An Ethical Dilemma
The problem is, you are asking me to choose between obeying you or respecting the truth. It’s put us all in a difficult situation. It’s not that I want to disrespect you or am happy with that. I intend to maintain my integrity, which means I will not compromise the truth, certainly not consciously.
You will interpret this as me disrespecting you, and I expect you will react accordingly, using your authority to pressure me in this way. I am asking you to align with the flow of the truth. On this occasion, it’s not a case of being subjective. There’s hard evidence to show what the situation is. You ask me to suppress that. I intend to expose the whole story.
Part of my motivation and purpose is because I’ve been put on the defensive by the person I’ve exposed; which is why I’ve had to expose them in the first place, and what they’re doing. I’ve reacted defensively to an unwarranted attack by raising a flag on it.
Respect where jurisdiction lays. You’re asking me to disrespect where my own jurisdiction lays because you are now attempting to administer my forum, despite having made it very clear you do not want me administering your forum.
I hope you can understand that this is with no disrespect to you, but I will decline your request for me to censor the truth in my own forum. I’m presenting evidence there to defend myself by exposing the truth with evidence. I question both why you feel you have a right to limit my voice in your forum and limit my voice in my own forum. I question why you are attempting to suppress the truth and actively encourage other people to suppress the truth.
I did not want to argue with you, but there is a morality here which does have a very definitive line. You cannot have one rule for one and one rule for another in a just society. It is one rule for all. You’re coming into my land to put a gag on me, disguised as a request that I politely do not tell the whole story. I cannot understand that way of thinking. I respect that you do not want to get caught up in this. Neither do I. None of us do.
By exposing where the problem is, which is what I’m doing, I have unintentionally made myself a target of people I’m trying to protect and educate about what is going on. Therefore, my reply to your request is that I ask you to think this through with a clear mind and a greater understanding of the whole situation beyond your border and why people around you deem it necessary to make the decisions they are making for the greater good.
The problem is people throwing their weight around, attempting to gain clout while disregarding the damage they are doing to the people around them. Please do not become one of those people. I am concerned about myself behaving the same way in other peoples perspectives. This is about respective boundaries. I do respect that you want a peaceful life. We all do. I’m not instigating problems here; I’m exposing the root of them because they’ve caused problems for me as well.
This is not blame-shifting or deflecting. I have to analyze that. Perhaps it is. Perhaps my moral creed is flawed also. I’m grateful to you for revealing this to me to contemplate, although it is possible that you are unintentionally gaslighting me by causing me to question my own sincerity and integrity.
Where I’m coming from is that where there is abuse, it needs to be exposed to protect people, and where there are others protecting the abuse, that is an abuse network which needs to be exposed to protect other people. I do not believe you intended to align yourself with an abuse network, by asking me to not cause you problems.
The truth is black-and-white. It’s either the truth or it’s not. If it’s half-truth, it’s not the truth. It’s a very narrow path to walk, one surrounded by pressures and stress on all sides. Often very lonely. Even so, I will not band together with manipulators, liars and controllers when I can have lonely peace, if that’s what peace must be. Anything beyond that is some shade of egotism, even when disguised as public service. It is that way for all of us.
What has swung it for me is this: the sim is one of the most wonderful places in the whole of Second Life. It’s beautiful. Not only the environment but the community there of like-minded people, the writers. Being a writer, one of the things which influences us is our environment. People write about their environment, how it shapes us, and how we feel about those places and the people there.
There is a vast historic precedent for this very thing. The existence of travel journals and the idea of characterization in novels validate their importance. There are industries built around people’s ability to craft words about these very things: people and places, experiences.
I have been writing about the sim and my experiences with the people there. All of this comes under that umbrella. On this basis, you’re asking me to censor my own writing in an area which is famous for writers to explore. I know you have done that because you prefer peace. It is usually a peaceful place to go, which is one of the reasons we all enjoy it and one of the reasons I’ve been exposing the problem element who has disrupted that, for which I seem to have been tarred by the same brush.
I’ve not been back there for a season. It is, as I said before in a different message, no longer a safe space for people like myself who love peace. It’s not me who has brought drama there. I’ve reacted to the drama by exposing its source. I’ve justified why in several valid ways.