With yet another Arbitrator having resigned, the already quite serious
quorum issue, has only got worse. So much so, it should really be sending Eric's enablers into blind panic. They always reflexively claim there should be no case, but perhaps they need to be doing something that reflects the serious risk their boy now faces?
Perhaps things will reach the required temperature if I remind people that if the case is accepted, there is still time for a full case to be held and completed before newly elected Arbitrators can arrive to stack the decks, and with Worm already recused, that leaves only seven Arbitrators to hear that case. Six if the laughable claim that GorillaWarfare should recuse succeeds, although I'm sure it won't.
To put that another way, if just four Arbitrators decide the condition of
wit's end has been reached, Eric is fucking gone. Done. Toast.
More importantly, looking at those seven.....
* AGK (talk · contribs)
* GorillaWarfare (talk · contribs)
* Joe Roe (talk · contribs)
* KrakatoaKatie (talk · contribs)
* Mkdw (talk · contribs)
* Opabinia regalis
* Premeditated Chaos (talk · contribs)
....you can only really say Opabina is fully supportive of Eric, and even she has been wavering recently as she surely realizes how ridiculous she sounds, and how big the lies she keeps having to tell to back up her votes are becoming. Gonna be interesting to see what she says, since it is pretty obvious she will be declining.
Worth noting that this seven is unusual in that it has a majority of women, and if anything, the three men are pretty intolerant of the idea Wikipedia should be an asshole friendly place.
With the spectre of Fram hanging over them, and the fact that in the press at least, it is widely believed Eric is a misogynist, and even if he isn't, he's an old white dude with rather traditional values regarding diversity and respect, and has repeatedly either denied the gender gap among editors even exists, or if it does, denied it is even a problem, well, it becomes pretty clear that his future is very much under serious threat without the need for any ridiculous claims of conspiracy or injustice to be true. And if his enablers start screaming about a Feminist cabal, well, they really will have lost what credibility they ever had among the neutrals. It hasn't stopped them before.
If accepted, then more than it has ever been the case previously, it's going to take some very brave Arbitrators to stand up and say he deserves a fiftieth second chance, or more accurately, they need to keep bending the rules just to retain the services of this one asshole. And if so, this won't really look like the decision of a Committee, certainly not if the outcome is not unanimous. It could the greatest ever example of super-voting since, well, that time Primefac downgraded civility from a Pillar to a secondary concern, in the context of RfA.
As ever, the people who most benefit from declining an Eric Corbett case request, will be the Arbitrators themselves. But the benefits will surely be short term, since it is already suspected one of the reasons they dropped the ball with Fram was this exact sort of institutional cowardice, if not a local institutional desire to completely ignore that Civility is still a core value.