1UpsForLife | Establishing Responsibility

Continued from these tweets. This is a stupid/sensitive thing to talk about in public but I can’t reach 1UpsForLife directly. I’m basically trying to resolve an issue of ambiguous reponsibility for my being ostracised, either via a dialogue to tackle the issue in private or by establishing 1Ups’s intention to ostracise.

1. Damage

Firstly, to establish damage I suffered from the situation. An undisclosed case, or in other words hearsay, about actions I did to 1ups that hurt her, was used by SMS mods as part of justifications to ban me from that community (see quote below from Jpep), and by Jpep to turn people against me (see here):

from what ive been told by mods, it is a catalyst. as in, it is 1 individual event that is bad enough to motivate moving forward with a ban that they had already been talking about before

This resulted in ostracisation – broken contact, unfollowings, blocks etc. from several people. It wasn’t the only reason in some cases, but is notable in that all other reasons and events are fully disclosed in public. The apparent severity of the secret case is in my judgment due to the secrecy, not the substance of the case itself. This quote from Jer provides primary evidence of this result:

You were banned for abusing your friends

Also important to note is that 1Ups is well aware of the damage the situation with lumardy caused me, and my susceptibility to such damage from before then, having read my personal essay about alienation. The former has a lot in common with this current situation, which I’m handling by comparison to it.

2. Responsibility + Outcomes

Basic principle of responsibility: if an ostracisation is enacted based on something that you were a supposed victim of, then final responsiblity for the ostracisation rests solely with you. This is because you have complete control of the situation – your testimony carries far more weight than anyone else’s, it’s extremely unethical for either a friend or an official to prosecute someone for it against your wishes (compare with Awesomo case), and you are capable of enforcing a decision on everyone else over whether the matter should be personal or public.

This principle requires establishment of the supposed victim’s awareness of the consequences of eir actions, which is the point of this document – I am trying to both:

  1. give this a chance to be settled humanely, and
  2. if not then establish this responsibility, since I would need it to justify future actions.

There are three possible outcomes here that I’m trying to determine between:

  1. 1ups and I agree that I shouldn’t be ostracised over what I did to her; she intervenes and we start to settle things;
  2. 1ups and I agree that I shouldn’t be ostracised over what I did to her; she doesn’t intervene hence I’ve established mens rea (see section 4);
  3. 1ups thinks I should be ostracised over what I did to her, which allows me freedom to scrutinise and talk about what happened properly.

#2 and #3 here both establish intent to ostracise. And the outcome I’m ruling out with this document is the story so far – ambiguity over whether she consents to the ostracisation, which allows her lawyers (my facetious term for Jpitar) to defend her on different grounds depending on which of these outcomes I assume is at play.

3. The Story So Far

A short summary of how we got to this ludicrous situation where, 3 months after the fact, I still can’t establish 1ups’ consent/responsibility for ostracising me. I’ve documented a fair amount of lying/manipulation from her lawyers already, so this is only my best guess as to what happened.

  1. 1Ups sends the private letter of wrongdoing the case is based on to Jpep and Mlarvitar. The former is with my consent; the latter is someone random who has no understanding of the context.

  2. 1Ups dips for multiple weeks.

  3. Mlarvitar reports the existence of the letter to SMS mods without 1ups’ involvement, ascribes guilt on me for 1ups dipping.

  4. Тhe mods prosecute me for it, and in my ban rationale cite this as an example of “malicious bullying”, and assert that their actions were taken in consultation with victims o.w.t.t.e.
    • There is a chance they didn’t speak to 1ups;
    • There is a chance they spoke to her to establish causality between my letter and her leaving;
    • There is a chance 1ups blamed me in the sense of guilt for a prosecutable offence.

  5. Jpep editorialises on the situation without 1ups’ involvement, to turn several people against me, while still not revealing what I actually did to 1ups.

  6. I defend myself via a video blaming the lawyers and mods for the (clearly unethical) actions in each of #3–#5 (with the exception that the last option in #4 would mean that the mods’ prosecution was legitimate, but would also establish 1ups’ responsibility as per section 2). I call for the situation to remain private and abstractly argue why it isn’t prosecutable.

  7. 1Ups returns like nothing happened.

This situation to me reads like a more evolved form of the ostracisation op done on lumardy’s behalf, also directed solely against me. The initial side-taking is done via private conversations by the supposed victim that turn people against me (in the case of Jpep, he took a side based on his personal read on the situation and false belief that he was present in almost all interactions between me and 1ups). Thereafter, the ostracisation is enforced by people acting on the supposed victim’s behalf, but never by the victim emself. lumardy achieved this by duplicity – persisting different perspectives on the situation to his defenders vs to me and mine. 1ups achieves this by remaining completely silent.

The setup her lawyers have achieved is quite clever in that it strategically uses lack of awareness to exculpate 1ups – she supposedly isn’t responsible because all the ostracisation was done behind her back by her lawyers. Moreover, there’s no direct evidence of a conspiracy.

But I am dismantling it by forcing her to become aware and so take responsibility.

4. Mens Rea

This section will go into more depth on the second outcome of section 2:

1ups and I agree that I shouldn’t be ostracised over what I did to her; she doesn’t intervene hence I’ve established mens rea

Aside: If 1ups instead believes that I should be ostracised then the situation is very different – we recover a more traditional abuse situation where the victim presents a case and the case is properly scrutinised. This will allow me the freedom to talk about and be judged for it more fairly. If this is the case then this section is irrelevant.

