The air of authority Mort consistently tried to cultivate never materialized in my eyes, and I always found it puzzling that so many people put so much stock in his claims. I now find myself wondering, though, why everyone is vilifying the guy with such reckless abandon.
When I first read the regretful post that lead to all this, I took it as being in large part a "here is a plausible - more realistic, even! - scenario that does not require a 'oh my god, Sony is going to hell' narrative to make sense of recent events" sort of post. His primary goal was to give a sense of perspective, it seemed, not to give the absolute version of what went down. Now, it wouldn't have been surprising for his scenario to be informed by things he heard, and it seems that was the case. I can imagine, though, that his threshold for making those particular claims was lowered because his specific goal was not to leak, but to craft a more nuanced picture of things. Undoubtedly ego played a role here, and false claims were made, either way. But this is also a case of a normal person failing to be conscious of the impact his words can have, of the line between informed-speculative claims and facts, and so on. I find it difficult to be morally outraged by his admittedly still serious mistake.
Yes, his threshold for making such negative claims about someone he knew next to nothing about in particular was much too low. It's unfortunate he had to go there, and even more unfortunate doing so ended up having a real impact. But most of us know how easy it is to forget these names we throw around are attached to complicated, vulnerable human beings who may not be quite as distant as we imagine. I highly, highly doubt Mort had any negative intentions when he threw Roger's particular name around so carelessly.
I'm not saying Mort didn't badly mess up, because yes, he messed up...badly. That thing about these names being attached to "complicated, vulnerable human beings" applies no less to him, though, than it does to Rogers. The lifetime ban seems appropriate enough, but his capacity to have a very low moment doesn't cancel out whatever good he's done, and it certainly doesn't cancel out the fact that in his day to day life he's probably a perfectly fine guy.
In other words, the incredible explosion of cannibalistic, righteous impulse coming out of this thread and directed to someone who was once so pedestalized...neither side seems to deserve it.
