Preamble

I have had a difficult few weeks. Months, really. I've developed a new love for sitting and listening to birds sing while I think. I'm learning to respect myself while remaining kind and generous to others. I'm learning to express my thoughts even when they are not perfect, and I am learning to trust that the people around me will both eagerly listen to my words while also critiquing my mistakes. End posted a response to the "67 revolution" earlier today, addressing my list of claims from In Response To "Addressing the State of the Server", so I am here again, attempting to express my own thoughts on his response.

In the interest of full transparency, there is a no contact order between myself and End. We have mutually blocked each other on Discord, and in the interest of respecting his wishes, I do not read any messages sent from End in Discord. I'm aware he has clarified certain points today, but I'm only basing my response off of his Gnomestack post: Without context, even the truth becomes a lie. The full text of the no contact order is as follows:

After further consideration from Staff in light of recent events, we are requesting a no contact order between yourselves and End. This means you are not to contact End, and vice versa. We recommend you block End, as he has done so already for you. You are allowed to comment regarding/on End, however it cannot be unprompted. e.g. I bring up End to bash his nose for looking weird. You can reply to comments made in the public field/directly address you.

I do believe End's post counts as "in the public field" and "directly addressing me", but I am more than happy to edit or alter this post to comply with the no contact order.

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Goat herding and beating dead horses

In his response, End expressed his frustrations regarding how his mistakes seem to follow him everywhere he goes, and he is unable to grow or change, likening himself to a herder and his mistakes to a herd of unfortunate goats. He states:

There's a difference between a community that holds someone accountable and one that collects every goat a person has ever accumulated, strips them of context, and presents them all at once as a definitive portrait of who that person is.

This is something I wholeheartedly agree with. I am a massive fan of people learning, growing, and changing, and I am intimately aware with some of the insane and ridiculous goats the DC community uses against End. Owning a political RP minecraft server in the internet age looks like a unique form of torture dreamed up by some evil demon. Any mistakes that can be screenshotted, stripped of all context, and mythologized to the point of delusion will be. There is nowhere to hide from these attacks, and they take on lives of their own, completely divorced from the original context. I do not support and have never supported people feverishly digging up dirt that really should remain buried, and I have been consistent with this throughout this entire debacle.

My metaphor of choice is "beating a dead horse", with each one of End's overblown missteps being a different dead horse at different levels of pulping. End's public persona is absolutely trashed with horse viscera and rotting flesh, and I find it both cruel and pointless to continue splattering him with the unrecognizable remains of these horses. Many of the issues brought up regularly within the DC community have been relitigated so many times that they have lost all meaning, and those issues need to stay dead.

In my list of End's breaches of staff policy from In Response to "Addressing the State of the Server", I brought up one goat/dead horse that was the most personally impactful to me. I should not have brought it up, but I did anyways, and I regret it. The un-banning of Alexander Love, and all of the context before, during, and after that entire debacle, should remain dead, and End's assertion that "there is significant context missing from this characterisation" is accurate. I should not have stuck my hands into that particular corpse, and I apologize.

The other dead horse mentioned by End was "using slurs". I did not accuse End of this. That entire shitshow has been blown up so far beyond the actual reality of the situation that it's useless to talk about anymore. It happened SO long ago that it's useless to talk about anymore. Let it die.

When is a dead horse not actually dead?

When you are the owner of DemocracyCraft, and your community has a bloodthirsty obsession with rotting horse viscera, I can only assume you learn to expect corpses around every single corner. As I said in The Day After a Revolution, End is not solely responsible for the state of Ownership/Server relations, and we do have to acknowledge the reality of his position: he has faced hatred, doxxing, and a near-total lack of compassion from portions of his community for 6.5 years.

Because of this environment, the line between "bad faith criticism" and "good faith criticism" has been completely blurred for server staff. Bad faith criticism is brutal in MCN: it’s collecting screenshots to bully, digging up ancient mistakes, stripping them of all context, and using them to publicly flog someone for sport. If I were constantly bracing for the next witch-hunt, I’d probably also view a list of critiques as just another mob with pitchforks. I don't blame him and the rest of the staff team for having their guards up, and it is completely understandable why it is so difficult for End and the team to separate the legitimate accountability I am asking for from the toxic noise he deals with daily.

However, from my perspective, End's response unfairly lumps the other 27 staff policy breach accusations with the dead horse I let slip through. I ask you to look past the blood on my own hands, and take the list of policy breaches not as "a list of stuff to torture End over", but instead "small pieces of a larger picture".

These are not mistakes blown out of proportion that have been following End around eternally. They aren't dead horses because they are recent. The vast majority of them happened mostly within the last 12 months. In fact, 27 of the 28 grievances I listed occurred after I joined the server, and at least 15 of them happened within the last 60 days. Furthermore, this was not an exhaustive list. It was a collection of incidents sent to me by community members, and I only included the ones I could personally vouch for.

I agree with End's assertion that there is a lot of missing context from my list. This was intentional, but I will freely admit that a lack of context is damaging. Because of this, I want to explicitly encourage you: do not take my list at face value as full, unadulterated fact. Actually, you should never take what anyone says on the internet at face value, myself included. Treat my list as exactly what it is: a short summary of events, inherently lacking the full nuance of reality.

