Hamula Thread

Keep it locked.

I too forgot about it and the earlier thread. I went so far as to try and agree with the PR mistake (I also stand by my belief that he would have been hounded by the rabid post-Mo podcast crowd if nothing had been said) –

I wish they had never said anything. Excommunications no longer need announcing. His should have been handled the same way. They could have released him and let it go at that. But I never get to be in charge.

The original thread petered out with speculation months ago, and that’s all that there is… speculation.

I had forgotten all about it until Sam raised the topic again and I don’t know where else the conversation can go except repeating more of the same.

We don’t know.

They should have said what it was or said nothing.

We should know.

Maybe it’s this.

Maybe it’s that.

Reboot.

I agree.

The thread has nowhere to go except speculation.

Is that a valid reason to lock the thread? Let’s talk about that. We speculate at length on all sorts of topics. What makes this different?

Is it libel, slander, smearing, a personal attack? What about this particular thread rises to the level of locking it rather than just letting it play out?

P.S. I am more interested in having the discussion than any particular outcome.

For me one of the reasons to lock it is that we are speculating on a person who has very little influence on our outcomes. We have debated the merits of certain bloggers, podcasters, and historic or public church figures – but each of them has a direct effect on us.

He doesn’t. He was very low level. We weren’t ever going to be dissecting a talk he gave or a direction he was taking. All the other people had those areas that were public enough to weigh in on.

In a way it was borderline gossip.

I never knew who Hamula was till the excommunication.

It seems like bad manners to me to speculate on something like this. As others have mentioned, he was a low level functionary. Plus, his family is potentially impacted by rumors.

I just double checked to be sure I hadn’t commented this on that original thread, but when Hamula got exed, I was picking up my daughter at a friend’s that day, and her friend’s grandmother (a good friend of mine) came out, and we were chatting. She said Hamula (Jim to her) used to work for their law firm, and when she heard the news she wasn’t surprised.

Here comes the gossip part (so you can’t quote me on it). She said he always would order lunch, then short the assistants when he paid up for it (never covering tip or tax), so the assistants had to pay for part of his lunch every day. My friend finally said nobody could order lunches through the assistants again because he was abusing the privilege. When he took an assignment for the church as MP, they said they would hold a job for him, which they did, but when he got back, he was pissed that someone else who hadn’t taken 3 years off was making more money than he was, and he demanded a raise to cover what he felt he would have gotten if he had been there; they didn’t agree. He felt entitled because of his service to the church. He also was trying to steal clients to leave the firm with them, and the other lawyers ratted him out. He told one client who was a church member that he’d get him a cushy church job if he got their business. He often bragged about his rise in the church. So basically, from her perspective, this was not a surprise, although she said they are still friends with him and his wife (more with the wife based on these business experiences).