Moira asks:

My deep question is: How do you deal with asshats within an SCA group? The ones who get pissed when you don’t drink their kool-aid.

Ah, again.  SCA questions.  Universally applicable answers.  And, by the way, I have always had a deep fondness for the term asshat.  Nothing else is quite as succinct.

The nice advantages of being a certified dinosaur in the SCA is that you reach a stage in your involvement where you no longer feel compelled to drink anyone’s brand of kool-aid, no matter how strenuously it is offered.  Conversely, you really no longer feel the need to serve anybody any either.  You reach a point where you feel you have earned the right to say “you do your thing, and I will do mine, and we don’t have to invite each other to our respective birthdays.”  It’s much nicer than simply saying “piss off”.

Aside from adopting the attitude of a person too scarred to give a proverbial poopy, I have decided over many years of SCA administration on several levels, that the “Enough Rope” approach is the most effective.  It does require, however, the most patience. 

The Enough Rope Method of Asshat Management is simple, because it requires very little effort on my part.  Basically, you let your Insistent Annoyance play out enough line to not only hang themselves, but hogtie themselves in the process.  And it is effective because:

1.  Over inflated views of self-importance basically guarantee that they will play that line out to the very extent of their own incompetence.  Every.  Single.  Time.

2.  Most people witnessing the dispensing of said Rope, are not stupid.  I will present, for your consideration, that the great majority of people are not only decent and well-meaning, but are fully capable of discerning between the righteous and the merely self-righteous. 

Eventually, anyway.  That’s the patience part.  For your more devious asshat, this sometime takes a bit longer than others, but good does ultimately prevail.  Permanent damage is rarely done, except, of course, to the asshat.

 And if it doesn’t?  In that case you might have to sit back and reconsider who is really the one being the asshat.