#MindQuake2021

[hypnoobiwan]

Well ... this is distressing

If you listened to last night’s (6/18/2021) “discussion” of the controversy surrounding MindQuake -- which I will say upfront I didn’t, because I long ago decided against going to it ever again -- then you probably picked up on a lot of things that made you uneasy about that convention and its new leader, Mr. Taqtiks.  If you didn’t, then you probably need to talk to your peer group about it, because that could mean that you need to have your moral compass checked.

I’ve heard that while he was spinning his false tales of conspiracies against himself (hmm ... kind of like that other former world leader who still maintains that an election was stolen despite the total lack of evidence outside his own fantasies), which is boring but nominally allowed.  But then, apparently to bolster his nonexistent case, he started reading verbatim from someone’s private complaint letter against him!

If you’ve never been involved in a complaint case, you may not be aware of certain very relevant things:

1) Complaints are (supposed to be) treated as extremely confidential by the organizations to which they are submitted.  The actual text of a complaint is not to be disclosed to anybody who hasn’t demonstrated an actual need to know -- that includes concoms, and it especially includes the person the complaint is against.  The very fact that Taqtiks has seen that person’s complaint against him means something went very wrong with the handling of that complaint.  And the reason the subject of a complaint should never see the written complaint was fully illustrated by Taqtiks last night: it opens up the person who wrote it to retaliations by Taqtiks and others who are sympathetic to Taqtiks.

2) Taqtiks, as a former (fired for cause) member of the Charmed! concom, has a passing familiarity with this basic principal.  He had no objection to it until there was a complaint against him (not to Charmed!, BTW, but to the local BDSM education organization); then, and only then, did it constitute a personal affront against his concept of justice.  It’s tempting to draw a conclusion just from that, but it only scratches the surface.

So knowing that complaints are confidential, and that complaints are not intended to be shared with anyone not directly involved especially the person they are about, Taqtiks proceeded to read aloud on Discord to a public audience from that person’s complaint letter.  He took a situation that was already bad, and made it 1,000 times worse by broadcasting that he had a copy of the complaint and making it public knowledge, down to specific wording.  I’m not sure what his objective was in doing that (other than to torture/punish the person who complained, obviously), but he has made a few things abundantly clear to everyone:

Taqtiks has no interest in preserving the proper handling of any consent complaints about himself, at least, and demonstrably will retaliate against anyone who complains about him in the future.

It follows that if the rules don’t apply to him, they won’t apply to anyone else that he likes or that is associated with him in some way.

Therefore, no event that Taqtiks is part of can be considered a safe environment for anyone who isn’t a personal friend of Taqtiks.

I had already reached that conclusion when I heard that Taqtiks had taken over MindQuake and was just quietly going to opt out, just as I quietly opted out in 2019 and 2020 and nobody really noticed.  But since Taqtiks has decided to broadcast publicly his disdain for the rules and attack someone for daring to expose him, all bets are off -- and anyone who was thinking about attending MindQuake would be well advised to think again, unless they are part of Taqtiks’s inner circle.  You’ve had ample warning now, from Taqtiks himself, that if anything happens to you there your complaint will mean nothing.