prefacing: I don't think callous should have been given a managerial spot in the first place for reasons I will go into later; I also think the overturn itself
as a concept is fine, if given sufficient reasoning. I do not, however, think the official reasoning that was given to
justify the overturn was at all sufficient as has been said a thousand times over itt. it was flimsy, undocumented, and inexplicably rushed.
it was also, as far as I and anyone else has been able to gather, a decision made by Senior Staff, not TDs and made in such a way that completely overrides the TD team's agency. thus far, there has been no attempt (as BKC has talked about in the SmogTours Discord server) by SS to communicate to the TD team, to go along their complete silence towards the rest of the community. remember
this thread? the community at large was justifiably upset with the various mishandlings of SS when it came to situations similar to this, and the SS response in this thread and other similar IS threads, was the claim that they will be making decisions in more transparent ways moving forwards. there are 2 main reasons I want to hone in on transparency here:
1) the official justification given for callous's removal being at best poorly thought out, and at worst intentionally misleading. I am not calling out Eo or the TD team here; due to the nature of the decision and more details that I will mention soon, I can only assume it had SS behind it.
2) the secrecy this decision was carried out with. said secrecy encompasses both how SS has seemingly left the TD team in the dark, and how there has yet to be as much as
a single sentence by SS about this.
on why callous should not have been given the managerial spot in the first place and why it matters:
I am not willing to die on this hill or argue about his merits as a manager as it pertains purely to pokemon. the reason I am talking about this is to add to the overall point of this being a massive SS mishandling.
per Eo's post, callous was denied the spot due to
1) platforming Lavos
specifically through interviewing him
2) calling bluri on his phone as a form of harassment
the second has been thoroughly debunked; bluri gave his number consensually, and even if you disagree with callous's...peculiar approach to it, it is
absolutely not a disqualification in any way.
as for the first; as others have mentioned, the interview itself was fairly mild, especially by Lavos standards.
Callous's biggest offense, and IMO something that should be considered damning, was how he harbored Lavos and other permabanned users (that were permabanned for similar reasons..) in his invitational and server of, and stood by and defended their inclusion when confronted. In fact, the driving force behind Lavos's removal from PSI was
ABR,
not callous, who even disagreed with removing Lavos from it. I consider such attempts of reintegration and mild re-normalization of these users absolutely reprehensible when viewed alongside their offenses. these are not users with "simply differing opinions", they were active harassers and general incredibly toxic presences that were deemed bad enough to be permanently ousted from smogon. callous did not simply interact with them, he actively attempted to rehabilitate them into the larger pokemon community. this is not about him interacting with them through DMs. to me, giving callous a managerial spot so soon after these incidents is nonsensical.
all that said, I can't help but wonder;
why were these things completely skipped over in the official reasoning we were given?
to add to how this non-inclusion makes absolutely negative sense
, the TD team
was aware of these things. explicitly so. callous being given a slot is imo a fault of their judgment, and is why I don't think such an overturn is inherently bad as a concept. however, I have a very strong feeling that if the official post articulated these points there would be much less outrage. enabling and defending a permabanned user talking about how he was canceled by the "tr***y brigade" IN HIS SERVER, and EXPLICITLY making it a point against him is significantly less contentious than "yea he interviewed him".
I apologize for taking me so long to arrive at the thesis of my post, but:
why were these things mentioned nowhere to the larger community, and why were the TD team apparently not consulted on them? There's been so fucking many threads and back and forths about Senior Staff needing to be more transparent about their decisions and ESPECIALLY when it comes to the tours section, and when it comes to user toxicity, bigotry, and harassment. this is a massive clusterfuck that could have simply been avoided, or at the very least mitigated, if this decision wasn't
1) rushed immensely; seriously, conduct a longer 'investigation', give it half a day or one day or something
2) carried out with more transparency, especially with the TD team. what is the point of not just not consulting the designated section leaders, but actively bypassing them with such massively insufficient information? what I talked about earlier is information the TD team
was aware of and took under consideration when making their decision. why were they not even so much as asked about their engagement with the matter??
I cannot for the life of me consider the logic behind making such an impactful and obviously contentious decision so quickly and so secretly. it is absolutely baffling, and the damage has already been done, no matter what happens next.