Mr Dear Mr. Tomndebb -- Double Pitting

About This Message Board
1

In Which U.S. President had the best policy re: Native Americans?, you left this particular Official Mod Post…

Everyone back off the personal comments and the attempts at sarcasm that are not effectively reaching the intended audience…it is clear to anyone who examines the thread that by “everyone” you meant a guest known as Tenebras and me. This was hours after Elendil’s Heir posted a request to stay on topic, and it was even almost 10 hours after I posted about Obama’s appointment of Kimberly Teehee to his domestic policy team. I carefully explained the difference between “a Cherokee Indian” and a Cherokee Tribal Member", and why it was important that he appointed the latter.

In other words, I had already taken Elendil’s Heir’s suggestion and returned to the topic. Ten hours before you posted your Official Mod Post. Ten fucking hours.

Yes, early on in the thread, I had said my peace about Indian Hater Jackson, but the guest that calls itself Tenebras, decided to actually fucking argue the point about who suffered more: Jews who died at the hands of Nazis, or Indians who died at the hands of the Indian Hater (and his lapdog successor). Not only that, he decided to go off on a whole spiel about how I had made up the word “analogics”, and that because I had made it up it had no meaning. It WOULD have the meaning I assigned, he belched, if it were indeed a word.

Now, add Guin to the mix, who can no more help herself from Junior Modding than a gambling addict can keep herself away from the black jack tables.

Instead of pointing out me, or Tenebras, or Guin, you issued a general post to “everyone”. Who else was, in your view, “off topic”? And why is it off-topic to talk about the policies of US Presidents in a thread about the policies of US Presidents? If you thought I had gone too far in berating the worthless fucking bigot Asshole Jackson, then why not address the Official Mod Post to me? If you thought Tenebras was going off topic with his ad hoc Stanford Binet test and his obsession with the term “analogics”, then why not address the Official Mod Post to him? And if you thought Guin was Junior Modding, then why not address your Official Mod Post to her?

Remember, I had already gotten back on topic and had ignored Tenebras’s post, leaving it unanswered. That was early afternoon. It wasn’t until late last night that you blew your Mod Whistle. Why not name names? Especially when your brush was so broad, it could have meant every single person in the fucking thread. Only one person was sarcastic, and that was Tenebras, with his “I only count Grover Cleveland once because he is, after all, only one man. However, I count Taft twice. Motherfucker was big!”

But that’s not the only reason why I’m pitting you. I’m pitting you because you will pull out the Mod Hat bullshit at the tiniest hint of a complaint. Maybe there was a post reported. (I reported one, too, but you have not in any way acknowledged the report — by email, PM, or any other means.)

You pull out this kind of bullshit while allowing Der Trihs to enter and shit in every thread that remotely resembles having anything to do with religion, and spew his usual bile. Religion is deprecative and makes people crazy. It is the enemy of science. It is blah blah fucking blah. You could cut and paste his shit from thread to thread.

Luckily, he has shied away from my Jesus threads, but probably only because they have so far been completely philosophical in nature. But I’ll bet a dime against a dollar that he jumps into the final debate thread: Part V.

What I’m asking you is, why the double standard? Why do you allow Der Trihs to drop rants and rhetorical turds here, there, and everywhere while pouncing on the rest of us for meandering off-topic just a hair (if indeed we were off-topic at all.) Is there something you owe him? Has there ever been another one-note wonder who wasn’t Mod Hatted or even banned?

People used to bitch because they said I turned every thread into an argument about libertarianism. Obviously, that is no longer the case. Why don’t you take a big tug on your balls and call out Der Trihs for shit like this:

Religion has essentially no chance of being correct. It’s all about being wrong, and insisting that everyone else go along with your delusion.http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11280038&postcount=222

Or this:

Religion is actively, systematically, innately hostile to any attempt to understand objective reality; it’s anti-scientific, not just non-scientific.http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11280622&postcount=224

Or even this:

What ARE you babbling about ? Yes, surprise, surprise, someone totally irrational doesn’t make rational decisions.http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11280844&postcount=232

Isn’t that sarcasm and personal attack? Is any of it on topic in a thread titled “Was Jesus dying on the cross a meaningful act?”. Was he, as you put it, “effectively reaching his target audience”?

And all those examples are from one fucking thread. No Official Mod Post from you, though. I’d like to know why you called down whoever it was you called down in the Indian thread, but still do and always have given Der Trihs Carte Blanche for thread shitting.

2

Holy shit! First Farrah Fawcett dies…and then, if that wasn’t enough, Michael Jackon steals her thunder and dies too.
And now you’re upstaging BOTH of them by starting a pit thread that will probably go on until its 23rd page and by that time be nothing but people taking small potshots at each other.
Will this day never end? :eek: What more can happen? :eek::eek:

3

Wha? All I asked was that you not hijack a thread I found interesting? Maybe I was a little over-zealous, but I don’t think that’s junior modding.

4

So, tomndebb should be on here 24/7? Make posts within a rigid timeframe? He posted what he did after either reading the thread or receiving a “report this post” to alert a moderator to a post that someone thought violated a rule of the SDMB. I’m not responding to the rest of your points. Just that the time lag is not important.

5

This belongs in About This Message Board. I’ll move it there from the Pit.

Gfactor
Pit Moderator

6

Actually, you were pretty much of a twat in that thread. Things probably would have simmered down without you throwing kindling on the fire.

7

I think your rant is actually longer than all your posts in the concerned thread. I hope you have that out of your system.

As it happens, I logged in after a very long day to find three separate (and conflicting) complaints about that thread. Scrolling through it, I saw several posts that were inflammatory even beyond the ones reported. I confess that at that point I did not go back and review the date/time stamp on every post. For that I apologize.
Regarding your other complaint: that poster does not actually cause disruption in Great Debates. He posts an opinion, (the same boring opinion over and over with a slightly different set of victims for his bile), and everyone knows that he is simply posting his unsupported rant and they ignore him. On the occasions when he has linked his silly diatribes to specific posters he has been admonished.
I genuinely do not care what opinions are expressed as long as they are not direct attacks on other posters. My intervention in that thread was directed toward the personal hostility posted by multiple posters and had nothing to do with attempting to silence your views on the topic.

(BTW, I think this was supposed to go in ATMB, although I’ll let the Pit mods figure out that point.)

8

The thread was in transition from the Pit to ATMB when you made this post, so obviously I’m not here to warn you. I just want to point out that *now *it’s in ATMB.

Gfactor
Moderator

9

Yeah, it was still in the Pit when I started typing that. I appreciate that you realized that, Gfactor.

As to the OP, I read that whole thread and I took it that tom was sending out a general warning and that it wasn’t specific to anyone.

10

Glad to see that Lib finally understands that claiming Cherokee heritage does not make such claims true. You actually have to prove it so that anyone (read: Liberal) cannot claim that heritage falsely. Funny that he’d never wanted to acknowledge that little, pesky tidbit before.

Also, it’s so delicious that his grandson is named Andrew.

11

I suspect Tomndebb and I are at polar extremes on nearly every opinion–ones dealing with cultural and societal issues anyway.

Any yet I find him impossible to develop a distaste for and impossible to be upset with.

Allow me to suck up a moment and simply comment that I think that must mean he’s a terrific moderator (despite his erroneous views :wink: ).

12

Looking over the other posts in this thread and finding nothing posted that actually prompts or evokes this reply and further noting that it has already been moved out of the Pit, I will point out that this sort of personal attack does not belong in this forum, (and would be suited to the BBQ Pit only on a technicality of Least Common Denominator associations).

13

Hey, Chief, I respect your opinions, error-laden as they are, as well. :stuck_out_tongue:

14

Maybe, maybe not. My point still stands, and I don’t think I was the only one. And it WASN’T junior modding.

15

Apology accepted. Kindly keep your wits about you in the future.

And so he skirts your rule by references to religious groups, often specific ones like Christians. But that should give him no leeway.

From C K Dexter Haven:

Hate speech directed against any race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or gender is a violation of our rules, as outlined in the Registration Agreement.Emphasis added.

It is untenable that you cannot see that almost every post he makes about religion is hate speech. What the hell is hate speech if it isn’t things like: delusional, trecherous, evil, dangerous, and all the rest of it? Your excuse of him — that he is the growling Chihuhua in the room that most people ignore — is ridiculuous. Just because he’s done it a long time, and just because everyone knows what he is doing — what kind of defense is that? Who, other than he, is defended in those terms for repeated — make that daily — violations of the rules?

Well, I wish you had been more clear about that. “Everybody who…” is a nebuolous phrase. I hadn’t noticed any personal attacks or hostility because I was busy defending the destruction of 500 Indian nations against someone who thought their plight was trivial.

16

Heh–that list of hate speech forbidden targets is interesting. Four of those five items are items by birth (race, ethnicity, nationality, gender). The fifth item is more or less by choice (religion).

Der Trihs annoys me more than he annoys you, in the same way that a total wackaloon Christian’s posts probably annoy you more than they’d annoy me. But if his stuff is considered hate speech, I think that stifles discussion. Can we not discuss whether religion as a whole has a salubrious effect in the world? (weirdly, I think it does, but that’s not the point). If we can’t discuss that, can we discuss whether, say, communism has a salubrious effect? If the first is forbidden, but the second is not, what clear difference may we establish between a religious ideology and a political ideology?

It’s sort of like how I believe the boards should allow the wishing of death on people involved in an armed conflict, even though I find such wishes to be odious, because to forbid such posts limits the discussion unnecessarily.

17

Hmmmmm, and up til now, Liberal had been doing so well on this reboot. <sigh>

18

The Rule is pretty much trying to promote civil discussion. We found, however, that people wanted more guidelines (more rules! more details!) so we came up with the list that Liberal quoted above, pretty much selected based on U.S. anti-discrimination rules. (Aside: U.S. anti-discrimination rules also protect the disabled and the aged, but I don’t think we’ve ever bumped into “hate speech” directed against those groups. If we did, we’d probably amend our definitions.)

We’ve been able to make a distinction between discussion of religions in general, (or a religion in particular) and hate-speech directed against a specific religion. I’m not sure that a rant against all religions would be “hate speech.” Certainly, spewing venom about all races or all genders or all nationalities seems to be misanthropy rather than “hate speech.”

There’s no intention to limit discussion; the intent is to limit impoliteness and incivility.

19

Do you believe that Der Trihs’s comments on religion and religious Dopers are polite and civil?

20

Really? Prove it by choosing to accept Christ as your savior right now.