Right, and I feel that the reason given on the notice of his banning dismisses the whole story and fails to deliver the message needed for the next Cesario to come along.
We didn’t need a 5000-word essay on his past. How about “We have decided that although the topic of pedophilia is not verboten on this board, we don’t feel that someone who celebrates it and wants it enshrined in law is the kind of person we want as a part of this community. After repeated warnings to that effect and requests that he stop bringing up the topic on unrelated threads that went unheeded by him, we have decided to ban Cesario”. Or something to the same effect but with less dramatic wording.
Let’s face it, the actual problem with Cesario was that he couldn’t refrain from dropping his agenda at every single opportunity. Even if his agenda had been a legitimate one, say “clean water for all Africans”, it would have been just as annoying and there is a rule for that. But we have and tolerate other people like that. We have many others who drop their little gems on every. single. thread. Yet nobody is asking for their banning.
Which brings us to the perceived problem with Cesario. He was icky. Most normal people find pedophilia to be not just wrong but flat out disgusting. That’s a good thing. That Cesario saw his problem not as a disease but as something good that the system should protect made him shit on the bottom of everyone’s minds’ shoes. Fair enough.
Message boards have their tone and idiosyncrasy. I think Cesario has a right to want his sickness protected by law. Everybody else has the right to tell him he is just plain wrong. That’s how democracy works. That dialog, though, is not the dialog we want here. Screw Free Speech. This doesn’t work on government money. If the community doesn’t want something, it is off limits and that’s that. We also have rules for that. The admins have the right to call a thread too icky and lock it
Cesario was an unwanted member of this community. He was told that was so and he then was a jerk about pushing his agenda where it wasn’t wanted. Two very valid reasons to ban him. I see no problem with the banning coming a few weeks or months too late. I think that making the point was more important than being current.
As it stands Cesario was banned for rolling his eyes at a ridiculous ad hoc rule. Something that anybody else would have done just the same. TPTB could have either come out with a delayed ruling or waited for a new real infraction which was just a matter of time. Instead they chose to bag him for an invented offense and lost the chance to send a clear message, one to the community of “we heard you and as you desire we do”, and another to future Cesarios of “you are not wanted here and we don’t need no stinking rules to keep you out”.
One of the things I found most distressing about this entire issue was how people were willing to misrepresent factual aspects about Cesario to make their point. Among them, I’ve heard that he’s admitted to underage sex (he has not), that he believes non-consensual sex is ok (he claims to be as sickened by coercive rape as a non-pedophile), that he’s inciting others to pedophilia (he believes it’s innate so there’s point) and the above claim that he posts exclusively about pedophilia.
Minus the posts discussing pedophila, he was a pretty distressingly normal poster. I think it was perfectly reasonable to expect that he could have abided by the restrictions placed upon him and stayed well within the guidelines set by the mods. I don’t believe he was a troll of any kind and that he genuinely held the views that he espoused and, while in my opinion wrong, he was a hell of a lot more consistent and reasonable in his arguments that the majority of people arguing against him.
I think it was absolutely right that the reason he was banned was because he flamed out with a suicide by mod and that this was the real reason and not just an excuse to ban him.
Anyone is, of course, free to disagree with me but I’d appreciate if they kept the disagreement grounded in the facts of the case rather than making up random bullshit to tar and feather him with.
ETA: and probably why he was allowed to post as long as he did. I accept the (was it Dex’s?) explanation that no mod monitors every thread, but is restricted by Real Life to stay within his bailiwick. It slows down decisions, but all of the mods have to both do their job here and In Real Life.
What’s there to misrepresent? Sure, Cesario never admitted to actually having sex with a child…but I’d wager he’s not stupid enough to admit to that, even if it’s just more bullshit. But he clearly wanted to have sex with a child, and he wanted the law to be changed so he could legally have sex with a child. Since children by nature are unable to give informed consent, it’s hardly a stretch to claim that Cesario believes in non-consensual sex. (Remember, we’re not talking about grey areas like 15-16yos; his primary fixation was on five-year-old girls. FIVE-YEAR-OLDS.)
That’s kinda like saying, “Aside from the murders, Ted Bundy was a pretty normal guy.” :rolleyes:
The relevance of your question to my comment is completely unclear to me, but I’ll be a sport.
I think that reasons and causes are different. The reason he was banned was he broke a particular rule. The cause for his banning was different than that. “The problem with Cesario” is an ambiguous phrase. It could denote the rule he broke, or tendencies he displayed which caused the whole long process we’re discussing.
There’s certainly nothing “cowardly” about doing things in a formally correct way on a board that prizes itself for being run in a formally correct way.
What gets me is those Mods who come in with Jackboots and are ever so eager to show how active they are over some perceived bending of the rules - who hand out warnings and use tough words- suddenly were absent when things required a solution to be found.
They had to be the ones to say the things that needed to be said. They didn’t.
My point being that you chose to reply to an irrelevant line of my post and ignored the main issue. Much like Zotti has been doing all along. Just barging in and saying “Hah, you didn’t cross that T” is a lame cop out for when someone you don’t like is saying something right. Broken watches, twice a day and all that.
I see what you are saying (although I do have an opinion on the “run in a formally correct way” bit) and agree with it. That said, I will insist on the Al Capone analogy since it was already brought up by someone else. Cesario was not someone who could endlessly dance out of the reach of the law and who needed some weird side issue to be bagged. He was either minutes away from repeating one of his real infractions and he could have been banned for it or TPTB could have handed a delayed penalty for the ones already committed as they had already acknowledged that the fault was real and that it had slipped their attention before. Either one would have been formally correct and to the point.
Instead, they made up a new rule about Cesario not being able to post on anything related to law, children, images, or things happening on or outside the planet Earth and applied it retroactively. Not only it misses the point of what was wrong with Cesario but it doesn’t strike me as particularly “formally correct” either.
Of course he does–he just makes up a definition for “consensual” that no other non-deviant finds acceptable. He wants to boink 3 year old kids and he believes there is a magical test that can be administered to a three year old kid to make it “consentual”–news flash: there is no three year old. NONE. Ever in the history of the human race. Not even if Einstein and Madame Curie had a super-genius baby. Not one three-year-old ever could give informed consent to have sex with a 40(?) year old pervert. Since he believes that there are three year olds he can boink (if only the bigoted horrible law would get out of the way), he’s advocating non-consesual sex.
I guess you are using hyperbole, but the restrictions they placed on Cesario were not that broad. Of the ten examples Shalmanese gave of Cesario’s “normal” posts, only1 for sure, possibly 2, seem to break his custom crafted boundaries. So he definitely could have lived within them, if sneaking in “child rights” wasn’t his only reason to stick around.
On a not unrelated note, elbows over in the Argent Towers thread is calling for his banning and asks (paraphrased) “Have you dumb staff not learned anything from recent incidents”. Who agrees that Argent’s idiocy should mean a banning?
Sorry, I genuinely thought that “the mods are chicken” was an accurate summary of the point you are making in this thread. I didn’t think it was an uncrossed T, I thought it was, in summary, what you are trying to say.
I’m actually not aware of the infractions you’re talking about. Arguably he broke the “don’t be a jerk” rule many times, but I’ve never been happy with that rule anyway. Did he have infractions involving other rules?
Not only it misses a good chunk of the point but your reply implied that the important thing was that the mods live up to my standards of internet tough guyness.
The point was, well it’s been made enough already. The point was that the mods instead of having the spine of doing what had to be done (banning Cesario for his actual offenses) chose to ban him for nothing and try to both look enlightened by not following mob rule and pleasing the crowd by banning him before he had his chance for a repeat.
Dropping his agenda on every thread and being icky. Both of them in the rules.
One of the the things I found distressing was how people ignored Cesario’s very real infractions.
He explicitly said that he would have sex with a 6 year old if they “started it.”
No weasel words about a “consent test” or “changing the law.” In fact when I called him on it, he eventually admitted that he didn’t care about the law.
Now Argent is paying the price for Cesario not getting banned when he should have. There is absolutely no comparison between the two, and honestly I feel bad even using their names in the same sentence, but the one is clearly the reason the other is getting bashed.
The fear mongers here can now point to Cesario, and say “See! We were right!”, and there is no way to respond to that.
I’ve read that a few times now. It reduces to “The point was that the mods were not as brave as they should have been.” It really does! Re-read it while trying to forget you wrote it, and see what it says, independently of whatever you’re actually thinking.
Your claim is “the mods were not brave enough.” You’re evidence is “they did not ban him for actual offenses” and “they banned him for nothing in an attempt to look enlightened.” Then there’s further evidence for the second claim. But what you just wrote out, the conclusion of the argument it conveys is, just as I said, “The mods did not act bravely enough,” or more colloquially, they didn’t “have spine,” or “were chickenshit.”
So that seems to indeed be the point you’re trying to make. You marshall evidence for the claim, which is fine. But I’m ignoring the evidence, because I criticize the very idea that the claim your making has any significance. In other words, even if it’s true, you haven’t said anything worth saying. For, as I said, if this is a board where the mods are supposed to be trying to impress you with their testosterone level, then I’m on the wrong board.
But he didn’t do that, as documented in a previous post. He’s posted on many topics.
Reviewing the rules, the best I can come up with is that maybe you think he was posting material that’s vulgar or obscene, or that he was posting material that (in the mods’ opinion) promotes an illegal activity. Is that what you have in mind?