Episode #98: Rules For Me, But Not For Thee

I'm not a big fan of censorship, especially when it comes to writing, and more specifically when it comes to my writing. In fact, the only time I will accept censorship of my writing is if I'm doing the censoring.

I have mellowed out over the years when it comes to my own writing being censored and no longer have the vitriolic responses from years gone by when it happens. Instead, I simply take a long mental health break from the source and thus find somewhere else to peddle my wares, so to speak, until I'm willing to return to that source.

However, this post is not about being censored, although I could on a very long diatribe about the personal censorship I've going through in the past 14+ years, but about equal application of whatever rules that happen to be in place, for wherever you may happen to be, whether real world or the cyber world.

I recently left a group on FB because of the unequal application of the group rules. I'm of the iron-clad belief that if you're going to apply certain rules to the masses, you better 100% apply those certain rules to yourself as well. Nothing less will pass muster with me, as far as I'm concerned.

This, sadly, was not the case. The head admin for the group was iron-clad adamant that things could only be posted on a certain day of the week, and no other. To do so would risk the wrath of the admins, thus being a bad boy/girl in their eyes and thus having the offending post nuked. But apparently the same rules they applied to the members with a mace club simply did not apply to them. They were free to post whatever, whenever, and you weren't allowed to post out the blatant hypocrisy of it.

I actually tried pointing this issue out, and I basically got the old "so sad, too bad" response, along with having a comment deleted. Once that happened, I decided that it wasn't worth having a major flame war about it. Instead, I just simply walked away and called it a day. In truth, it's not something I'm going to miss, since a large percentage of the time, there was a lot of inertia, which I believe was due to other members finding other groups that were a little more accommodating/flexible with their rules.

Like I said, I'm not a fan of censorship, on any level, be it cyber space or the real world. But I do expect an even application of whatever rules that happen to be in force for a given place. It will take me a very long time to find another group topic that I'll be comfortable in being part of without having to worry about rules being unequally applied. And that is a very sad thing indeed.

{c} 2021 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved