Out of bounds, Starving Artist. What happens outside our board stays off here. If something elsewhere torques you off, don’t drag it back here. I have some (personal) sympathy for your frustration but fair’s fair. Don’t import grudges or nastiness from other places to fight out here. Fair warning: don’t do this again.
Settle it where it happens.
TVeblen
I think what you may be missing is that I wasn’t so much talking about Shodan owning someone as I was pointing out that relative to Shodan, Excalibre was a mere pipsqueak, and that it was therefore the height of effrontery for Excalibre to address Shodan in the way he did. In other words, it more a swipe at Excalibre than it was an hommage to Shodan.
Now, having said that, and in view of what you’ve just said here, I’m glad I didn’t follow my earlier inclination when Excalibre quoted your terrier remark. I started to say that we’d since come to a meeting of the minds and that you probably no longer felt that way. (What a faux pas that would have been, eh?) 
I confess to a certain amount of surprise at your characterization of me as one who lies in wait for someone to say something I’d like to say and then giving them an ‘attaboy’. I would expect such denigration from Excalibre and his ilk, but I hadn’t expected it of you. Occasionally, when perusing this thread or that…or when returning to a thread I’d temporarily been away from…I’ve had occasion to see something that someone has written that I think is particularly cogent, or perhaps is even better than I would said myself. When this happens, I say so in the spirit of giving credit where due. But this doesn’t mean I hold back waiting for someone else to express a certain POV or argument I would otherwise be at pains to make for myself.
And I would point out than although I’m certainly no saint, I would hardly characterize myself as being picked on here. If anything, I would think it would appear that I’m picking on Excalibre.
(And yes, in reading back through some of the old threads, I see that I still didn’t quite manage to eliminate all the errant keystrokes that my renegade keyboard was foisting upon the board. What a crappy time that was – and if you’ll recall, I was also plagued by an ever-increasing recalcitrance on the part of my monitor, as well).
Anyway, I’ve come to feel that you’re one of the good guys on the other side. Several of you I tussled with have become people I respect. FinnAgain, GIGObuster and crowmanyclouds are some of the others. (Yeah, yeah, yeah…suck up on this, Excalibre! I calls 'em as I sees 'em, what can I say?)
I apologize, TVeblen. To be honest, I had a vague notion that I might be skirting the area of forbidden territory in bringing those posts up, but I thought that by not mentioning the board by name and by not linking to the offending posts themselves, I was probably in safe territory. Obviously I was mistaken, and now that I know better I assure you that it won’t happen again.
So here’s the core of your evidence, Starving Artist. I indicated at some point in time that I hadn’t yet done a search to find those threads. At a later time, I wrote a post referencing those threads. Indeed! At some point I hadn’t searched for those threads, and at a later point, I had! Remarkable! In the meantime, a different list of threads was posted.
I’m amazed that you simply don’t have the honesty to admit that you made up a lie, and a rather poor one at that. You accused me of getting help from someone else and you had no evidence to support your claim. In fact, the evidence indicates quite clearly that the claim was false. And then in some bizarre, otherworldly logic, you still maintain that your demonstrably false claim wasn’t a lie?
Nothing to do at this point but shake my head, Starving Artist.
It matters not whether it was a measure of your esteem for Shodan or your disdain for Excalibre. Personally, I find the idea of “owning” someone on a message board laughable. Especially here where owning someone amounts to outyelling them until they lose interest and wander off.
I phrased it mildly for a reason and included the “welcome to correction” for a reason. It was simply an impression that I had of you. Nothing stronger than that and certainly not enough to engender negative feelings on my part. When I find myself in similar circumstances (agreeing with a poster who has phrased it much better than I could’ve. Lord knows that happens a lot on this board), I either quote it and add my rather limited statement or I let the comment stand unless called out personally.
I’ll say that reading your posts is much less of a headache than it was then. I was wondering if that problem had ever been fixed.
Aw gee. :o You ain’t so bad yourself. Wasn’t aware I was on a side though. Next time I’d appreciate it if ya’ll would let me know when we pick teams. 
Your claims about Excalibre are questionable at best. I’m no fan of the snark boards, but just because Excalibre posted a question there doesn’t mean that he didn’t do the search himself or that he is in something of a leadership position either. And even if he didn’t do the search himself, it does nothing to refute his claims about you. Dragging it in only stirred the pot even if you didn’t intend to do so.
A much better argument is the much calmer response that I recieved.
Starving Artist, I have no doubt about your integrity at all. None. We’ve been buds for a very long time. Not once have we ever agreed on anything! Yet, I know from experience the considerate and generous nature at the heart of you.
Ah, now that you know I’ve been warned and can no longer discuss the situation vis-a-vis the other board, you come back swinging – and in a dishonest way even now. Unfortunately, to refute these latest allegations it would be necessary to reference out-of-bounds material from an out-of-bounds site.
I’m quite content, though, to let anyone so inclined to look at what we’ve both posted and come to their own conclusions regarding your honesty.
However, now that you’re back, perhaps you’d care to address this interesting comment from your earlier post to Zoe. In that post, you said:
“one of the things you’ll find if you examine my posts in areas in which I have expertise - particularly linguistics - is that I try my darnedest to explain things well, and patiently, as I understand that people without the same knowledge don’t come to the subject matter with the same knowledge or perspective.”
Now, am I reading this correctly in that what you are really saying is that you have more patience and understanding with people when it comes to your own area of expertise; but when you don’t know what you’re talking about, it is then that you are most intolerant of, and bullying to, the ignorance that you perceive on the part of others?
In other words, when you know what you’re talking about, you’re patient and informative; but it’s in areas where you don’t know what you’re talking about, it is then that you become impatient, insulting, condescending, and given to declarations of ignorance on the part of the other poster.
And you shake your head at me? :rolleyes:
The mind boggles.
Thanks you for the advice. I could perhaps justify my claims about Excalibre if I could go into more detail. However, I have always tried to play by the rules here and so I take the warning from TVeblen seriously. I just do not know now what I may legitimately say in regard to the issue and what I can’t, so the best thing for me to do is let it drop. I regret that I can’t go into more detail, but really I’d have to go into very specific details to be able prove my point conclusively, and unfortunately that just isn’t possible.
And on preview, thank you, Zoe. You know I love you! You’ve always been one of the posters I’ve had the highest regard for…you’re sweet and fun and interesting and I’ve often wished I knew someone like you in day-to-day life.
Many regards and thanks again,
SA
I wished to address your response to me, the one I hadn’t yet gotten a chance to refute.
Fundamentally, the only person who knows where those links came from is me; no one was watching over my shoulder when I did the searches. You made an assertion as if it were one of fact, when it’s fundamentally one you cannot prove. And the evidence does not support your claim; I can accept that perhaps, at the time, you believed it to be true. I think if you’re as honest as other people have said, you’ll admit that it’s clear now that it wasn’t.
I would submit that when you’re reduced to attempting to find any evidence of your opponent’s misdeeds - and weak evidence at that - that you probably are in an argument that’s not worth continuing.
I think that’s an unwarranted twisting of my words. When I find one of those relatively rare opportunities to actually fight ignorance - that is, when there’s a thread within an area in which I have real expertise (and as a tremendously ignorant person, I find such opportunities rarely) and someone else with superior knowledge isn’t around, I try my best to explain things patiently and to take into account the fact that whoever I’m talking with doesn’t approach the subject with the perspective that I do. I don’t always succeed; sometimes people are interested in learning about a subject, but occasionally they are not. I confess that I don’t always manage to be nice; niceness is - regrettably - not one of my strong suits, though I make an honest effort.
It’s during arguments over things that are not simple matters of fact that I tend to become frustrated. It is frustrating to see someone vigorously arguing something that I find immoral - and while I try to remember that they view me from the same perspective, it’s a difficult thing to divorce oneself from one’s moral principles and remember that one’s opponents believe what they do honestly. That’s one of the reasons you’ll rarely see me in political arguments anymore (beyond the fact that I rarely have much to contribute, as there are many, many people around here who know a ton more about such things than I do.)
While I find debates - over politics or anything else - fascinating, and I treasure the fact that this place gives me a chance to watch and participate, I find them frustrating for many reasons - the abject refusal of my opponents to realize how terribly, terribly wrong they are :), the number of people on both sides of the discussion who are dishonest or just irritating (something I think you’ll agree with me on), and simply the sheer difficulty of arguing such matters. And then there are people who don’t argue fairly - people who make an assertion and then stand back and challenge their opponents to disprove it, people who argue only that their opponents are “biased” or “won’t open their eyes”. I don’t like those people. Those are the fools who I don’t suffer gladly, and I don’t have any particular intention of starting.
I’m not a nice person - or rather, I am sometimes, and other times, my irritation gets the best of me. I’ve always been irritable, and I try not to act out of sheer irritation, but sometimes I do. I also try not to argue dishonestly, and mischaracterize my opponents when it’s convenient, but sometimes I do. That is something I feel particular shame about, particularly when there are many times when by simply looking at what one’s opponent means you can come to some understanding rather than “winning” or “losing” an argument. tdn earlier alluded to the “cat thread”, in which I behaved absolutely abominably, particularly towards PinkMarabou. And when I realized that, I apologized - something I try to do when I need to. Sometimes I don’t realize it until the opportunity is long past.
And sometimes I hold grudges. I try not to do that either, but it happens. Upon later examination, sometimes I was right, and other times, I wasn’t. On rereading old threads in which you and I interacted, I’m pretty sure I was fair in holding a grudge against you, Starving Artist. For months, you and I had found each other - mostly in political threads - and you rarely put together real arguments. You mostly just talked shit - the example with Shodan being one of many. You spoke to me, over and over, in a patronizing, contemptful manner.
Based upon what other people have said about you, I can only assume that this was something unique between us, and it’s not your modus operandi. I’m unsure where it started; it seems to me that either of us might have needled the other, and the other responded, igniting whatever fury there was. Either way, by the time you attempted to “bury the hatchet”, I had been treated contemptuously by you for months, and having done what digging I can, I maintain that your contemptuous shit-talking was fairly one-sided. I’m still puzzled as to why you expected me to forgive you.
But I will acknowledge that some of the things I’ve described as your style or personality are probably based upon small sample sizes. In the thread with Liberal and Shodan, you did go around like the big boys’ sidekick and more or less shout “Yeah, that’s right! You tell 'im, boss!” A number of people remarked on it. I have to admit, though, that I haven’t seen any good examples of you doing it elsewhere. I think I saw it a lot of times after that, clouded by my earlier impression of you. It’s easy to mischaracterize someone’s actions based upon your previous experience with them - in fact, you did it above, when you claimed I had taken a list of links from the snarkpit which I honestly did not.
I can only say that while you do seem to be nice to a lot of people, you were never really nice to me. Between your behavior in that one (very long) thread, and your old habit of treating me with unfair contempt, I may have chalked up a lot of genuine instances of you being nice to you simply trying to suck up to people. You treated me badly, and for a long time, but it’s probably not fair to assume that you treat everyone else the way you treat me.
Whatever other people say about you, though, you treated me neither with generosity nor fairness. And your cardinal sin, in my eyes, is your longstanding habit of talking shit about me rather than making a real argument. I enjoy a real argument; I do not enjoy watching someone flap his gums on the sideline about how his friends are going to kick my ass. It’s childish; it’s foolish; and it’s simply nonsense as this is an internet messageboard. And in that respect, you have been absolutely constant, right up to this thread when you made the laughable assertion that I’m jealous of roger thornhill. Again, perhaps this isn’t how you treat everyone, but it is how you treat me.
I don’t like you much, Starving Artist. You have treated me very poorly. Further, while I have seen you take part in political arguments, I have rarely seen you argue from evidence; instead, I think you have a habit of making assertions that you treat as self-evident, though in reality they are not. I haven’t seen many signs that you have very much that’s interesting to say, and even when you and I have argued, you rarely addressed anything substantively but instead spent a lot of time calling me a “pipsqueak” or a “dipshit”. Whatever you might say about me, Starving Artist, it is assuredly not my habit to substitute namecalling for real argument. And it’s given me the general impression - one that still lingers - that you are not really capable of putting together a real argument. I think your contemptuous dismissals of me were simply part and parcel of that. Perhaps it’s inaccurate, but I have not seen any evidence to suggest it is.