Mens rea, the establishment of the understanding of the harm your actions bring, closely related to the idea of malice, is an essential component of a serious abuse case. Establishing it often takes time and is heavily affected by the actions of a perpetrator after an initial conflict.

This is maybe the biggest difference between the lumardy and urbani cases, for example. Damage is often inadvertently done, as people get out of their depths handling novel conflicts they have no prior experience with. In both these examples, there was uncontrolled manipulative venting that caused discord to be spread and risked turning people against the victim. However, I additionally confronted lu with the consequences of his actions repeatedly – he showed awareness of the mental hell it had caused me, of the material damage (friendship loss) I’d undergone, showed an authentic fear of the same being done to him, yet persisted the same duplicity until the bitter end. That’s how I established mens rea and decided I couldn’t forgive him. That said, his motive was still one of self-defence, so he shouldn’t be seen as evil.

With 1ups, we saw in the toburr shine heads ban situation that 1ups has inadvertently caused chaos that damaged me, via staying silent in situations where people were getting the wrong idea about what had happened under her watch. Her motive for this is self-protection, in that she can’t mentally handle getting involved, and prioritises self-care at all costs. This makes it very hard to hold her responsible for the spread of false information and damage.

Self-protection in this way cannot be used to excuse direct lying, which is where this case differs heavily from the lu case and is really tricky to navigate. If one stays forever silent, that is, just leaves everyone behind, then that person can’t be held responsible for not addressing this kind of mess, since that person is not there and has no influence on the situation. 1Ups is different in that she does come back, but ignores the situation.

I think this can still be accepted, if with great disapproval, for situations like the toburr ban, which are essentially petty disputes. I would argue, however, that in this situation, I’ve established the serious damage inflicted on me clearly enuff that ignoring it, assuming you know the damage is unwarranted, is wilful neglect to the extent of being mens rea for real emotional abuse (incomparably worse than being sent one abusive letter), and that excuses of incompetence in dealing with conflict don’t cut it.

At least, that is the pov I would proceed from. In other words, that staying silent when someone ostracises someone on your behalf is tantamount to you ostracising that person.

To recap section 2: if 1Ups thinks the ostracisation is warranted then fair enuff, that then isn’t abuse but does invite scrutiny on why you’re ostracising that person. If she thinks it’s unwarranted then my DMs are open to start fixing things.

5. Compelling Talking

In my personal relationship with 1Ups, I sent her a hurtful letter in reaction to her hurtful actions towards me. She decided to stop talking, and the situation was escalated by third parties. I respect her right to stop talking here; I disapprove for personal reasons I haven’t discussed, but I don’t have the right to harass her to keep talking because my last message was itself an ultimatum that explicitly gave her the option to walk away.

It is only as a result of the escalation and ostracisation – the consequences – that 1Ups is now compelled to get involved again, or make a deliberate statement by not getting involved.

6. “Abuse”

It is true that this word means a million things and has often been used carelessly by people including me for persuasive effect. An example I laff at a lot is Mlarvitar referring to me directly confronting my bullies in GB Discord as “abusing being right”. I’m trying to be more thoughtful in using it.

I don’t take back anything I said in my video, in which I described my actions towards 1Ups as abusive. Like I said at the time, I prefer to call it “abuse” because it humbles me and compels me to face up to and introspect on the actions seriously. This is the same as the modern feminist philosophy of calling out actions as racist etc. even when they’re just the result of subconscious bias, without worrying about the hurt feelings of the accused. This is also why I called out 1Ups for victim blaming – some of her actions were textbook victim blaming. It’s not intended to speak on someone’s deeper character, the same way that I don’t see my own actions as making me a bad person.

I want to be more careful when calling things abuse and people abusers in public tho, because the culture of how serious abusive situations are handled imbues an expectation of severity – notions of a long timescale, victim protection, cancellation, etc. People are very inclined to see “abusers” as outright bad people, much as I wish they’d rather use their critical thinking. In that sense, I am saying, as I always have, that what I did to 1Ups is not abuse (that’s a laffable overreaction by her lawyers), yet what I described in section 4 absolutely is. You have to have a very good reason to poison people against someone, and you gain awareness with the passage of time of the damage you’ve inflicted and chances to remediate.

7. Approach

My approach to dealing with this is to be as lenient with 1Ups as I can, in handling the inevitably toxic fallout of having enabled a secret abuse case to contribute to the destruction of my life.

It is with full awareness of her reluctance and poor ability to responsibly handle the conflicts she’s embroiled in that I am trying to give her a chance to fully appreciate the consequences of the different actions she might take, while still hoping for and encouraging a route involving discussion and setting aside hatred and victimhood.

As such, I’m setting aside my own reads on what will happen next in order to try to not prejudice the outcome. My past impatience in establishing evidence led to situations, like my falling-out with 1ups itself, where I feel like her reaction proved me right but I can’t prove that it did because my own actions might have decisively affected the outcome. I want to strip back anything I can do to prejudice things so that I can see the other person’s true feelings.

I hope to start talking to her, but failing that I will have established her intent to ostracise me and can start talking about it a bit more.