The Achilles Heel - Saying What They Mean

It’s been several days since the deaf/hh community-wide uproar broke out over the forcible removal of Rachel’s blog from DeafRead’s aggregator site based on circumstantial evidence(s), assumptions, and the refusal to engage in due process (i.e. benefit of the doubt) regarding Rachel’s own defense. The Achilles Heel in DeafRead's justification for doing so in this whole thing are primarily three things:

1) No prior notification or warning
2) No due process
3) No real clarification on guidelines on what’s really permissible or not, and the unclear definitions of some of the words behind those guidelines.

The main guideline that prompted the removal of Rachel’s blog was under DeafRead’s #6 Guideline doled out to Rachel as their "reason" for her blogsite address removal which copied and pasted here:

“6) Commerical Sites
We do not link to commerical sites for the purpose of generating profit, other than our own (we have expenses to cover!).”

Now, it is rather curious to read Jared’s latest blog entry regarding this matter. that he has done on behalf of DeafRead’s editors and owner was to try and clarify certain positions *AFTER* the fact and not *BEFORE* in the attempt to somehow “prove” as if they actually had these clarifications already set in stone (of course, fooling no one). If hindsight is your friend so is owning up to your own mistakes, too. But that has never happened…yet. However, in Banjo’s blog, “Oh the drama!” (and who hasn’t?) Tayler supposedly admitted his own error about Amy’s DVDs advertisements in an AIM conversation with Banjo. But why “admit” this one particular error in Banjo’s blog? Why couldn’t Tayler just post that “grievance” in his own blog as a step towards reconciliation and acknowledgement in making the faux pas of the year? Either Tayler gave Banjo the “ok” to print his particular comment from their AIM conversations or he did not. I am supposing it’s the former rather than the latter. And if so, then why? Is Tayler somehow trying to move forward in a way to save face by giving Banjo the “ok” to use his comments in his blog? Well, it seems so.

In other blogs I’m seeing comments that essentially point out how Rachel’s blogsite is more like exhorting a “religious experience” based on her own positive experiences with her and other people’s cochlear implants. But it’s funny when people try and point that out using a particular euphemism since there are those who are just as equally “religiously supportive” on the use of ASL even to the point where purists rail against cochlear implants as being “bad” and not good for the Deaf community. Whatever. People who do that reminds me of this phrase, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” Hypocrisy comes to mind, too.

Now we get into this conflict of interest complaint. In the last sentence in Jared’s blog a comment made by him that was really wanting.

“We believe it is petty behavior to target a blog by disclosing evidence.”

I disagree. You say you (i.e. DeafRead) have “evidence” but the crux of this is you either have the “evidence” and you disclose it or you don’t have it. There is nothing petty about disclosing evidence to back up your assertions and reasons for a blog removal. What’s petty is targeting a blogsite based on circumstantial evidence hinged entirely on Guideline #6 that's open wide under the sun to interpretation with no means of due process, no advanced warnings or concerns, no efforts to contact the blog owner to try and work this out and get the underlying answers first, and no real clarifications on guidelines on what’s really permissible or not based on undefined set of terminologies. What’s obviously petty is to not acknowledge their own mistakes. Jared has made clear on behalf of DeafRead editors that they did in fact err in their judgment against Rachel based on the re-introduction on new "clarifications" about DeafRead’s quidelines. Which means, in short, that the DeafRead’s guidelines were never clear in the first place.

Jared's ends with this concluding remark on behalf of DeafRead.

I hope this vlog makes it clear the reason why we recently removed an aggressively marketing blog when its relationship to a corporation was discovered. As long as there is proper disclosure or the blogger stays true to the ethos of blogging, DeafRead will continue to list deaf-related posts of the blog.

Aggressively? And against all common sense and logic they still see this as an aggressive marketing blog (Rachel’s) when all it was it was about her experiences and others about cochlear implants. All this has been at best a continuing of mixed messages by the editors of DeafRead while making no attempt at reconcillation, acknowledgement or accountability. Kind of reminds me of the last two Democratic hopefuls' own messages in 2004 and 2008.