But that doesn’t justify me mischaracterizing your behavior. I will endeavor to be fair in my evaluations of you; I will try to assume that the way you treat me is not emblematic of the way you treat everyone. And I will try to interact with you in a civil manner.
Excalibre likes to take cheap shots at those he doesn’t think will be around to see them. The definition of a coward.
Anyone worried about that douchebag and what he thinks needs to seriously rethink their priorities.
Oh, hell. I thought you were gone. Now I’m going to have to take back all those party invitations.
Nah, you know you love me. Why ruin a good thing? The party would be fabulous!
All the attendees will have to wear black. 
Hey, if you have some sort of hang-up over people wearing clothes, that’s your issue. Me? I just want a good time.
Black body paint it is, then!
Huh? Which thread was that?
:: sigh ::
I’ve been trying damned hard to stay out of this, after offering an assessment of Excalibre way back toward the beginning. But this has to be addressed.
SA, you know the regard I have for you. You know that when I believe you’re in error I will tell you so, politely but firmly. Sometimes you even admit I’m correct! (Notice I said “correct” rather than “right”. ;))
So: Please accept this as my polite but firm opinion: Excalibre is often astringent, sometimes unduly harsh, and not inclined to mince words, but he is not in the least a pipsqueak. Nor is it effrontery for him to speak bluntly in contradicting Shodan – not least because the latter is inclined to reflexively partisan driveby sniping, while Excalibre more often provides an in-depth, cogently reasoned explanation of the position he’s espousing.
Now, you may find his reasoning specious from your point of view. But it’s my observation of those two that it is Excalibre who does way more heavy lifting in terms of analysis, while Shodan too often throws out some lightweight snipe rather than offering substance.
I daresay you’ll disagree vigorously with this, but that is how I see it.
And while I’m heaving observations about, I might as well return to an issue we’ve discussed before: the impression of condescension you at times engender. Yes, I know that’s not your intent, and you’re genuinely bewildered when people fling that at you. Nevertheless, a hectoring note does creep into your posts when you set about to put people (usually those damned idiotic liberals 
) you strongly disagree with in their place. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: When your readers perceive you as lecturing them (especially when they regard your arguments as piss-poor ), they are likely to take umbrage and react with more or less aggressive hostility. (Think back to some of the knock-down, drag-out fights you’ve had with FinnAgain, for example.)
I can’t say positively, of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me if at least some of the bad blood between you and Excalibre has been driven by his perception of unwarranted condescension on your part toward him. Maybe you both should take a step back from this argument and ponder what elements of the imbroglio are your own contribution. Reading Excalibre’s most recent post to you here, it seems to me that he is at least trying to see where he could have wronged you, and is offering an olive branch – not seeking to be buddies, but requesting a truce.
If you’re the good guy (outside of your damned idiotic politics ;)) I believe you to be, you’ll respond in kind, won’t you?
I intended to address this earlier.
We have been in in agreement in two or three threads that were discussions of various linguistic matters, so I don’t doubt that you are knowledgeable. But linguistics is a very expansive field. Most linguists claim expertise in limited areas.
The abundance of commas, semi-colons and dashes in your sentences is unusual for anyone concerned with both syntax and clarity of thought – which I think you are. I chalk it up to your “enthusiasm” in the moment. And often your word choices are not grammatically correct. That is very peculiar for someone with expertise in linguistics. Here are examples from this thread.
This is one sentence:
And you sometimes have difficulty with the correct pronoun in this construction:
As you know, I was an English teacher in my better days. I have humiliated myself hundreds of times on the SD with all sorts of bad grammar, misspellings and poor construction. Rarely a post goes by without an error. I’ve admitted that my mind is mush, I can’t spell and I’m no expert. I’m not faulting you for imperfection. But these characteristics have made me curious about your academic background in your area of expertise.
Would you mind sharing your background in linguistics? Are you a professor? Are you published? Is your expertise in one specific area or the entire field?
Despite my observations about your unique style, you do manage to get your points across. I envy you that.
Aw, jeez, Zoe – you just described my writing style to a T! Now I’m all embarrassed and stuff. :o