I chose to omit that context for three specific reasons:

1. I do not want to leak staff information beyond what I believe is strictly necessary. I respect and understand the desire for privacy in staff matters, and including additional context or evidence for my points would have exposed more information than I am comfortable disclosing.
2. I do not want to feed the circlejerk of hate against End and the Staff Team. Bad faith actors thrive on screenshots. I intentionally kept the list of policy breaches mostly un-evidenced, as I know each piece of evidence I supply will be taken out of context and spread around eternally. I decided instead to risk my own reputation by making it my word against his, personally vouching for each of the incidents rather than giving the internet a folder of screenshots to obsess over.
3. The list is intended to show a larger pattern in End's behaviour, not to bury him in each individual accusation.

A few of the items in the list are quite tame. They were never meant to be massive "gotcha" moments. They're just puzzle pieces, trees in a larger forest. The point of my list was never to argue over the minute details of whether a building was pasted with proper permission. I wanted to highlight a pattern of staff policy breaches. End's criticisms of my individual claims are valid, but continue to miss the underlying reason the entire "6/7 revolution" happened.

Context, power imbalances, and information asymmetry.

In his post, End repeatedly appeals to those engaging in "good faith". While he doesn't explicitly name me as a bad-faith actor, I find the implication difficult to shake. Stating or implying that I am not engaging with this entire debacle in good faith is unfair. I've been working very hard to express my concerns respectfully while still holding server leadership accountable to their own rules. End states: "I'm happy to discuss any of this with anyone who wants to chat in good faith". The reality is, many people have been trying to discuss this in good faith with End for a long time, and these private, good-faith conversations never went anywhere.

End's core defence is that my claims lack context, and he's right. What he fails to acknowledge is the power imbalance at play here. How exactly am I supposed to provide full, balanced context when doing so would violate staff confidentiality rules and breach my own moral code? How can I supply the necessary evidence, or a nuanced perspective, when I do not have access to the information required to do so?

Navigating this situation is inherently skewed. End, as the owner, holds all the institutional power. He decides what is shown and what is hidden. He decides what is censored and what is promoted. Ultimately, he has the final say on what constitutes a rule break and whether I am allowed to stay in this community at all.

I do, however, want to acknowledge that power imbalances go both ways. While End holds all the institutional power, I imagine he felt completely powerless against the wave of public outrage during the "67 revolution". Facing a massive, united front of community backlash is its own kind of overwhelming power imbalance, and I do not want to minimize how terrifying and isolating that must have felt for him.

But this brings us to the core issue: how do you hold someone accountable when they hold all the cards? Who decides when criticism is beating a dead horse, and who decides when criticism is justified? Currently, at the end of the day, no matter how many community members speak out or how many staff members vote behind closed doors, the final arbiter of "bad/good faith criticism" is server ownership, and therefore is End himself.

End literally cannot be punished by the systems we have built. He cannot be suspended, demoted, or fired. As ownership has told us, when institutional accountability fails, the only lever a community has left is to leverage the reputation of the server itself. I know that publicly calling out these systemic issues and attacking the reputation of DC was a drastic, extreme step, but I honestly felt hopeless. Seeing as this was the only thing that finally got End to take a step back and reflect, I do still believe I was justified in taking that step.

That being said, I want to be honest about the cost of that justification.

I acknowledge the harm and the broken trust that my actions have caused. This entire situation is a tragedy, not a victory. I am sorry for the collateral damage, and I would love nothing more than to talk about it and begin repairing those bridges. But the reality is that I am currently being completely iced out.

My Own Feelings

I've spent countless hours in MCN, from all levels of staff to all levels of government. I care deeply about DC/SC and the community attached to the servers. I did not take the actions I took lightly, but I decided End's behaviour was enough of a risk to the health and future of the server to actually speak out against him. None of this has been fun for me, but I still believe it is necessary, which is why I am pressing on.

Because I chose to publicly hold End accountable for his breaches of staff policy instead of keeping them in-house as I had done before, there's a real possibility I'll never get to return to the staff team. I have irreversibly damaged my friendships with End, Tech, and other members of the MCN Staff Team and have therefore lost a solid chunk of my social circle here on this server. I doubt I will ever get a chance to serve on the staff team higher than a Moderator, if I am ever (by some miracle) welcomed back. This sucks. I love staffing, I think it's super fun, and they honestly need the help.

I am not bringing this up to throw a pity party or play the victim. I made my choices, and I was aware there would be consequences, and I'm doing my best to accept them. But I do want people to know there is a real personal cost associated with making these posts.

Conclusion

I am genuinely grateful that End has taken some limited accountability for a few of the isolated incidents I raised. I am also relieved and thankful that he has chosen to take a necessary step back from the server's day-to-day operations. Those are real, positive steps, and I don't want to minimize them. I'm still disappointed by the lack of broader understanding of my frustrations, and the community's frustrations as a whole.

In his response, by picking apart the minutiae of each individual accusation, End is still missing the point. He has shown moments of reflection, but ultimately still relies on a "divide and conquer" strategy that ignores the broader reality of his leadership style. The issue cannot be split apart and dismantled piece by piece, because the issue is the culture of the server staff at large, and the flippancy with which End breaches the very server policies he is responsible for writing and enforcing. We need to all be able to look at the big picture together, trying to make the server better as a whole, rather than getting bogged down in individual incidents.

To answer my own question: when does accountability turn into something else? Ultimately, accountability turns into something else when it becomes a tool for harassment, but it also loses its meaning when owning up to individual actions is used to distract from a much larger, systemic truth.

If you ever want to talk about any of my posts, please do. I genuinely encourage more people to write out their thoughts in long-form blogs instead of quick conversations in #politics.

I love you all :)

juniperfig