have >>the responsibility to uphold what SAM wants, >>not what we want or what we might think is >>right. So if what Elly was doing was something >>she felt Sam would have done, she's absolutely >>in the right, by definition. End of story.
>
> Dave, did you ever hear about the ethical
>obligation to *higher* responsibility from the
>Nuremburg Trials? Examine your logic again when
>you say "we have the responsibility to uphold
>what SAM wants, not what we want or what we
>might think is right." What is this -- a hands-
>off & hold-your-nose policy to partisan
>politics? Not to put too fine a point on it,
>but what you are suggesting is unethical.

Sam owns RinkWorks. Kicking or banning people from RinkChat is not at all the same as, say, kicking or banning someone from their job. It has no lasting affects on any rational and sane individual. It's the same as if you invite me into your house. If I come into your house and start cursing and farting and generally being obnoxious, don't you have the absolute right to throw my butt out on the street? Well, so does Sam. And, it being his house, he has the absolute right to set the standards. And, as a caretaker of his house, I don't have the right to ignore those standards. Let's say I'm housesitting for Sam. Let's say I allow my friends to come in and randomly break stuff in my house. Do I then have the right to let my friends come in and randomly break stuff in Sam's house just becuase I would let them do it in mine? No. If I know that Sam wouldn't want people coming in off the street and smashing up his stuff, I have the obligation to stop them if they try.

If any of this makes me a Nazi, then Seig Freaking Heil.


>I
>know that by now you may well be totally fed up,
>and think that Chat is a fairly trivial thing to
>devote your time to, or to devote any great
>effort of personal ideology. But any time you
>have ANY degree of human interaction and
>communication, it has to follow certain rules of
>acceptability -- of finding COMMON GROUND for
>determining right and wrong -- or the
>communication will inevitably descend into
>meaninglessness.

You're back at the idea of chat being a democracy. It's not. It never has been. It never will be, as long as Sam owns the site. Sam is the law, and that's it. We're not talking about Hitler ruling Germany here. We're talking about Sam ruling his creation. One is wrong, the other is right.


>This includes one's time spent
>in Chat. Sam cannot decide what is right and
>wrong for you all the time, because Sam is not
>always there at the time. The persons who are>op'ing or admin'ing at the time have the
>obligation to be arbiters of what is appropriate
>behaviour. These persons must always exercise
>tact and caution in exercising power.

True. Caution is called for. Tact--eh, well tact is usually nice, but not always completely necessary. And yes, we can't always *know* what Sam would do if he were there. But all of us who *are* ops and admins have been around long enough to be able to make judgements based on what we know of his stance and his morals and his way of doing things. So *that* is what we need to put first in determining our course of action, not what *we* might think to be right. Again, I might let my friends randomly break things in my house, but if I'm taking care of Sam's house, I can't let that go on.

-- Dave