“Victimisation”

‘Victimise’ is a word that has been thrown around quite a bit in the past few days, with regards to the despicable attacks by Nick Maggiore, the Editor of the St. Charlian Observer. The word has been used to describe the responses to these attacks by Duke Bradley of Wyvern, who Mr. Maggiore launched the attacks against.

The article, entitled ‘Carolinians and Conservatives’, includes two scathing paragraphs of the Duke’s spelling & grammar, including such phrases as “a renowned champion of spelling and grammar” and “one of the most charismatic leaders of MicroWiki [sarcasm]“. What Mr. Maggiore apparently did not know at the time was that the Duke is dyslexic, a fact that is excusable to an extent.

There is, however, one important fact pointed out by Robert Lethler of Erusia; that the link provided in the article as “evidence” of the Duke’s poor spelling & grammar included explicit references by the Duke himself to his condition, something that, as Mr. Lethler said, “there is absolutely no excuse [for]“.

Leaving this aside, upon being notified of this by King Quentin I of Wyvern, Mr. Maggiore replied to the notification by publishing two rather rude comments that appeared to try to excuse his need to apologise, and accused Bradley of using his dyslexia to his advantage, calling his “BAWWWing”, and saying that “…[it] might work with the other leaders, but I already victimize myself so much that I don’t listen to the others”.

Following this, I felt inclined to intervene, as did Robert Lethler with his excellent response, which may be read here.

Now that the background has been gone through, I can explain why I am so disgusted at these events.

Mr. Maggiore, leaving aside the fact that through just a little bit of research on his own link, he could have avoided this whole situation, is refusing to apologise to Duke Bradley for his comments. This I find inexcusable. His attempted justification for this is even worse: “from my part, I don’t feel like I should apologize to anyone: as I said on this same comment list, I was not aware of his dislexia…Apologies must be also earned, I think, and Bradley, in my opinion, does not deserve them, dyslexic or not” (these comments are not out of context).

The fact that he is not apologising for such blatant ad hominem attacks on an unfortunate condition of Bradley’s, is simply beyond me, and has eroded all respect that I held for Mr. Maggiore and, for that matter, the Observer itself. He feels it necessary to continue to try to defend the indefensible and justify his comments, and this is beyond reproach.

However, and I’ve saved the most despicable part until last, is Mr. Maggiore’s claim that the Duke “…USES his dyslexia to “win” over a discussion”. The single incident which he refers to is a rather understandable outburst by the Duke. I suspect that this was brought about by him being quite fed up and annoyed at having to continually explain to many micronationalists and people that he was dyslexic.

Even assuming that the outburst was not understandable, this single incident is no excuse for such an accusation. I don’t think that I need to go into too much depth as to why the comment is despicable, but I will say that if I was on the receiving end of that comment, I certainly would not be as restrained as Duke Bradley has been so far.

I firstly call for Mr. Maggiore to unreservedly apologise and retract his ad hominem attacks against Duke Bradley. Secondly, I call for disciplinary procedures to take effect by the St. Charlie government against Mr. Maggiore. Lastly, I call for a peaceful and speedy resolution of this matter, so that we can just accept the facts and move on. We have better things to do than attack micronationalists’ perceived imperfections and disabilities.